your business?
Setting up an intranet is probably too easy and inexpensive, as Steven L. Telleen, the person credited with coining the term
intranet
, has found. Formerly of Amdahl Corporation and now director of strategy and business development at Intranet Partners (Santa Clara, CA), Dr. Telleen's mission is fighting the "lack of business scrutiny that is going into intranet projects."
An intranet uses Internet protocols--TCP/IP--and Internet tools on an organization's LAN or WAN. The structure often uses Web-style pages of information. Users within the organization can post information and can access posted information. Although usually intended for internal use, sometimes the enterprise allows the outside world access to part or all of the intranet.
Open standards make intra
nets wildly popular. They are flexible, easy to implement and use, and platform- and vendor-independent. Web browsers render information more accessible. Helper applications and plug-ins integrate browsers with existing applications. According to Netscape, about 50 percent of its Web servers are for intranets.
Web tools for receiving and publishing information are deceptively easy to use--and often deceptively free. All you need to start an intranet are a free server and free Web clients. A skilled user may be able to set up a Web site from scratch in an afternoon. And that is just where the problems can begin. It's as easy as finger-painting, and it can be just as messy.
Step 1: Make a Mess
As the first pages start going on-line, you start wishing for an HTML editor. Soon, users discover that the technology is simple enough for them to publish information on their own, and pages and servers start sprouting like weeds all over an organization. Telleen recounts that when information manage
rs at large corporations run a Web crawler on their intranets for the first time, they often discover that about 30 percent of the servers that appear were previously unknown to them. "Unofficial applications and information seem to be the trademark of intranets," he notes. While the unknown may be exciting, it's not easy to control.
Whether official or unofficial, an intranet needs managing. Probably the first thing a Web administrator will need is a set of administration tools to check links and fight "spaghetti."
Then mail and, perhaps, news servers become part of the system. As the organization starts using the net more interactively, CGI scripts implement on-screen forms, and back-office applications collect the data and feed it to an order processing or workflow system. To allow information to flow the other way, the Web needs a database link.
The intranet is not open to outsiders by definition, but it soon becomes obvious that not even all insiders should have access to all informati
on. An access control system, something conceptually foreign to Web structures, needs implementing, and that costs.
Of course, access control can extend to "outsiders," namely one's customers and business partners. Giving them access to price lists and planning materials can be a boon to business--but a security nightmare. The Web is already notoriously permeable. Clearly, some kind of rational access control is necessary.
If the allegedly free intranet has not already turned out to be costly by this time, the final straw may be load balancing: Servers and communications links give way, a distributed infrastructure becomes unavoidable. This may be easy enough for the information itself, but not for add-on applications and access control.
Notice that all these additions have been serving useful purposes within the organization. Information is available for circulation, although exactly where might be a mystery. The infrastructure for group collaboration is there, even if that bozo from Finan
ce messed up your masterpiece of a proposal: Who let them get access? And why are there 52 drafts of the company holiday schedule, and what is the difference between them?
Companies are struggling with information delivery, as well as work flow, revision tracking, and document security, says Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson, a U.K.-based intranet consultant and codesigner of an architecture called Intra.doc. Despite its problems, Bjelkeman-Pettersson believes that the Web and Web-derived or Web-integrated tools "will be king of the hill." But, as IDC analyst Evan Quinn points out, the ubiquity of Web tools has made "every seat in the enterprise with a browser a 'developer' on the intranet." As a Mortice Kern Systems (MKS)white paper puts it, intranets are "rich with opportunities but loaded with peril." Corporations should be wary of placing "responsibility of maintaining and publishing this information in the hands of their employees," as this also means "accountability for ensuring this critical corporate
information is valid, accurate, and legal." The intranet enhances employee productivity and helps create a truly global corporate communications platform, but MKS notes that its "grassroots origin...is also its Achilles' heel." Who will be responsible if errors make their way into on-line price lists or quarterly financial statements?
By this time the Web administrator will start thinking about what the organization has gotten itself into. Maybe an off-the-shelf solution, perhaps even something like Lotus Notes, would have been better. In any event, it's time to start reining in the intranet.
Step 2: Clean It Up
There is hope. The problem at this stage, Steve Telleen writes in his upcoming book
Understanding Intranets
, is not things being out of control but people feeling out of control. The first challenge is "a change in roles and responsibilities. In the past, IT professionals controlled the flow of computerized information by virtue of the technology barrier. Almost overnight,
this barrier has come down. [But] control is not gone, only shifting."
Industry analyst Stan Lepeak of the Meta Group (Stamford, CT) warns that thick manuals with rules and regulations will not help at this point. Corporate legal departments, requesting the right to examine all Internet and intranet content, are more likely to create bottlenecks. One day, Lepeak says, "an IT manager wakes up and discovers his organization has 600 Web servers." They have security and integrity problems, but "those departments that have been so busy working on the intranet will have to get back to their real work."
The solutions to intranet chaos are not hard to find. In fact, they are already in use in groupware, software configuration management (SCM), and document control systems. One necessity is access control: Not everyone in an organization can have unlimited access to everything on the intranet. The access control should have gradations. Some items might be read-only (like corporate information and policies
); some items might be accessible only by users in a certain group (like workers on a particular project); still others might be invisible to all but a select few (for sensitive documents); and yet others might be wide open to anyone.
Another need is for version control. A user with the right to write should not make changes to the original document itself: You might want that original back again. So making changes to a document would actually create a new version automatically, stamped with the name of the modifier, the date, and other information. This permits tracking changes as work progresses. The downside is that having many versions of documents takes up space on your drives. But once documents reach certain "plateaus" of doneness, intermediate versions can vanish.
Related to version control is check in/check out of documents. When a user checks a document out of a repository, no one else can modify that document, although it's okay to merely view it. Once the document checks in again, the
n others can modify it (or its successor if the first user modified it).
Search capabilities are essential, of course. It does no good to produce intranet content if no one can find it.
Finally, the user interface is of prime importance. Surprisingly, not all your content producers are going to be super-Webheads. The interface must be simple enough so that any user can get things done. It should be robust but not restrictive. You want control over the process, but you don't want the process to be daunting. It does you no good if the controls are so rude and rigid that users prefer to find ways to circumvent them.
While these are old concepts, new technologies can give them new twists. For example, if documents exist as related objects in an object-oriented system, then many of the above interactions occur as part of what the documents "are." Furthermore, since many intranets are Web-based, preserving links to documents is an important feature. Besides, a single Web page is a complex object i
n itself, with multiple contributors from different locations, both internal and external, supplying text, graphics, multimedia information, and even software.
Web Object Management
According to analysts, an organization may typically spend between $100,000 and $2 million to develop a Web site, and up to half a million a year to maintain the information and keep it up-to-date. The challenge is to improve quality and usability of the content while lowering the associated costs.
Intranet users also need different views of information, tailored to what is relevant for them. Because the Web cannot provide that, many organizations resort to publishing the same content to everyone. The result is quiltwork at best, info-glut at worst. Some information is isolated from the intranet for security reasons. Furthermore, the static information structure causes frustration.
To stem the flow of entropy, some organizations rely on multiple Web administrators, while others have none at all. As the
Web itself lacks means of controlling, reviewing, and versioning content, these have been manual tasks--a classic situation where a computer might help or might make things worse.
Enter Web object management (WOM), or Web content management. These technologies marry traditional SCM functionality with Web-specific features, making control central but lightweight. WOM products try to foster collaboration, remove bottlenecks, automatically enforce corporate look-and-feel standards, and safeguard business-critical information. It helps the Web administrator centrally organize Web objects, including text, graphics, and Java files.
Naturally, the two heavyweights to watch are Microsoft and Netscape. Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe began life performing version control as part of software development products like Visual Basic, Visual Studio 97, and FrontPage 97. It also appears in Visual InterDev as well as in NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition. Now it controls a variety of items in a variety of formats, includin
g HTML documents and Java code.
SourceSafe provides all the major functions you would want. Its version control offers features specific to Web management. "Shadowing" maps a SourceSafe database to other sites. As product manager Lloyd Arrow says, this is handy during development and staging of sites, before they're ready for prime time. "Deploy" creates a "consistent state" of a site: a collection of certain versions of files that belong to a certain level of a site's development. Deploy ensures that with new changes to the site, the links are okay and everything works. A click of a button publishes the consistent state to the Web.
SourceSafe access control offers four levels of security, plus a superuser level, for each project or collection of files. Allowed access includes read-only, check in/check out, edit, remove, and delete (at the highest level). Besides the usual check in/check out (where one person can have file out at a time), it offers a multiple check in/check out option. With this,
several people can each have the same file out--to work on the text or graphics of a Web page separately, for example. When they check the file in again, any discrepancies flash the warning light: The person then decides which version of each file element to use. No changes are lost, though: Each version of the file gets saved separately, just in case.
Searching with SourceSafe can be content-based--looking for a word or phrase in a document, or by filename, or by other features like file state ("What files do I have checked out?"). The user interface closely resembles Windows Explorer's hierarchical view of files. Plus, as Chris Stirrat, program manager, notes, SourceSafe integrates easily with third-party products. This allows SourceSafe to become part of another product and also permits using a variety of development tools with SourceSafe.
Netscape's own offering, Enterprise (Web) Server 3.0, provides many features for managing intranet content. These include automatic link management, version
control, control of access to documents at several levels, and intelligent agents that can inform a user if certain Web documents update.
The Netscape server includes pieces from several sources. Netscape's own LiveWire technology enables link management and the creation and management of Web content that can include documents and JavaScript applications. Netscape has licensed MKS's Integrity Engine for document version control and check-in/check-out features. Netscape has also licensed Verity's search engine technology for indexing and searching not only the content of documents (which can be the usual ASCII or HTML or a variety of other supported formats) but metadata about the documents, such as title and author. Netscape's Catalog Server provides automatic document cataloging.
Netscape's SuiteSpot comprises a whole family of Web server products. It has the advantage of being OS-independent, and Netscape claims it integrates easily into existing infrastructures. SuiteSpot includes nine products
, among them Enterprise Server and Catalog Server. Also included is Collabra Server, a full-blown groupware package.
MKS also partnered with Informix Software, developing a DataBlade for the Informix Universal Server. It helps manage and retrieve revisions of new dynamic forms of objects, such as sound, video, geospatial maps, and graphics from an object relational database. Using HTTP, workgroups using Web Integrity can surf, edit, approve, and publish Web objects while working off-site.
Documentum describes its similar product, RightSite, as a Web content manager. Based on Documentum's Enterprise Document Management System, RightSite brings Web pages under the control of a dynamic document repository. It helps Web administrators manage the life cycle of Web pages in the same manner as other documents. RightSite controls the actual content of a site, automating the process of contributing and updating Web pages and tailoring their delivery based on a user's rights and preferences. RightSite's Vi
rtual Link Processor generates hyperlinks dynamically, enabling the system to select the appropriate version and rendition of a page based on the user's requirements and security clearance; this also takes care of dead links. The Dynamic Page Assembler uses a combination of server-based business rules and the attributes associated with a query to assemble Web pages appropriate for a user's rights, profile, and preferences.
Tools Aren't Everything
While having competent tools to manage content certainly simplifies the problem, there are other aspects to the intranet content management solution. Methodology can heal the madness. For example, it is important for an organization to maintain as much of a sense of inherent information structure as possible. Once such a framework is in place, it greatly facilitates do-it-yourself publishing by team members: The information should more or less automatically show up in its logical place. Should any reorganization become necessary, it will help avoid hav
ing to actually move information: adjusting links should suffice. Once managers and Web administrators start reviewing content, a threaded discussion or, better, an annotation system is invaluable for channeling comments.
Whether you are just starting your intranet or trying to streamline an existing one, it may help to sit back and think about the intranet's implications for your corporate culture. Intranets cause the distinction between formal and informal information to blur, for example. Employees discover it can help them circumnavigate the chain of control by allowing them to publish and share information directly. While some organizations will view this as defying a corporate policy of top-down decision flow, others may interpret the same situation as empowering. Either way, it might be necessary to redefine management control roles. Understanding these new paradigms is an important first step to taming the chaos.
Where to Find
Hy
perwave
Munich, Germany
Phone: +49-89-9930-74-0
Internet:
http://www.hyperwave.de
Intelligent Intranets
