An intranet is like an Internet just for your company. Imagine a place where all your corporate information and knowledge can be stored and retrieved by company employees with the same ease-of-use the Internet provides. Intranets employ the same technology used on the Internet—browsers, Web servers, networking, HTML, etc.—but unlike the Internet, only your company can access it.

Your company's information appears in the browser just as an Internet Web site would, complete with its own home page containing news and information pertinent to your corporation and links to important documents.

This simple idea can be easily extended into a highly functional and efficient hierarchy that centralizes information, makes it manageable, preserves knowledge, and keeps employees in the know. Each department, job function, or employee might have a home page, providing a common window to relevant documents.

An intranet is a cost-effective information management system that pays for itself quickly. Because it looks and feels like the Internet, little or no training is required before users can begin to leverage its benefits. Instead of repeatedly asking co-workers for information, employees can use a properly implemented intranet as their "go-to" source for questions. Users retrieve information more rapidly, and with fewer errors, than they would from traditional sources.

Intranet information integrates easily with the Internet, if desired, allowing companies to create customized information portals and centralizing access to commonly used Internet resources. Functionally, it's like having your company's own private Yahoo®...but it also reduces the amount of time employees spend "surfing" the Internet to find information.

Some simple intranets are one-way communication vehicles, in which published information is directed from the company out to employees on the network. Typically, these intranets consist of little more than Human Resources documents describing company policies, benefits, paid holidays, etc.

More functional intranets publish documents by departments, committees, or individuals and support diverse content ranging from meeting minutes and process documentation to Web-based training, report viewing, and on-line catalogs.

Many companies that develop their intranets in-house have one or more Webmasters who maintain the systems, receive submissions from content producers, integrate documents into the intranet framework, and perform any necessary programming.

Too often, these content integrators are overwhelmed and become a costly bottleneck, discouraging the publication of timely information.

The most effective intranets offer some or all of the following benefits:

• The ability for all employees to publish and link documents using easy-to-learn tools
• Security for documents so that unauthorized users can be prevented from viewing, altering, or deleting restricted content
• Full-text searching, which allows related information to be grouped by keywords and provides rapid access to documents without technical knowledge of where they are stored on the server
• Web-based applications that improve the flow of information between employees