What is an 'Intranet'?

The explosion of the World Wide Web is due to the world-wide acceptance of a common transport (TCP/IP), server standard (HTTP), and markup language (HTML). Many corporations have discovered that these same technologies can be used for internal client/server applications with the same ease that they are used on the Internet.

Thus was born the concept of the intranet - the use of Internet technologies for implementing internal client/server applications.

One key advantage of Web-based intranets is that the problem of managing code on the client is greatly reduced. Assuming a standard browser on the desktop, all changes to user interface and functionality can be done by changing code on the HTTP server. Compare this with the cost of updating client code on 2,000 desktops.

A second advantage is that if the corporation is already using the Internet, no additional code needs to be licensed or installed on client desktops. To the user, the internal and external information servers appear integrated.

A rapidly-disappearing disadvantage is that there is limited ability to provide custom coding on the client. In the early days of the Web, there were limited ways of interacting with the client. The Web was essentially "read-only", with protocols such as gopher and WAIS. With the release of code tools such as Java and JavaScript, this limitation is no longer a major issue.