Chapter 2

What Can You Do?: The Intranet in Action

• Three Levels of Usage, Three Levels of Impact
  • Level One: Displaying General Information
  • Level Two: Sharing Business Data
  • Level Three: Interactive Communications
• The Noncommercial Application of Intranets
• Summary

Intranets offer a broad range of capabilities-so broad, in fact, as to be either dazzling or daunting. The challenge to those embarking on an intranet is to define and focus on the functions that meet current and future needs. In other words, intranet capabilities should be considered in terms of their utility to the sponsoring organization and evaluated in the context of overall business objectives.

Another key challenge in considering intranet applications arises from the rapid evolution of this new medium. The intranet envelope is constantly expanding and, like the underlying Internet, it is inherently in flux. Moreover, because they are user-driven, intranets quickly evolve to reflect individual organizational needs, limited only by the sponsor's imagination.

Throughout the next several chapters, this book will explore how individual computer applications can help organizations display information, share data, and communicate resourcefully. The many commercially available products will be discussed and reviewed, and you will see how to customize existing software and create your own. This chapter helps put all this information into perspective. It discusses, in general terms, exactly what you can and can't accomplish with an intranet now, why you would want to use an intranet, and some of the emerging capabilities of intranets.