Vibrant MCSE BOOT Camp Notes :

Basic Static Corporate Information

In most traditional groupware settings, corporate information generally is not accessible by computer to many employees. Employee handbooks, benefits booklets, organization fact sheets, annual reports, job openings, training booklets, and policies and procedures pamphlets are usually static files on paper.

Although Lotus Notes allows for some viewing of these files, few organizations utilize this technology. Instead, documents are distributed to employees, making the process time-consuming and expensive. In addition, storing paper, or "hard copies," takes up a lot of space. Sharing of corporate information isn't really accomplished well using traditional groupware systems because these system weren't designed in an open architecture format. But it is one of the easiest things to do with an intranet, and often one of the first things an organization develops when setting up an intranet.

To accomplish a "network library" of internal publications and documents, an organization just needs to acquire a Web server, like the Netscape or NCSA server, and a browser, such as Netscape or Microsoft Explorer, for all the workstations that will be on the intranet. The intranet administrators create World Wide Web pages in HTML of the employee handbook, corporate policy, or any other static information and stores them on the web server. Now the information is accessible to everyone on the intranet at any time, with no reproduction or storage costs. Some intranet systems include a program that creates easy-to-use libraries, transforming documents into HTML for placement on the Web. As one of its applications, LiveLink Intranet by OpenText provides such a searchable, online library for document management.

Corporate information also could be stored on a gopher server. Gopher, developed at the University of Minnesota, also has an intranet capacity. Creating the text file application involves collecting information that typically is shared between researchers and students and making that information available over an intranet. As organizations start to build their own intranets, they essentially will do the same thing that universities were doing five years ago-collecting basic static information, once printed or copied and distributed in paper form, and distributing that information over the World Wide Web, thus saving a lot of time, resources, and money.

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