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Besides mail and news software, you'll find a variety of other
software packages that might be useful to your intranet. In fact,
one of the advantages of building an intranet is that you always
have the option to implement new features as they become available.
Let's look at some Web utilities, tools, and applications of both
the past and present.
Perhaps you've heard about Gopher. Maybe you've noticed that some
Web sites use a Gopher as a means for storing information. Do
you want to put a Gopher on your intranet? Not anymore. Gopher
is an older, text-based system that has been replaced by the Web.
I don't know of anyone currently setting up Gopher sites; most
people are translating Gopher sites into Web sites. Before the
Web, the Gopher was a menu-driven, point-and-click, linear program
that provided a means to thumb your way through information. With
Gopher, if you had 1,000 documents that you wanted to make available
and easily accessible to your readers, users had to click from
page to page until they found the document they wanted. Unlike
Gopher, the Web has documents connected, so users can jump around
instead of tediously clicking from one document to the next. In
addition, the Web includes formatting, sounds, pictures, and an
expanding host of multimedia options. Gopher-based information
is best read on a text Web browser called Lynx. Today, if you
find a page that is operating a Gopher, it's likely that you'll
also find that the information is in the process of being converted
into HTML to be transferred to a Web server.
You've probably also heard about IRC (Internet Relay Chat). It's
doubtful that any intranet seriously needs IRC, as it is primarily
an entertainment forum in which Internet users worldwide gather
for miscellaneous conversation. It's true that a chat environment
(ideally) might be useful for meetings or brainstorming sessions,
but usually the connection is too slow to allow for spontaneous
conversation. As a result, the "chatters" often wind
up discussing mechanics of the Internet or problems with their
modems or computers rather than the topic around which the session
was originally created.
To develop the structured, topic-oriented conversations you'll
want for your intranet, consider installing a software package
that will allow you to create and play streaming audio. With streaming
audio, an audio file is compressed into a small amount of data
that can be transferred in real time. The streaming file is about
as small as a text file but is ordered so that you listen to it
as it arrives at your site.
Streaming video is being developed, but because video contains
more information than does audio, it requires more bandwidth.
Until bandwidth availability increases, the quality of streaming
video will be relatively poor, unless you are running it through
a LAN.
Establishing your intranet with the capacity for streaming audio
(and video) is a good idea. As the Web becomes more interactive,
you'll want to install the tools needed to participate in audio-
and video-conferences and to create online presentations. (See
Chapter 25, "Audio Presentations," and
Chapter 26, "Video
Presentations.") One popular streaming audio package is Progressive
Networks' RealAudio.
RealAudio is the company that first developed streaming audio.
RealAudio is set up so that it sends the audio message to a RealAudio
player and as the audio comes in, it gets uncompressed and is
fed to the player. This allows the user to hear the audio even
while it's still being downloaded. This may not sound that useful;
however, imagine that someone has a microphone. As he or she speaks,
the voice is being compressed, sent, and played to the recipient.
It's possible with RealAudio for someone to deliver a speech online
in real time. There are several radio stations that broadcast
on the Internet using RealAudio. To visit the RealAudio home page,
go to http://www.realaudio.com.
Other commercially available streaming audio packages include
Xing Streamworks and Netscape CoolTalk; both work with Web servers.
Xing Streamworks was created by Xing Technologies and is distributed
by Hewlett Packard. It provides live and on-demand audio and video
services. Xing Streamworks is a newcomer to the market so it is
not yet widely used, but with its backing from Hewlett Packard,
it's worth looking into.
Netscape CoolTalk is distributed by Netscape and provides audio
streaming with the streaming client integrated into the browser,
but not video streaming. Unlike RealAudio, CoolTalk doesn't have
to start a new application every time a user accesses a new Web
page, because CoolTalk does it for you. This is an ideal program
for those interested in a complete Netscape solution.
Along with streaming audio, your intranet might benefit from the
potential of video-conferencing. As the quality progresses, streaming
video technology will be used for electronic meetings (both internal
and intracorporate), sales presentations, training, and documentation.
Think of streaming video as something to work toward as you select
the software servers to include on your intranet.
CU-SeeMe, shown in Figure 8.5, is a high-quality intranet video-conferencing
package developed by Cornell University that streams video and
audio and works with the Macintosh, Windows 3.1, Windows NT, and
Windows 95. The freeware is impressive, but currently special
hardware is needed to run it.
Figure 8.5: CU-SeeMe.
Whether to stock your intranet with the tools for real-time audio
and video capacities is an issue worth some thought. If you currently
don't have a need for real-time conferencing, you might want to
wait until the technology develops further. It's highly likely
that, as the Web develops into a media-rich environment, your
intranet will require at least some plug-in players for real-time
audio and video. Usually these players are free and can be downloaded
from their developers, but to create your own multimedia presentations,
it's likely you'll have to purchase a package.
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