The Intranet

Implementation of Internet And Web Technologies In Organizational Information Systems

A Hummingbird Communications Ltd. White Paper
© 1996 Hummingbird Communications Ltd.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The Intranet Market
• Organizational User Needs
• The Building Blocks of an Intranet
• Collaborative Computing
• Intranet Desktop Requirements
• A New Frontier: Objects and Intelligent Agents
• Summary
• Appendix
  

I. Introduction

The World Wide Web (WWW) has rapidly become a global information village that is accelerating international cultural interaction and social change; but perhaps more importantly the Web is changing the way we do business. The confluence of the Internet and the Web has formed what now might be called the world's largest virtual book and has made Cyberspace a reality. Application of Internet and Web technologies as enterprise information management and collaborative computing technologies is just being discovered. The technologies of cyberspace are now being viewed as a foundation for developing enterprise-wide information systems. These new enterprise information systems are called Intranets, and represent the beginning of a new computing paradigm.

In William Gibson's book, Neuromancer, cyberspace is "an infinite artificial world where humans navigate in information-based space," and "the ultimate computer-human interface." For today's cybernauts, information-based space is the global sea of web servers; the computer human interface is currently a browser-like device based on the Mosaic model. The original vision of the Web, however, was not to create a sea of Web servers and surfers, but to provide a collaborative computing environment enabling scientists to easily share information. The potential of the Web and its enabling technologies, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), has been clouded by the startling success of Mosaic, the first widely distributed graphical browser.

Today, as business, government, and education discover the advantages of Internet and Web technologies for internal use, this vision is being recaptured. Intranets represent a new model for internal information management, distribution and collaborative computing, and offer a simplistic but powerful implementation of client/server computing.

Organizational Benefits of Implementing Internet and WWW Technologies

• The simplicity of the Web's client/server design is recognized as a major advantage.

• HTTP is a light stateless protocol has little impact on bandwidth-strapped enterprise internetworks.

• Internet and Web Technologies

  • Leverage legacy technology investment.

  • Are platform and operating system independent.

  • Do not significantly increase the complexity of the computing environment.

  • Are based on Open Systems technology standards.

  • Are portable, extensible and scaleable.

This white paper has been designed to provide an overview of Internet and Web technologies and their use in developing an organizational information systems. The potential benefits and issues associated with designing and implementing Intranets, and the future of Intranets are discussed; however, our focus is on the Intranet desktop and its management.

II. The Intranet Market

The Intranet market is just beginning to develop, as are many of the dynamic technologies and products that will facilitate its evolution. Organizations with an existing TCP/IP internetwork infrastructure are implementing pilot projects utilizing Internet protocol suite technologies, and newly developed client/server Web technologies. In many organizations Web servers are popping up like weeds, uncontrolled by management, primarily because of easy access to public domain software (NCSA&CERN Web server software, etc.), and overall ease of implementation and use.

Basic Intranet Enabling Technologies

• TCP/IP Electronic mail

• Network File System (NFS)

• Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

• Network News (NNTP)

• HTTP Browsers

• White Boards

• NCSA, CERN and proprietary Web servers

• HTML authoring tools

• Portable electronic document (PED)technology

The window or interface to the organizational Intranet will be key to its success. Intranet or Web interfaces, what we now call browsers, will greatly simplify access to and use of organizational computing resources and information by functioning as an omnipresent window or interface to applications and information. IDC estimates that approximately 56% of advanced Internet suites will be used primarily for Intranet access only, the CAGR for advanced Internet/Intranet suites is 39.7%, and is expected to reach US $134.1 million by 1996.

IDC Market Segmentation

1.) Operating systems embedded browsers.

2.) Browsers embedded into TCP/IP suites.

3.) Advanced Internet suites include TCP/IP, collaboration and/or advanced authoring tools.

III. Organizational And User Needs

A great deal of the hyperbole surrounding this new model of computing implies that by simply plugging a browser front-end into the organizational network, along with some Web servers at the back end, one can create a useful and productive Intranet. This perspective overlooks the present state of the Web: the current generation of browsers and the infrastructure of the Internet and Web have been developed largely for recreational surfing. Organizational users have a radically different set of application requirements - an Intranet is quite a different environment from the Internet, even though it may employ the same technologies. The technologies of the Internet can indeed be very useful in an organizational setting, but they must be integrated in a fashion that observes organizational realities.

Organizational Realities

The impact of these realities on the design of an Intranet can be summed up in a simple mantra: management, management, management. In other words, there are three primary requirements for an Intranet: efficient individual and group information management-i.e. access, collaborative authoring, and distribution; cost-effective document management; and administrative control.

IV. The Building Blocks of an Intranet

As organizational information systems, Intranets will demand far more than simple browsers and Web servers, which are two fundamental building blocks of future Intranets. Instead, the foundations of an Intranet will reach deep into an organization's computing infrastructure. In many, some of these building blocks are already in place. Most of the remaining components can be easily added while leveraging the current technology infrastructure, and without significantly increasing internetwork complexity. Internet and Web technologies are of equal importance in building an Intranet, and successful Intranet design requires a careful weighing of the advantages and disadvantages of each technological piece.

Intranet Building Blocks

The World Wide Web: HTTP and HTML

The power of the Web is derived from two sources: HTTP and HTML. HTTP is a lightweight stateless networking protocol that uses minimal network bandwidth. In addition, its simplicity makes it easy to design and implement an HTML server or client (browser). As a result, there is a plethora of public domain or free software products available to build Web systems, as well as an increasing number of commercial solutions.

HTML is a simple subset of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language. (Specifically, HTML is what is called a DTD, a Document Type Definition, which defines precisely those descriptive elements-the syntax-needed for a specific type of document: in this case, a hypertext document.) As a subset of SGML, HTML is not concerned with the format (i.e. appearance) of a document; instead, it describes a document's logical structure, leaving it up to the client side-the browser-to render the document as desired by the user.

The potential of the Web as a powerful building block in an Intranet can only be realized if the limitations of its fundamental technologies-especially HTML-are recognized and compensated for with other technologies.

Current HTML limitations can be summed up in six points:
1.) Creating useful HTML documents is a specialized talent.

Users must learn a new application and/or new techniques to author documents.

2.) It is difficult to convert legacy documents into HTML.

Bringing legacy documents into an Intranet as HTML is expensive and labor intensive.

3.) HTML gives the browser control of the appearance of a document.

HTML conversion does not maintain the original appearance of a document; meta-information supplied by formatting and layout is lost along with graphics and images.

4.) HTML is most effective at publishing static information.

Its dynamic collaborative capabilities are limited.

5.) HTML has no "hooks" or API for document management.

It is difficult to manage and archive large collections of HTML documents.

6.) HTML lacks efficient mechanisms for loading and viewing large documents.

HTML documents must be decomposed into many smaller hyperlinked subdocuments.

Beyond HTML: Portable Electronic Document Technologies

Although the above limitations are not significant in the current World Wide Web, they can cripple the design and implementation of an organizational Intranet. The limitations of HTML are stimulating a growing interest in Portable Electronic Document (PED) formats, whose strengths complement HTML in an organizational Intranet. PED technologies are platform-independent software systems that not only preserve the original appearance of a document, but do so in a way that is largely or totally (depending on the vendor chosen) independent of the fonts or applications present on the viewing computer. In addition, PEDs are Web friendly and permit hyperlinking to HTML as well as other portable documents, allowing graceful integration with ordinary Web technology.

PED formats vary in their capabilities and usually have two basic components:

• A print driver or converter that allows users to create portable documents with applications (Microsoft Word etc.) they are already familiar with,

• Viewers that render the resulting documents accurately on the platforms supported.

The documents not only contain the original formatting and layout information, graphic and images, but they permit the addition of meta-information that can be used for indexing and retrieval, such as tables of contents. In addition, they can be annotated and marked up by other users without affecting the underlying text, enabling PEDs to be circulated via email or disk for collaborative authoring.

PED technology delivers five benefits to balance the limitations of HTML:

1.) The PED print driver enables ordinary applications to create portable documents

Users do not need to learn a new application to author documents

2.) The PED print driver allows the use of the original application to convert legacy documents

Bringing legacy documents into an Intranet as a PED is not expensive

3.) PEDs give the author control of the appearance of a document

PED conversion preserves the original appearance of a document; meta-information supplied by formatting and layout is maintained

4.) PED annotation capabilities make them a dynamic medium

PEDs and email create an easy-to-use, inexpensive environment for collaboration

5.) The meta information embedded in PEDs can be used for document management

It is easier to manage and archive large collections of portable documents

Not all PEDs are created equal, nor are all equally Web-friendly. The features and functionality required by a PED for use in an Intranet include:

• Accurate representation of any graphical or font information, regardless of the recipient's platform or font capabilities.

• Viewer with minimal impact on user's desktop system: no helper applications or system-strangling DLLs or drivers.

• The ability to hyperlink to and from both PEDs and HTML documents.

• The ability to download one page at a time over the network, rather than requiring the entire document file to first be transmitted.

• A small, easily-distributed, embeddable viewer; no installation required on viewing desktop.

• Annotation and hyperlinking capabilities usable by any recipient of a PED document, with or without embedded viewer, whether from the Web, via email, or by disk.

• Easy creation of PED-based documents from standard desktop applications.

• Easy conversion of legacy documents into PED format.

• Extensive management capabilities to organize large collections of documents.

V. Collaborative Computing

Collaboration is an organizational necessity that generally involves a highly-evolved, if informal, structure within organizations. Therefore, it is important that any Intranet solution offering collaborative capabilities fit gracefully into the existing collaborative structure, and allow people to interact and work the way they normally would. In most organizations two forms of collaboration alternate to produce a final result.

Collaboration can be viewed in two forms:

• Synchronous (real-time)

• Asynchronous (non real-time)

The traditional process of planning a new collaborative organizational effort initially involves a meeting, with everyone present face-to-face at the same time. This is the synchronous part of the collaborative process, and it's important to note that very little actual formal work is ever done via synchronous collaboration. Instead, it is a vehicle, and a very powerful one, for the generation of ideas and/or consensus. However, since it requires everyone to fit the meeting into their schedule, synchronous collaboration is hard to arrange and has a high impact on organizational resources. The real work gets done when people go off to their offices and work at their desks, generating memos, reports, and other documents that are then circulated for comment and finally collated into a result. This is asynchronous collaboration, and it is the vehicle for most of the real work done in organizations. It does not require simultaneous presence, requires little or no pre-arrangement and has a much lower impact on resources.

Collaborative Computer Technologies

Network News Groups and Portable Electronic Document technologies are particularly noteworthy for the ease with which they can be implemented, and the rich collaborative computing platforms they enable. Network news groups are based on NNTP and public domain news servers, and can give an organizational Intranet the same threaded discussion group capabilities found on proprietary services like Compuserve, America OnLine, or the Internet's Usenet News. Network News provides a powerful platform for organizational information distribution, and a medium for workplace collaboration that can be easily controlled and focused by the organization.

Portable Electronic Document technology features extensive annotative and hyperlinking capabilities, combined with SMTP email this creates a platform for collaborative documentation development. Collaborative documentation development and internetwork circulation of documentation is perhaps an Intranet technology that most closely mirrors the way in which people already work in the world of paper documents. In contrast, proprietary database-enabled groupware and email-enabled groupware often require extensive business re-engineering, hardware and software investment, and custom application programming. Additionally, these trendy groupware solutions impose a somewhat alien vision of collaboration on the organization, one that doesn't fit the way people work.

Document Management on the Intranet

Intranet solutions that have limited capabilities for integrating legacy documentation will have finite value to organizations. An Intranet document management solution must be capable of managing large collections of documents regardless of their sources, for a successful solution will result in a proliferation of documents and facilitate an increase in user productivity. There are a variety of innovative solutions available, incorporating many different technologies. The decision to go with a turnkey, from-the-ground-up solution or to attempt some degree of in-house integration, depends on a balance of factors including the current organizational information infrastructure, organizational resources, and time constraints.

Advantages of Portable Electronic Document Formats For Intranet Document Management And Collaborative Computing

• Web server-friendly documents are easily archived, indexed and linked.

• Enable a collaborative internetwork documentation development platform.

• Easily implemented as a simple home-grown solution.

• Leverage current information infrastructure.

• Provide more control over document design.

• Do not involve a high up-front cost.

• Scalablility.

• Extensibility.

The experience gained in understanding the problems of document management through implementation and adoption of PED technology strategically positions the organization for more complex future systems without committing a high level of resources to the learning process.

VI. Intranet Desktop Requirements

The architecture of most current browsers is based on NCSA's Mosaic model, which was primarily designed for accessing and/or surfing the World Wide Web. Although Mosaic and other browsers have been a major factor in the Internet's and Web's success, many browser products and TCP/IP suites are kludged private and public domain software products that attempt to increase functionality and feature sets. Users and administrators of organizational Intranets require more than simplistic information access via the email-Telnet-FTP-Gopher-Browser technology: they need highly integrated application suites and utilities that enable them to become Intranet citizens and participate in collaborative workplace environments. These requirements are addressed in advanced Intranet application suites.

Invisibility and integration will be the hallmarks of advanced Intranet application suites. Users won't have to decide what application or protocol to use to access information, or enter into a collaborative relationship: this is all handled by the user interface. In addition, all application protocols will be accessible from within any document.

A Web address (http://somewhere.com/some-directory/some-file) found in an email message will be live, so that if users click on it they are immediately taken to the document referenced in the link.

Primary Intranet Desktop Requirements

1.) Recreational netsurfers on the Internet are not particularly concerned with productivity and/or collaboration, but these are prime requirements for an Intranet. Internet and Web technologies should be integrated into the Intranet desktop in a fashion that enhances users' ability to quickly find and use all forms of information and resources, and to collaborate naturally with other Intranet citizens in creating and modifying documents based on that information.

2.) Although the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the lingua franca of the Internet, it has a number of limitations-especially in regard to document management-that demand augmentation for Intranet use. Portable Electronic Document (PED) technologies address the shortcomings of HTML while maintaining compatibility with it. A properly designed Intranet desktop should integrate PED with HTML to get the best of both worlds.

3.) Finally, unlike the relatively unstructured Internet, an Intranet is organized to support organizational goals, so an Intranet access product must include tools that enable administrators to focus users' activities and access capabilities on the information and resources that support those goals. Also, since network bandwidth is a critical and expensive resource, an Intranet desktop must offer the ability to minimize its impact on the network. An Intranet desktop should include extensive administrative capabilities that enable the installation, configuration, and management of every desktop from a central server; help reduce the impact of user activities on network bandwidth; and give administrators the tools they need to control access to and distribution of sensitive information.

Managing and Administering Intranet Desktops

Effective managers require an organizational framework to achieve maximum productivity. The same is even more true of ordinary users, and the purpose of an Intranet to a large degree is to make users information managers. An Intranet, then must include tools that enable network administrators to give users the framework they need to be productive members of the organizational Intranet. The ways in which this can be accomplished are legion, involving each of the technologies and subsystems discussed above, and many remain to be discovered as the Intranet market evolves. However, since the desktop is the primary focus of user activities, it is critical that an Intranet desktop offer administrators a way to help users become more productive.

At the very least, when a user or administrator installs an Intranet desktop from the server, the desktop should come pre-configured with "hotlists" (or whatever form of resource organization is used) that already point to important organizational resources. In addition, and equally important, it should be possible to lock out other information resources to reduce the temptation of non-business activity. This can be done at the firewall, at the desktop, or, ideally, both places, since one of the ideals of security is defense-in-depth. (Considering the ease with which a modem can be added to a personal computer, control at the firewall alone is not enough.)

Control of the times during which various activities are possible, and the assignment of priorities to those activities based on criteria such as network impact, organizational productivity, and the like, are other desirable qualities in an Intranet desktop application suite. These capabilities enable network administrators to focus users on those activities that are most likely to help them in their work-and increase productivity. The next generation of Intranet desktop application suites will provide many of these capabilities as a common denominator.

Future Organizational Internetwork And Intranet

Desirable Features and Functionality of an Intranet Desktop Include:

• Seamless application integration.

• Invisibility of protocols (e.g. access to live URLs within email, etc.)

• Persistence of common activities across sessions.

• Intelligent agents to automate information retrieval.

• Scheduling capabilities to offload high-impact ctivities to network off-hours.

• Search and indexing capabilities.

• Ability to work offline.

• Control of all activities to avoid downtime from stalled Intranet/Internet servers.

• Intuitive user-defined organization of resources, e.g. email addresses, URLs, servers, etc.

• Easy means of sharing documents and files on the Intranet without impacting security.

• Integration with remote access solutions already in place.

• Integrated Portable Electronic Document technology.

• Centralized installation and administration.

• Administrative control of time and type of desktop activities.

VII. A New Frontier: Objects and Intelligent Agents

The benefits of object technology in software development are well known: by abstracting software behavior into software "pieces or components" with well-defined interfaces, software developers can handle far more complex projects, reuse code, easily add new behaviors without breaking already-written code, and more accurately reflect business processes in business applications. Several of these benefits mirror the layered architecture of TCP/IP, and for the same reasons it's not surprising that object technology is rapidly finding a home on the Internet and Intranets, especially in the realms of scripting languages and intelligent agents.

Scripting languages can be used to automate common activities on the desktop, or by network administrators to automate many tasks such as software distribution, installation, desktop configuration, and control. An important consideration in the design of a scripting language is the amount of access to critical system internals it allows: too much and it can easily be used to craft viruses or other destructive software entities, too little and it is of limited use.

Intelligent agents are software modules that automate complex user or administrator tasks; often they are written in scripting languages such as Visual Basic. They exhibit many levels of intelligence, ranging from pre-programmed modules whose behavior must be defined in detail by the user, and adaptive intelligent agents that can detect patterns of use, thereby automatically adapting to a user's needs and modes of work. A major benefit of intelligent agents is their ability to perform useful work anytime the desktop computer sits idle, or when network usage is at a minimum.

An exciting new frontier in internetworking is the development of mobile agents: code, often called "applets" or mini-applications, that travel across the network to perform user tasks. This is especially compelling in the arena of mobile computing and remote access, and enables remote users to work offline and then dispatch a mobile agent to do its work on a distant server with only a brief network connection. This technology can greatly reduce a user's impact on network resources. Additionally, it can be used to automatically add new behaviors to software on the fly, enabling clients to handle a new datatype, for example, by downloading the code needed to process it transparently to the user.

Applets and mini-applications can also be viewed as a terrifying technology in some respects, because they basically could be considered domesticated viruses. The same security considerations that apply to scripting languages apply here, with even more importance: a mobile agent that can perform useful work is also capable of performing destructive work. Software development in this area is just beginning to evolve; it is far too early to tell what role this technology will play in Intranets and the Internet, or who the dominant players will be.

Summary

Development and implementation of organizational Intranets encompasses an enormously wide array of technologies. A comprehensive overview of Intranet technologies would involve a significant undertaking well beyond the scope of any white paper. Intranet security for example, is not included in the discussion as it involves several extremely complex technologies: firewalls, encryption and authentication. Intranet security is deserving of several books in itself. We have also severely limited our discussion of object technology, although its ramifications portend incredible advances in application development, and it will play a major role in future of the Web and Intranets. Multimedia audio and video technologies are beginning to play a small role on the Web but, their application in organizational internetworks is currently unrealistic considering the limitations of network bandwidth, and could be viewed as techno-hype. The scope of this discussion has been focused on technologies of fundamental importance to information technology managers and network administrators-Intranet enabling technologies. The majority of information and trends discussed have been derived from interviews of Hummingbird's customers, many of whom are in the process of building organizational Intranets.

Back to the Future

The full potential of Internet and Web technologies is certainly far from being realized. The intrinsic beauty of the Web is its simplicity, for aside from simplicity there is nothing new about Internet and WWW technology. The Internet and WWW design were derived from an open systems UNIX client/server culture-a computing paradigm that distributes the power of the internetwork enterprise-wide. In this environment the physical location of applications and information becomes irrelevant and is leveraged across the entire enterprise. Some might argue that the Web represents a return to the days of mainframe time share computing. This is unlikely considering that the foundation of the Internet and Web technologies were derived from open standards. The ease of implementing Internet and Web technologies, and their open systems origin are perhaps two of the most important factors driving their acceptance.

Appendix

The information in this document represents the view of Hummingbird Communications Ltd. on the topics discussed, as of the publication’s date. The continually changing market conditions and general dynamic nature of the computer business mandates that Hummingbird cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information published after the date of publication.

This White Paper has been prepared solely for informational purposes. Hummingbird MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED IN THIS DOCUMENT.