Overview

The growth of intranets and the Internet as a means of deploying applications represents one of the most dramatic changes in the history of computing. The market for services in this area has grown from zero to over $1 billion in a few years, according to research by Zona Research, Redwood City, CA. Web browsers make a great platform for sharing documents and managing tasks. They give familiarity, ease of use and simplicity. They also bring clear benefits. A 1997 survey by the Meta Group of 55 companies, mainly taken from the top 200 Fortune companies, showed that intranets were delivering average Return on Investment of 38%. This figure was higher when companies had developed intranets which went beyond information publishing to collaborative or interactive applications.

This combination, plus their low cost and the ease of deploying applications surely represents the future for all groupware and workflow applications. All major collaborative software players have, or are actively enabling their applications to integrate with the Internet.

Although the Internet has many tools to navigate and transfer files between servers, it is really the increase in use of web browsers to access information on web servers which has caused this change in groupware. Browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer provide an easy method of accessing and viewing web documents stored on different servers.

Intranets arose because companies who experimented with using Internet tools to share company information realised intranets offered several benefits over traditional information systems. Intranets use the...