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H. Joseph Wen: School of Management, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA
Introduction
An intranet is the internal corporate use of Internet technologies. Intranets are modelled after the global Internet and its World Wide Web (WWW). While an intranet has all the look, feel and functionality of being hooked up to the Internet, it is totally self-contained on the company network (McDonald and Kaplan, 1996). Intranets employ the hypertext and multimedia technologies used in the Internet, but for applications internal to an organization. They provide a standard browser-based window in which all information is displayed the same way, and all processes interface the same and work the same. Intranets are gaining in popularity because of this "standard" environment and because they give companies the opportunity to electronically deliver documents, link software, databases and hardware into a network and create open and functional applications. They provide the corporation with a less expensive way of disseminating corporate data than through the usual complex applications that link disparate computer systems.
Client/server (C/S) is two-tier computing where the presentation logic, business logic and database access functions are shared between the client machine and some servers. An intranet puts a new layer into the architecture: the Web server, which acts as the gateway to the application logic and data. In today's C/S world, the Web is an enhancement. The client machine employs the Web browser as its software, which allows users to navigate within online pages. By clicking on home page hyperlinks and the links on following pages, users access information available via that Web site, either stored locally or at another site. It is three-tier computing and could be considered as "n-tier" computing where these functions are performed on numerous servers (Linthicum, 1996).
When a server responds to a Web client request, it does not matter if the client is a Windows 95, Windows 3.11, Windows NT, OS/2, UNIX or Macintosh platform. Translations are handled by the browser, including requests to the Web server as well as responses sent back to the client platform.
Web pages can be thought of as documents that are built with format codes and hypertext links using hypertext markup language (HTML). Hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) is a client/server protocol used for...