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Swamped with new information and employees, Aetna Life Insurance Company of Canada needed a way to better orchestrate their communications.
The Toronto-based organization was growing at a frantic pace in their sales force divisions and by acquiring other companies and business units. Instead of turning to a client/server-based communications infrastructure as originally planned, in May 1996 Aetna saw more benefits in building a TCP/IP-based intranet. Pat Smith, Aetna's senior vice-president of corporate resource services, said the company saw the growth in Internet use and noted that technologies such as firewalls, certification and gateways were being developed.
"Our confidence increased," Smith said. "We knew whatever tools we put in place required us to think about communication...Why should we set up internal-only company e-mail, when we can set it up so we can mail internally as well as to the world at large?"
So the decision was made to create Aetna Live, an intranet designed to facilitate better company communication and simplify many exhaustive paper-pushing procedures. The intranet meant all company desktops had to be upgraded to 586s with 32MB of RAM to handle the Netscape software and Aetna Live functionality. Aetna currently employs 1,200 people in main offices in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver, and has 32 additional offices nation-wide.
Aetna Live is continually altered according to recommendations from employees and business partners who have access through an extranet.
"We tried everything in-house before rolling it out...