An intranet sounds great, but how does a small company move from conceiving the idea to actually building an intranet?
First, determine content. Put together a committee to decide what information should go up on the Intranet and in what order - what should debut on the site, what should come later. Start off small and slow. In terms of content, companies say they usually start with material germane to all their employees: the Human Resource newsletter, an employee directory and policy manuals. Then it's up to individual departments to make the case for constructing additional pages.
Your company also needs to consider how users will navigate your Intranet. What will the opening page be like? Develop a schematic of what information will be where. Consider the conventions you will use to give the intranet a uniform look and feel. For example, will there be a "top" button at the bottom of each page so people can go to the top just by clicking on it? Will there be a help listing on each page?
The intranet also needs a search engine - sort of your own private Yahoo, Excite or InfoSeek - that will let people type in a description of the information they need, hit a button, and then find the appropriate data. The search engine points the inquirer to the information they seek.
You must also decide where the information will physically reside, and in what form. Information can be spread across machines and your local-area network. This is pretty complicated and hard to keep secure. Most companies will opt to set aside some computer systems as intranet servers, which are just like Web servers except instead of storing the company's external Web site, an intranet server stores all the intranet's content. The choice of software dictates the choice of hardware. For example, if you choose Microsoft Internet Information Server as the software to run your server, your company will need a Windows NT machine. If you opt for Netscape server software, a Unix-based machine would be your top hardware choice.
Information housed on your intranet server can travel along your existing computer network provided your company runs a separate TCP/IP (an Internet networking protocol) environment on top of its regular networking environment. Or, if your company has Novell's networks, consider the company's IntranetWare product.
Information such as word processing documents must be converted into Web pages. HTML Transit, by InfoAccess, is one such conversion tool. Documents can also be embedded into Web documents by using a tool such as ActiveX. Microsoft is also getting into the act with its Microsoft Office 60 Minute Intranet kit, which comes with ready-made HTML page templates and instructions for creating intranet sites. The kit is free and can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/office/intranet.