Hawai'i Tech
Intranets make documents accessible to remote locations

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

Greg Taylor • The Honolulu Advertiser

The drive to make office documents available from remote locations, whether from home or distant business locations, has driven companies to establish intranets, which are like small-scale versions of the Internet. Employees or others given security clearance connect by phone line or cable and log on with a password to post messages, view and exchange documents and otherwise communicate as if they were in the same office.

Some companies call this kind of system a LAN or WAN, which stands for a local-area or wide-area network. Technically, such a network becomes an intranet if employees exchange documents and information using the same kind of language employed in Web pages. The face of an intranet, in fact, often resembles a Web page.

This kind of scaled-down network becomes useful for groups other than companies, too. Joshua Kuo, a computer science senior at the University of Hawai'i- Manoa, has written his own software allowing students to log on and take practice quizzes for a course.

"A variation of this project that I did later was to modify it for Java programmers who are interested in taking the Java certification test," Kuo said. "This will be their online forum to discuss study materials and post their own practice questions."

More recently, surfers of the public Net have encountered regular Web sites that appear to mimic a truly private intranet. Sometimes these are called "hosted intranet services" or "extranets," because they are reachable through the public Intranet.

"Some companies build their own 'extranet' using the Internet backbone, so their employees can communicate with each other and update the same database from different locations in the country," Kuo added. "Some companies do not have the expertise or do not want to do that, so there are services out there such as OfficeClip and MagicalDesk, that provide this kind of service for them."

Despite the technical distinction, some of these, such as Intranets.com, have appropriated the intranet term to describe what they do.

And while what they do varies somewhat from site to site, here are some common elements:

• Document storage; many sites (MagicalDesk.com, for example) will allow a user a certain amount of storage space for free and charge for additional space.
• Messages; usually there's a place to leave messages for others in the intranet, either through a separate e-mail account (such as name@officeclip.com), in a bulletin-board format or both.
• Calendar and to-do list are common offerings, allowing users to check their daily schedules from remote location.
• Address books and Web bookmarks are often provided so commonly used information can be stored and looked up from locations beyond the office.

Some services (the Connected Office at Yahoo! is one) are free; others, like OfficeClip.com, charge for premium services but provide free starter accounts; and others, like Intranets.com, have moved completely to a service-for-monthly-fee system.

Some sites have the user download software that only runs on certain computer platforms. Visto.com, for one, won't work on Macintoshes.

However, most of them figure that people will access their site from a variety of places and computers and make them friendly to various systems. And as a result, operations become a little less than seamless.

To open a text file stored onsite, for example, many services require that you download it to your desktop first and open it as a plain text document; viewing it in another format generally requires running onsite software, for which there is a charge.

The other drawback, a serious one for businesses, is security. Web-based office sites require a lot of trust that proprietary files won't be hacked from outside, or even breached by the company running the site itself, said Michael Hodges, systems manager for UH Information Technology Services.

"The trouble with externally hosted services is you don't have control of your own information," Hodges said. "As a short-term means of shared access in an unsecured environment, it might work, but I don't see it as a viable solution for business."

For businesses that use the Internet as the backbone of a company network, Hodges prefers the use of software known as "virtual private network" programs.

When that's activated on a computer, a company network can be accessed remotely through the public Internet but only through a secure, encrypted entry process called "tunneling."

Besides, Web services are not exactly famous for their longevity. Intranets.com, for example, just recently started charging for services. And MagicalDesk has turned its free Web service into a kind of demonstration version of its full-featured product that is sold to companies creating their own intranets, said Steve Houghton, company director of business development.

Across the Net, there is a move away from advertising-supported free services, Houghton said. And this, said Hodges, is why they're dodgy as permanent solutions for business.

"You can't consider them stable if you spend time training people on them, and then they change business model or go belly up," Hodges said, "which on the Web is a popular business model, too."