About Intranets

Intranets and Extranets Give Business Classes a Genuine Corporate View

By Karl Barksdale

The emergence of corporate Intranets has inspired a new series of products for business education classes called Corporate View. In this article, I will discuss Intranets and Extranets and how you and your students can get an inside look into these essential corporate communications and office technology systems.

Intranets and Their Use

An Intranet is like a mini-World Wide Web for employees only.

Corporate Intranets started with the advent of the Web. In 1995, the business world discovered the potential of the World Wide Web and harnessed its tremendous technologies to reach customers in powerful new ways. A year later (1996), corporations discovered that employees were using the corporate Web sites for a variety of work-related purposes, and almost serendipitously the idea of a "corporate Intranet" was born.

An Intranet uses Web technology to communicate across a corporation. No matter where a company's employees are located, they can connect to their corporate Intranet via their Web browsers and corporate passwords.

To help you understand the power of this new office technology, here are a few specific examples of how an Intranet can be used in just one business activity—retail clothing sales.

Imagine you are the worldwide sales manager for a multinational retail clothing business with stores and outlets around the world. Your corporate Intranet allows each of your stores, its sales representatives, store managers, and sales assistants to have up-to-the-second information on any corporate topic related to their jobs. Buyers in New York can check the stock in stores in Los Angeles, Dallas, Detroit, or Toronto. Pricing for an upcoming advertised sales event can be posted just in time to start marking down prices. Employees can see video clips of the upcoming commercials before they hit prime-time TV. Specific product markdowns can be posted instantaneously and simultaneously for every store manager and every sales assistant by name. With the click of a mouse on an Intranet Web page, your entire worldwide sales team can be trained for a new inventory-reporting procedure or be given the specifics concerning an exciting new product acquisition. Sales personnel in any of your retail outlets can have their questions answered about the new acquisition and can even view a pictorial preview of any new products they will soon be selling.

These are just a few examples for one narrow spectrum of business activity. The number of practical uses for a business Intranet is virtually unlimited.

Extranets and Their Use

Extranets (short for "external Intranets") began to be used widely in 1997. Corporations found they could link important parts of their corporate Intranets to other corporate partners or suppliers.

An Extranet is a logical extension to a corporate Intranet. By sharing part of its private corporate Intranet with its suppliers and outside design consultants, a company can bring products to market more quickly and efficiently.

Why Corporations Love Intranets

Corporations love Intranets because they:

Are easy and inexpensive to set up.
Require very little employee training.
Allow rapid and effective sharing of corporate information.

The truth is, using a corporate Intranet isn't much different from using the Web and sending email. Because Intranets are for employees only, firewalls are set up to protect corporate information from uninvited guests, like you and me. To prevent unauthorized intrusions, a login name and password is required to enter most corporate Intranets.

Once employees have logged into the Intranet, most feel instantly at home because "it's just like the Web." After a few minutes, employees are comfortable collaborating, receiving corporate updates, sending email, updating orders or accounts, setting up conference chats or video meetings, or participating in a host of other business activities.

Although most Intranet software in use today is freeware, thousands of companies (including software giants like Netscape, Lotus, and Microsoft) are eager to show any corporation how to set up an enterprisewide, secure Intranet.

Intranets for Big and Small Businesses Alike

Most large corporations now have Intranets. Westinghouse and JPMorgan created their Intranets several years ago. Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, 3M, Cushman & Wakefield, and National Semiconductor, to name a few, have exemplary Intranets for their employees.

To help corporations set up intranets, Microsoft built Intranet capabilities into its server software. The software giant stated:

"There's no doubt that intranets are the emerging big business information infrastructure. And there's little debate about why. Used successfully, such a powerful one-stop information tool can help the organization improve communication, cut costs and ultimately shrink time to market."

(For more information, see the BackOffice section on the Microsoft Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/backofficeserver/guide/better_intra.asp.)

But Intranets are not just the "information infrastructure" of big business. Small businesses can set up Intranets for a few dollars per employee and have unparalleled access services at their fingertips, including the following:

Web pages customized to employee needs
Email and a corporatewide electronic address book
Online group planning software
Financial reports, sales forecasts, and marketing plans
Corporate communications of all kinds, like corporate press releases
Human Resources information, including job descriptions, policies and procedures, and benefits information
FAQs provided by the Information Technology team
Customer Support product service reports
The latest developments in R&D
Information about competitive products and pricing
Audio, video, and animations when required
E-commerce tools
Push technology to "push" important information directly to the employee's desk at an instant

Working on a Worldwide Corporate Intranet

The wonderful thing about working in a corporation with its own Intranet is that you can be anywhere in the world, on any Web computer, and still log into your corporate Intranet and report to work. Take 3M for example. With more than 60 business units or subsidiaries in 52 countries, it is hardly the small St. Paul, Minnesota-based company it was at its founding in 1902. This global giant uses its Intranet to share business forecasts, economic trends, and department needs around the world.

If 3M needs a "global economic forecast" in a hurry, it can get the entire 3M world involved. A financial analyst in Japan can contribute in a matter of seconds as easily as a marketing manager in St. Paul. England's sales force can send its data in seconds, which can be posted with Australia's research contribution in a matter of minutes. When the report is finished, it can be put on the Intranet for every employee to use or comment on.

Implications for Business Education

Business educators are discovering that Intranets and Extranets are opening new doors of learning. In the past, it has been hard to simulate a true-to-life, working, interactive, corporate environment. Now, business classes can experience business from inside a working corporate Intranet. And, teachers are discovering what business has discovered. Classroom Intranets:

Are easy and inexpensive to set up.
Require very little student training.
Allow rapid and effective sharing of educational activities and information.

In a new series of products by South-Western Educational Publishing called Corporate View, students step inside a corporate Intranet, assume the jobs of employees, and complete assignments the way employees complete them.

To access the Corporate View Intranet, click on Intranet Employee Login on the Corporate View home page. Because this is a working Intranet for employee use, you will need a login name and password. Contact your South-Western sales representative and ask for a preview copy of the first text in the Corporate View series. A password can be found inside the Corporate View Orientation textbook. To view a demonstration of the Intranet, click on the Intranet Demo link on the Corporate View home page.

As a teacher, you can set up your own Intranet with the help of the Corporate View Intranet CD or downloadable Web pages at www.corpview.com. By copying the Corporate View Intranet Web pages to your school's server or student workstation hard drives, students can contribute to the Intranet just like the employees at 3M or Hewlett-Packard. In a special EMPLOYEE folder, students can create and save business-oriented assignments that expand their Corporate View Intranet. Using the Corporate View Intranet as a starting point, there is no limit to what they can create and accomplish.

In the first volume of the Corporate View (Orientation), students are asked to create and post job descriptions, press releases, white papers, email, and a wide assortment of marketing, sales, and financial documents.

And, no special tools are required. Word or WordPerfect will work nicely for the orientation course, and Excel and PowerPoint (or their counterparts) can be used to enhance the learning simulations even further.

So contact your South-Western sales representative and experience the online business environment of the future with your students. See you on the Intranet!

Karl Barksdale is an accomplished author, business teacher, and presenter. He has written 15 texts and numerous articles and spoken on the Internet, Intranets, Extranets, voice dictation, technical writing, voice writing and composition, HTML, Java, Internet distance education, middle school computer instruction, and Corporate View in a dozen states. You can reach Karl by email at karlb@ms.provo.k12.ut.us.