These days almost any company of almost any size is either thinking about, or is building or already has an intranet. The reason for this explosion in intranet construction is that companies have finally realized that the intranet is one of the best ways of disseminating information and stimulating ideas and thought exchanges among the employees of the company. But, before any organization builds an intranet, it should plan it out and the following sentences explain the major issues at stake here. There are eight key issues to be considered:

1. Determine your infrastructure requirements- This relates to the physical infrastructure you will choose, whether a token based 10 Mbps LAN, a 100 Mbps Ethernet or even possibly a FDDI orATM network. Secondly, you will need the wiring and the hubs and routers that make up the vital elements of the LAN and which often can cause bottlenecks if improperly used. Also you will probably either go for a ISDN lineor a T1 connection to the internet. Thirdly, the software you will need to run and manage your network. More than likely it will be a TCP/IP suite with Novell Netware or UNIX for your system maintenance needs.

2. Determine your Web Server needs - This is your connection and link to the internet. You will probably want a robust server, that can handle the volume you expect, has some security elements and supports wide functionality. Once again there is a wide range of servers available running a wide range of operating systems. For eg., Sun's Netra, Compaq PC's Windows NT servers, high end UNIX servers, etc.

3. Make a browser choice - Almost defacto this will be Netscape 4.0 which has a wide range of functionality, although you could also go for Microsoft's Explorer.

4. How will you use your intranet? - This is a broad overall strategic plan which details your list of priorities such as determining what functions you want to distribute, how you deploy your Web servers, how you deploy proxy servers, what information you put on the intranet, who has access to it, who maintains it, etc.

5. Determine the application development software you need - This relates to the HTML coding software you will need to make the web pages. For simpler pages you could use Netscape's inbuilt editor or HotBot, etc. one of the easy to use HTML softwares. For more complex graphic oriented, user intereaction oriented pages, which are quickly becoming more of a norm these days, you will almost certainly need to use either some JAVA or some advanced HTML techniques.

6. Firewall - One of the hot topics these days is the need to protect your intranet from the unscruplous people on the Internet. This brings up the question of a firewall. You can implement either a network level or an application level firewall and there are various technologies developing right now, each oriented towards their own brand of protection. You will probably have to weed through each one trying to decide which one fits your needs as a company best.

7. The Webmaster - This is one of the most important components of your entire Network organization. What are the duties and functions of the Web manager. Is he just a technical network maintainer who has minimal say in how and what goes on to the Intranet or is he a bigger part of the organization information disseminating chain, giving him/her broader powers to intereact with others in the company to maximize the potential of the Intranet. Some companies have even broken this function up in to two, with a purely technical Intranet manager and a Web manager, who is a more senior level information systems manager.

8. Training - The purpose of the intranet is only accomplished if people know how to use it. This will probably entail some training and especially you might want to train one person in each department on how to code that departments documents in HTML so that each department can put its information up and change it when necessary.

If you follow the above mentioned steps you should develop an excellent and useful intranet.