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Chapter 65
Considerations for Implementing Corporate Intranets

Nathan J. Muller

Assessing whether the corporate network has the capacity to support an intranet is a top priority for many network managers. This chapter explains how to evaluate and improve network performance, accommodate intranet traffic demands, secure a new intranet, and in general, create an intranet environment that is flexible and integrated.

INTRODUCTION

A corporate intranet entails the deployment and use of Internet technologies such as the Web, E-mail, and TCP/IP on a closed private network within one organization or within a group of organizations that share common relationships. Because intranets are based on TCP/IP networking standards, they can include anything that uses this protocol suite, including existing client/server technology and connectivity to legacy host systems. Companies can benefit from Internet technology and avoid its drawbacks — particularly, its lethargic performance and lack of security.

Intranets support communication and collaboration; information retrieval, sharing, and management; and access to databases and applications. None of these functions is new, but the promise of an intranet is that it can use Internet and World Wide Web technologies to do things better than before.

For example, according to Microsoft Corp., Netscape Communications Corp., Oracle Corp., and Sun Microsystems, Inc., a Web browser could become the standard interface used to access databases, legacy applications, and data warehouses throughout the enterprise. In this scenario, the thin client (i.e., the browser) can make applications easier to maintain, desktops easier to manage, and substantially trim the IT budget.

A company’s customers, suppliers, and strategic partners in turn can benefit from the improved communication, greater collaboration, and reduced IT expenditure associated with implementing an intranet. They can even access each other’s Intranet services directly, which would speed decision-making as well as save time and money.

Achieving these benefits comes from properly implementing an intranet, which is far from straightforward. One of the more difficult issues to resolve is intranet content — determining what information will be presented, where it will come from, how its accuracy will be ensured, and how often it will be updated. The resources must be available to do this extra work.

Intranet content development is beyond the scope of this chapter, however. The focus here is on specific issues of network and server management. First, resources must be available to establish the service, to establish the TCP/IP network over which it runs, and to train users. Second, the impact on existing systems must be considered. This includes, for example, the capacity of the current network to support an intranet, the future usefulness of existing legacy systems, and the availability of hardware to run multimedia applications.

“FAT” VS. “THIN” CLIENTS

Corporate intranets provide an opportunity to ensure universal access to applications and databases while increasing the speed of applications development, improving the security and reliability of the applications, and reducing the cost of computing and ongoing administration.

“Fat” and “thin” refer primarily to the amount of processing being performed. Terminals are the ultimate thin clients because they rely exclusively on the server for applications and processing. Standalone PCs are the ultimate fat clients because they have the resources to run all applications locally and handle the processing themselves. Spanning the continuum from all-server processing to all-client processing is the client/server environment, where there is a distribution of work between the different processors.

TRADITIONAL CLIENT/SERVER

A few years ago, client/server was thought to be the ideal computing solution. Despite the initial promises of client/server solutions, today there is much dissatisfaction with their implementation. Client/server solutions are too complex, desktops are too expensive to administer and upgrade, and the applications are still not secure and reliable enough. Furthermore, client/server applications take too long to develop and deploy, and incompatible desktops prevent universal access.

As companies discover the benefits of private intranets and new development tools such as Java and ActiveX, as well as various scripting languages such as JavaScript and VBScript, they can use these tools to redefine the traditional models of computing and reassess their IT infrastructure.

JAVA-ENABLED BROWSERS

Browsers that are used to navigate the World Wide Web are usually thin clients when they render documents sent by a server. The special tags used throughout these documents, known as the HTML, tell the browser how to render their contents on a computer screen.

However, browsers can get very fat when other components are sent from the server for execution within the browser. These components can be specialized files with audio or video that are interpreted by plug-ins registered with the browser. When the browser comes across an HTML tag that specifies a file type that is associated with one of these plug-ins, the application is automatically opened within the browser, permitting an audio or video stream to be played instantly without the user having to download the file to disk and open it with an external player.

Applets

Another way that the browser can become fat is by absorbing Java applets that are downloaded from the server with the HTML documents. Applets are small applications designed to be distributed over the network and are always hosted by another program such as Netscape’s Navigator or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, both of which contain a “virtual machine” (VM) that runs the Java code. Because the Java code is written for the virtual machine rather than for a particular computer or operating system, by default all Java programs are cross-platform applications.

Java applications are fast because today’s processors can provide efficient virtual machine execution. The performance of GUI functions and graphical applications are enhanced through Java’s integral multithreading capability and JIT compilation. The applications are also more secure than those running native code because the Java runtime system — part of the virtual machine — checks all code for viruses and tampering before running it.

Applications development is facilitated through code reuse, making it easier to deploy applications on the Internet or corporate intranet. Code reuse also makes the applications more reliable because many of the components have already been tested.


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