Managing the Corporate Intranet

"Intranets introduce all kinds of complexity to organizations. Not only is the technology new, but the way it is used is also very different from traditional systems environments."

"Perhaps the most confusing question in intranet management is simply determining who controls what. Who rightly should be responsible for management? And what does that responsibility entail for an individual?"

"To effectively explain the management of intranet technology components, it is necessary first to have a clear understanding of what those components are and how they work together."

"A significant cost of managing a typical client/server environment is managing the client workstation itself."

"Few intranet environments have an adequate network operations environment to support their deployment, resulting in unpredictable performance, as well as unpredictable impact on corporate networking resources."

"When looking at managing a hardware (HW) environment, which includes planning its growth, there are infinite factors that need to be reconciled."

"As the configuration of the intranet becomes more complex, so does the task of managing the server software components."

"As intranets evolve from Web servers that provide simple documents to complex systems delivering wide varieties of valuable content, the need to effectively manage that material becomes increasingly important."

"In most organizations, changes in business needs and usage patterns should drive changes in the intranet, not changes in technology availability."

"Securing your intranet is a seemingly hopeless task. After all, if you make it secure enough to let you sleep, you will probably be up all night handling pages from people who cannot get connected"

"Increasingly, companies are leveraging their intranet infrastructures to deliver more than static content; they are becoming application delivery environments. There is no single way to perform this integration."