Departmental intranets

Many people use the Web everyday in their jobs. Excluding those whose jobs are to design, implement and maintain a Web infrastructure, most are looking for information. The Web provides an excellent medium for this information exchange and data retrieval. But, the entire World Wide Web (WWW) cannot serve the microscopic tailored needs of an individual´s work project. What´s more, a large corporation´s intranet cannot serve those specific employee´s needs well either. This is where a departmental intranet comes into play. A low-cost intranet can effectively serve the data archiving, retrieval and information exchange needs for any department. Additionally, an intranet caches data locally so workers can spend their time producing instead of waiting for data. There are many ways to set up an intranet. Hundreds of commercial solutions with dedicated servers, software and specially trained administrators exist, but all at a very high cost. Besides that, issues such as man-hours, capital expenses, urgency and privacy have to be examined. The solution discussed makes tradeoffs between man-hours and capital to install a freeware-based Web server into an existing infrastructure