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Internet & Intranet Notes Unit - 3 Intranet: Benefits

An intranet is a private network within an organization that securely shares the organization's information using internet technologies. Intranets provide benefits like increased workforce productivity, improved communication, lower costs, and enhanced collaboration. They allow for applications like sales force automation, online publishing of documents, and collaboration tools to facilitate information sharing and business processes within the organization.

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95 views9 pages

Internet & Intranet Notes Unit - 3 Intranet: Benefits

An intranet is a private network within an organization that securely shares the organization's information using internet technologies. Intranets provide benefits like increased workforce productivity, improved communication, lower costs, and enhanced collaboration. They allow for applications like sales force automation, online publishing of documents, and collaboration tools to facilitate information sharing and business processes within the organization.

Uploaded by

Swati Hans
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Internet & Intranet Notes

Unit -3
Intranet
An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet Protocol technologies to
securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems
within that organization. The term is used in contrast tointernet,a network between
organizations, and instead refers to a network within an organization.

Multiple definitions exist

 "Using Internet-based technologies within an organization to facilitate


communication and access to information.
 An integrating mechanism for people, processes and information within the
enterprise.
 The corporate "information network".
 No single definition dominates but basic agreement on the use of web based
delivery mechanisms within a private environment

Benefits
1. Workforce productivity
Intranets can help users to locate and view information faster and use applications
relevant to their roles and responsibilities. With the help of a web browser interface,
users can access data held in any database the organization wants to make
available, anytime and — subject to security provisions — from anywhere within the
company workstations, increasing employees’ ability to perform their jobs faster,
more accurately, and with confidence that they have the right information. It also
helps to improve the services provided to the users.

2. Time
Intranet allows organizations to distribute information to employees  as-needed by
the employees.Employees may link to relevant information at their convenience,
rather than being distracted indiscriminately by email.

3. Communication
Intranets can serve as powerful tools for communication within an organization,
vertically strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organization.
The type of information that can easily be conveyed is the purpose of the initiative
and what the initiative is aiming to achieve, who is driving the initiative, results
achieved to date, and who to speak to for more information. By providing this
information on the intranet, staff have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with the
strategic focus of the organization. Some examples of communication would be chat,
email, and/or blogs. A great real world example of where an intranet helped a
company communicate is when Nestle had a number of food processing plants in
Scandinavia. Their central support system had to deal with a number of queries
every day.When Nestle decided to invest in an intranet, they quickly realized the
savings. McGovern says the savings from the reduction in query calls was
substantially greater than the investment in the intranet.

4. Web publishing
Web publishing allows cumbersome corporate knowledge to be maintained and
easily accessed throughout the company using hypermedia and Web
technologies.Examples include: employee manuals, benefits documents, company
policies, business standards, news feeds, and even training, can be accessed using
common Internet standards (Acrobat files, Flash files, CGI applications). Because
each business unit can update the online copy of a document, the most recent
version is usually available to employees using the intranet.
5. Business operations and management
Intranets are also being used as a platform for developing and deploying applications
to support business operations and decisions across the internetworked enterprise.

6. Cost-effective
Users can view information and data via web-browser rather than maintaining
physical documents such as procedure manuals, internal phone list and requisition
forms. This can potentially save the business money on printing, duplicating
documents, and the environment as well as document maintenance overhead.

7. Enhance collaboration
Information is easily accessible by all authorised users, which enables teamwork.

8. Cross-platform capability
Standards-compliant web browsers are available for Windows, Mac, and UNIX.

9. Built for one audience


Many companies dictate computer specifications which, in turn, may allow Intranet
developers to write applications that only have to work on one browser (no cross-
browser compatibility issues). Being able to specifically address your “viewer” is a
great advantage. Since Intranets are user-specific (requiring database/network
authentication prior to access), you know exactly who you are interfacing with and
can personalize your Intranet based on role (job title, department) or individual
(“Congratulations Jane, on your 3rd year with our company!”).

10. Promote common corporate culture


Every user has the ability to view the same information within the Intranet.

11. Immediate updates


When dealing with the public in any capacity, laws, specifications, and parameters
can change. Intranets make it possible to provide your audience with “live” changes
so they are kept up-to-date, which can limit a company’s liability.

12. Supports a distributed computing architecture


The intranet can also be linked to a company’s management information system, for
example a time keeping system.
Applications of Intranet

Online Sales Force automation


Sales force automation is a technique of using software to automate the business
tasks of sales, including order processing, contact management, information sharing,
inventory monitoring and control, order tracking, customer management, sales
forecast analysis and employee performance evaluation. Sales Force Automation is
an important Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that helps you to
streamline the activities of your sales team.

 It is a tool that Originate to Improve Sales force Productivity.


 Which encourage the people document & communicate their field
activities.
 Support and cultivate customer relationships which improves the
customer satisfaction.

Purpose of SFA

Increase Revenue: Improve day to day operation and give competitive


advantages.
Reduce cost: Reduce the amount of time sales force spends on
administrative and other nonsales related task , hence reduce the cost of
sales.
Increases availability of customer information: SFA allows different
departments and individual in a organization to access specific information
about their customer.
Sales forecasting: AS SFA are equip with more sophisticated tools, it help to
do sales forecasting. SFA help managers to successfully predict sales and
make intelligent business decisions.
Improve tracking by management: SFA allows managers to better monitor
the activities of the sales force by reporting on the activities of the sales force.
SFA also allows managers to compare the sales force progress with all other
territories or teams.
Characterstics of Sales Force Automation
 Knowledge Management.
Sales Force Automation helps in

->documents

->publishing

->collaboration

->transactions

1. Documents on-line

Simplest use of intranets documents put on line and accessible through web
browsers .Simple example of this is the departments documentation pages for the
course .Information made available across the organisation with the majority of
intranet users reading the information made available. Range of search engines
used to find and index the information.

http://www.searchtools.com/ provides an overview of all the search tools available.

2. Document publication

Organisation members can make documents available .

Need to provide a shared repository for placing information on the internet .

Exploits a range of publication management tools .

Frontpage Dreamweaver Management of the publication process is critical with need


to ensure organisational policies are followed.
3. Collaboration support

Range of different facilities to support cooperation across and between groups within
the organisation .Two main approaches

Message and conferencing systems(also called groupware)


. Users cooperate by exchanging messages
. The messages are structured into conference
. Each conference consist of a set of threaded messages

See for example www.google.com group tag

Share document systems


 Users can access a shared document repository
 Place documents within a common repository via a web
browser
 Search for and find documents of interst
 Download range of documents
 Use mime encoding to represent a wide range of media
Example systems include
 Domino (www.domino.com)
 BSCW (bscw.gmd.de)
 Docushare (docushare.xerox.com)

4. Transaction Support
 More direct support for business one to one support
 Model of transaction based systems where each interaction represents a new
business transaction
 Supporting business transaction engine ensures all information collected in
correct order

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