Difference Between Intranet And Internet Information Technology Essay

Successful management of technologies has been a very important criterion to support new, emerging management philosophies. The Focus is on the openness and information sharing, combined with simpler and faster data access to realise that collaborative effort will yield improved productivity.

The paper has been written to help and understand the evolution and development of Intranets and Internet Technologies considering organisational change, the fusion of innovation and various approaches in implementation strategies. The paper is also supported by reviewing empirical studies on deploying Intranet and sharing information through Internet in mid 90’s and how it became as the focal point for the Users.

My research on Internet and Intranet has given me a very good insight on the current technology and ways and means to enhance the communication and information sharing methodology .The amount of knowledge gained during the process will be very help full from an academic perspective.

2.Introduction:

Information and Knowledge are the Key resources in the current Technology Era. In the new age of Informationalism, the Productivity lies in technology and knowledge generation, processing the information and communication channel.

Organizations are increasingly leveraging the knowledge resources by consolidating and sharing them through Intranet (within the organization) and Internet. Such repositories and information sharing have become an integral part of corporate world.

Intranets are chosen in part, because they pose a significant collective action challenge and are considered as the complex information tools that have grown in popularity in all type of organization. Internet Computer Technology has had and continues to have major global impact on our lives both directly and/or indirectly. These technologies have in all ways changed the way in which we communicate, live and do business. In the past 33 years, the Internet itself has become in obscure part of our everyday lives and it has been serving as an avenue for personal communication across worldwide. While many of us have seen the “.com” boom and the fall as a very venerable market, it can be very well stated that, not all has not been lost, as this industry has been inventing and reinventing itself ever since the Internet and the World Wide Web hit. At first, software makers and developers had focused on web browsers and the other programs which had aimed at making the web a consumer medium. But as we know, lately, with Internet commerce has been getting off to a slow start, software makers are always in the run to chase a more Immediate and close opportunity in helping corporate customers build Intranets.

We can easily state now that gone are those days of filling out paper time cards or having to drive to your human resources office many times a day to update your personnel record. Organizations, no longer are paying high travel and lodging costs for corporate meetings when they can now have them at their desktop.

On the other side of the stream, Intranets have been driving a new way of doing internal organization / company business, increasing, as well as improving the corporate communication and saving the countless hours and dollars in the process by setting up internal Intranets. To fully understand the evolving renaissance in communication, there are a few key issues that must be addressed and have to be clearly understood. An historical view on corporate Communications and as well as one of Intranets themselves will give us more in-depth view of the advantages. Setting up the Intranet and most importantly, design consideration will be reviewed as well as the advanced technologies companies are using for

deployment.

The purpose of this experimental study was to test the existing theory that, relates the independent variable for the study on Intranet and Internet at public domain with the independent variables, defined generally as general definitions for the dependent variable(s) and will be defined generally the general definition and the intervening variables(S) identified will be statistically controlled in the study.

2.1 Research Aim

The aim of this article is to understand the Underlying technologies and problems involved in Internet and Intranet. Bandwidth opmization is considered as one of the very Serious issues in the present Corporate world. Even though we have a Gigabyte Network in the Intranet, but sometimes the Corporate Network goes down due to either too much traffic, being pumped in or Out. The aim is also to find the options of optimizing and tools required for the same in the Enterprise Network.

Objectives

To understand Internet & Intranet connectivity and structure (hardware, browsers & networking including LAN & WAN & Current ways of connecting to the internet)

To know about the volume of usage between Internet & Intranet (approx)

To know the preference of Internet & Intranet

To know the factors that attract the users

To know the users attitude towards the Internet & Intranet

To determine the user benefits

To know the Social & Cultural impact of Internet & Intranet

Understand the trends in the internet & intranet technologies

2.2 Hypothesis

The Internet and the Intranet have had a very large Impact on the business, organizations, country and individuals. The Internet first started as a tool for research for universities had become the information freeway. The research on sending information from one computer to another began in 1960’s. Intranet and Intranet were chosen in parts, because they pose a significant collective action challenge. Intranets are a very complex information tools that have been growing in popularity in all types of organizations. Although information contributions for some portions of an intranet can be provided centrally (e.g., online phone directory), much of the information needed for a successful intranet requires that many individual users contribute their own discretionary information (e.g., lessons learned.).

Internet and Intranets have created problems for some companies and have helped some other companies. The Traffic over the Internet is ever increasing. There needs to be a control on the Data that gets in or out of the Internet.

2.3 Problems with existing system

In the current system, both in the Internet and the Intranet world, the amount of the data that is traversing on daily basis is very high. There is absolute no control on the data flow in and out of the system. Even though the Internet was initially discovered for information transfer and sharing on a private basis, it is no more the same. The System is being loaded with tons and tons of data. No one has control over the amount of the traffic flow. Especially in the corporate world, there needs to be a restriction put in place and this article discusses partially on the tools and the products that can be used to restrict the flow of traffic in and around Internet and Intranet.

Tools

There are Products and tools in the market which provides an option to optimize the Traffic from and to the internet. The Same tools can also used to configure the traffic with the Intranet.

The Barracuda link Balancer provides an option to restrict traffic in and out of the Local Area Network. The Radware tools can also be used to control the traffic from and to the network.

These tools are most extensively used in the networking world to optimize the Traffic flow in and out of the corporate world.

2.4 Proposed System

There are detailed network related as well as user access associated concerns that have surfaced over a historical of time. These include interconnectivity, bandwidth, access to services (and servers), traffic routing/isolation between segments and services performance. Given that communities outside require access to resources hosted within the Institute, service availability, accessibility and user performance are of concern

Route Traffic within the Intranet -Optimize network speed by routing the network traffic

Monitor usage – monitor the usage of network resources such as, servers, switches, HUBS, modems, etc.

Optimizing the Internet Usage – by using load balancing between multiple servers, ISPs, etc.

Bandwidth Usage – control /restrict/ prioritize usage of available bandwidth

3. literature review

Scope of the Study

Internet & Intranet has become primary source for any information or information exchange in this technology era. Internet & Intranet is being used by everyone globally (children’s, students, parents, professionals, teachers, etc.,) and has become an important mean/source of doing their day to day activities/work.

Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide.

In contrast to internet the term intranet refers only to the organization’s internal website, which is an extensive part of the organization’s information technology infrastructure. In other words, an intranet is a private analog of the Internet, or as a private extension of the Internet limited to an organization.

Internet & Intranet are built on the same concepts and technologies, such as client-server computing and the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). With this, Internet & Intranet both has enabled and accelerated new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, E-mail, internet forums, social networking (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.,) online shopping, enhanced collaboration etc.

4. Theoretical Framework Design a conceptual framework for the proposed research

The Overall design and framework of the proposed research will focus to help and understand the evolution and development of Intranets and Internet Technologies considering organizational change, the fusion of innovation and various approaches in implementation strategies. It also speak on the tools that can be implemented to restrict the flow of traffic in and out of the network

4.1 Internet

Internet, commissioned in 1969 by US Defence, coined as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was initially designed for military official communication. The decentralised nature of military network needed a secure communication channel, which would continue working even if part of is destroyed or under attack.

Technically speaking, Internet can be defined as a decentralised computer network spread across worldwide that allows data exchange among computer networks using the Transmission control Protocol called Packet Switching and standardised protocols that enable the exchange. The Packet switching technology breaks down the Messages in the form of email, audio, video, or other file formats into small packets of digital information with a unique address and reassembly instructions. This information in the digital format is sent to the destination using a public secured channel. The unprecedented reach, speed and interactivity of internet have made it a social reliable mode of communication network in many countries and communities for business and personal interactions. It was in early 1990’s, when internet first became available for commercial use in public. Internet is the easiest to define since we are accessing it on daily basis.The internet is a series of computers networked together to serve up information to the public.

These sites are not accessible from the internet. The End User is nearly any one and every one -ranges from kids, beginners to grownups. Internet is larger when compared to Intranets and extranets. The type of information share and served is enormous .The audience in an intranet is typically an organization’s employees. Over the past years, internet growth has been tremendous. The current internet usage stats is as follows

Internet technologies have developed and have enabled us to communicate large amounts of information virtually and literally from anywhere from the globe virtually almost instantaneously. Intranets has enabled organizations to alleviate many typical and problems associated with information access and security associated , authoring, processing and delivery of information . An Intranet employs the same communications and computer technologies as the Internet except within the privacy and security of your organization. An Intranet would offers near effortless input and retrieval of the corporate information, E-mail, webmail integration, and act as a gateway to the Internet.

4.2. Intranet

Intranets are private internal networks that serve information to employees or other closely related individuals of the organization. Looking at this technology from the top level, some of the most common functions that ninety percentage of the most of the companies perform for intra-company communications could be easily made efficient using the Intranet technology and can be achieved.

In some cases, organizations may tend to offer intranet access to close business partners, vendors or contractors. An Intranet is a Network which is based on the Internet TCP/IP Open Standards. An Intranet is set up within an Organization and is designed to be only accessible by the Organization’s members and employees or another out site organization only with prior approvals and authorization. The content which is served is meant to allow employees to collaborate and communicate and organize information that is proprietary to the business. An intranet’s Web site looks almost similar to a website looks and act just like other Web sites, but has a firewall surrounding it to fend off unauthorized users. Intranets, within an organization are used to share information internally. Secure intranets are much less expensive to build and manage than private, proprietary-standard networks. A summation of such simplicity does not completely cover all the possibilities involved with real-time business collaboration available. When an organization thinks of building an Intranet, the most common and a very frequent mistake made is to overlook the wealth of features available to optimizing business strategies all the while keeping within budget. Intranets are localized LAN based communication system to enhance inter-company or Intra -organizational communications using the advanced and evolved Internet technology..

Organizations and companies have definitely improved on data acquirement with the introduction of the electronically assisted workforce, but with the same stroke have created another problem of the location and retrieval of data. This hindrance could be easily made non-existent with using a properly suited Intranet.

Using Sales Force Automation, a salesperson can update corporate prices on demand

Association between various departments and individuals can be achieved in real-time

Activity of company senate can be documented for improving efficiency of the system

Press releases can be connected and linked for real-time feedback

Annual Sales reports may be generated on demand any time and anywhere

Corporate handbooks and policies may be adjusted and updated with limited distributive effort

The company can publish managerial contact information for those that require immediate access

Online education and policy review can be updated to suit the situation as your organization grows

Company briefings can be distributed for informational purposes

Employee time logs may be filled out either on location or remotely

4.3 .Intranet Design Versus Internet Design

While many of the companies and corporate across the globe have made great pace in their Intranet development, design and implementation methodology, there seems to be an always a consistency, when it comes to the future of design and advanced technology that need to be implemented and what to consider outside the scope that was not in which was previously covered. The whole idea and the concepts include creating user profiles and analyze user tasks and the relevant activities with respect to the organization behaviour, consider the accessibility and authorization issues and allow users to input/update as much data as possible on the site. One of the great advantages and benefits of designing a website or an application for internal users versus external users is that you can really find out who your users are, and what is their requirement, even if you are working at a very large organization. Using this benefit to your advantage, we can always find out about the people who will be using the Intranet and internet for exclusive activity, including their experience levels, their job function and tasks, what are the kind of tools they use, and how is that the Intranet might streamline their work and easy their day to day tasks. Visit them and watch them work with the set of activities that needs to be monitored. Many companies have been either doing or will employ people who use assistive technology to analyse the data. Almost every Intranet submission that has been received suffered from accessibility issues for users with low vision, no vision, or motor skill challenges and many other challenges. The trends toward having many graphics, tiny text, limited space between links and text and other issues, and small click targets are a bit scary, as these are chief accessibility offenders. (On the positive side of the design, while many submissions do overuse graphics and other multimedia plug-in, most of the selected winners use graphics sparingly and ensure that the accurate data reaches the end user, and when they do use them, they are well placed for users with low vision. The most well received Intranets are those that have fresh information that people need and want and the information they have been seeking. One way to keep information updated and interesting is to make it easy for employees to add and edit information, and this will help the overall site to evolve over a period of time. Conduct many simple usability evaluations on design iterations and watch people work. We noticed a surprising lack of consistent usability testing and field study in the design submissions. Even busy development teams with tight deadlines should take the time to watch people use their design to complete basic tasks (Goodwin, 2001).

The following table summarize much of the design techniques discussed as it compares Internet to Intranet sites.

Component

Intranet Sites

Internet Website

Audience

Users are employees–a finite and known group

Users are customers–a large, diverse, regularly return to the site

Goals

Intranets are about improving employee productivity, saving employee time, and managing knowledge within the company.

Most web sites are about making sales, staking out a claim, getting noticed, informing someone, and /or driving traffic.

Structure

Intranet users (like web users) prefer breadth over depth, but have a greater tolerance for more “jumping off” points from the site’s home page.

Web users prefer breadth over depth,

especially on information resource

sites.

Graphics

Intranets should have stripped-down

graphics, So that loading time and users’

processing time are maximized.

Graphics may add to the web experience and keep the site from being “boring”, but they still need to impart useful, in addition to decorative, information.

Labeling

Intranet labels can be specialized and focused because of a known audience and context. Acronyms for top-level labels can work if they are widely acknowledged throughout the company.

Labels need to be general, but still

meaningful so a much wider user

base can understand them.

Content

Intranets need brief text that is explanatory. Users want a site that cuts to the chase and delivers efficiency. Users have no tolerance

for hype about their own company.

Concise text is important to users, and they need explanatory information that is worked into a site so they have a context for better decision-making about clicks.

Size

Intranets are inherently large-scale. They tend to be 10 to 100 times bigger than

the same company’s external web site. There is usually an emphasis on stockpiling useful and “evergreen” content.

Web sites can be large-scale, but not

as much content is usually archived.

There is an emphasis on serving up

new content that constantly changes.

4.4 Internet and related technologies:

The foremost contribution of internet has always been the ease of communication. And the fact is, internet has excelled beyond the expectations, but still the innovations on. It has been serving as immense collection of Knowledge, which can be whenever and where ever. Education is embracing these new technologies as they bring with them fresh opportunities for both teachers and learners. Now we can communicate in a fraction of second with a person who is sitting in the other part of the world. Today for better communication, we can avail the facilities of e-mail and chat, the fastest means to answer your queries. There are plenty messenger services in offering. With help of such services, it has become very easy to establish communication and acquire knowledge from any part of the world as effective as thou sitting a class room. The emerging technologies currently are being used on a daily basis among the students. Sometimes, it is really tough to think a life without internet and the technologies around it.

The Following the services, which have become an integral part of a student

Instant messaging: (like msn) often using simple web cam

E-mail : free mail services like yahoo and Google

Web Blogs: a journal that allows people to update and maintain data on web.

Social networking sites: (like orkut, facebook)

Chat Rooms: (such as yahoo, hotmail)

Video Conferencing and Video Broadcasting

While it is very important to understand that many of the technological techniques used in developing an Intranet are the same as those of Internets with minor differences, it is very important to understand and understand the distinct and unique design differences between the two. When it comes to the overall Intranet design, designs and techniques teams must understand that they are not working with same set of design conclusions or even face the same tradeoffs as they have to do when working on an external web site that was yarning customers. Instead, increasing the work productivity (not only the e-commerce sales) drives Intranet design decisions to an better extent. Through knowledge and insight about the intended audience from research and further usability testing, designers able to deliver a highly focused tool, customized for specific tasks, which saves users time and extra steps in their daily work.

According to the Neilson 2001 design annual, two important trends in the Intranet case studies stood out. Good Intranet projects focused on simplification, and on creating unified navigation and user-interface design across multiple business units or departments. To highlight the most important fields, designers cut forms that were a hassle in previous Intranet versions. They simplified search and featured it prominently. They reduced or moved features that didn’t apply to most users to secondary screens. They also toned down graphics and aimed for clean design in the general look and feel

5. Methodologies

In this paper of numerous methodologies have been used

Collection of Data

The relevant information required for the study will be drawn from primary and secondary sources.

Primary Sources

Primary Data are collected through the direct interviews with the customer by

structured questionnaires. A questionnaire will be designed for this purpose.

Secondary Sources

The collection of secondary data is from the company catalogues, books, magazines

and journals internet and through other published sources

The methodology used for this research was quantitative technique (questionnaires) with an exploratory research approach. A questionnaire was developed to address the research objectives.

Quantitative methods of research in the form of questionnaires were used as a tool for collecting data for this research with a highly professional approach.

The questionnaire has Dichotomous Questions with two possible responses, open ended question to express respondent’s feelings and Multiple-choice questions where respondents to pick the best answer from among all the possible given options.

A demographical data section was kept in end to minimize the hesitation for participation of respondents and error due to statement of some personal information.

Self-administered questionnaire were provided to the respondents as an instrument for gathering data. Genuine efforts were made to come up with most appropriate questionnaire keeping various components and determinants into consideration. While execution of this survey at most care has been taken in regards to minimization possible known errors to achieve highest possible accuracy standard.

Statistical tools such as tabulation, drawing of percentages, construction of charts , for analysis from the raw data in widely used.

Although much importance is given to make study accurate and successful, but some limitation cannot be excluded. A List of Questionnaires was put forth to the group of students to analyze the competency level in terms of

Level of Competency

Awareness of Latest Technology

Level of Competency

The Study showed the level of competency among the student. The results were classified at different levels of competencies and are as follows

Level of Knowledge

Competency Level

No of Students

Expert

None

Strong

Intermediate

Active User

Passive User

None

Awareness of Latest Technology

The Graph represents the study results on the overall competency of the students and the individual ranking based on the following questionnaires

Questionnaires

Student Response

S1

S2

S3

S4

S5

S6

S7

S8

S9

S10

1 Search Engines – Sites Awareness

3

2

3

2

4

2

4

2

2.8

2 How much information gained from Chat Rooms and Voice chat?

2

3

1

3

2

3

2

3

2.4

3 Information from social networking websites ?

2

3

1

2

4

2

3

1

2

2.2

4 Use of Emails & Blogs?

3

2

4

2

3

2

3

2

2.5

5 Use of research books?

3

2

3

2

2.5

6 Using video broadcasting?

4

3

1

3

2

3

2

2.4

7 Content Handling

3

2

5

3

2

3

4

2

3

4

3.1 Total Score / Number of Ques

2.8

2.5

2.4

2.5

2.7

2.9

2.2

2.5 6. Conceptual Framework

Software and hardware requirement as well as a sound network infrastructure are a key element in the overall success of any Intranet venture and its success also closely depends on the technique and the technology involved in design and implementation. Companies and organizations using Intranet must install TCP/IP client/server and networks and related hardware and software, such as web browsers( Intranet explorer, chrome , firefox and Mozilla) and server suites, HTML web publishing software like Adobe and other tools which are available in the market, and network management and security programs.

The components of the information technology architecture of a typical Intranet considering O’Brian, 1999, While the web browsers and server software, search engines which have become the most important part of our daily lift , web software tools, and network management software like the monitoring tools are key components of an open Intranet, it is the software components that give the Intranet users the same kind of easy point-and-click navigation of hyper linked multimedia web sites that they enjoy on the internet. Some types of Intranet server software needed to power a full performance corporate Intranet include an

Enterprise Server

Mail Server

News Server

Catalog Server

Directory Server

Certificate Server

Proxy Server

Clients and Servers

In general, we all know that all of the machines on the company Intranet can be categorized as two types:

Servers and clients.

Those machines that provide services (like web servers or FTP servers) to

other machines are so called as servers. And the machines that are used to connect to those services are so called as clients. When you connect to MycompanyIntranet.com to read a page, the IT department in your company is providing a machine or a cluster of very large machines depending on the size of the site, for use on the Intranet, to service your request. This is considered the Intranet server.

7. Gantt chart defining the time lines for each of the activity

8. Design

Since it is impossible to study the whole universe sampling is done in this study. Simple

random sampling, a non-probability sampling method was used to select respondents to

conduct the study

9. Conclusion

Even though we have been using internet and Intranet for information sharing aross the globe, there needs to be a limit or a restriction on the flow of traffic in and out of the system. With out this it would very tough to accommodate the growth of the information in future and the situation could be uncontrollable. Tools like the Barracuda and the Radware tools can be used extensively in the Corporate world to restrict the flow of traffic. The corporate Intranets have evolved and have advanced in the past 10 years and we can easily realize that the renaissance have embraced a tangible gain as its counterpart, the Internet has.

Organizations across the globe have not only realised the monitory benefit but are also paying more attention the intangible values associated with it, such as learning and education, employee productivity, knowledge and information sharing and other collaborations with the organization.

When compared with Intranet designs, the evolutionary track is much slower than Internet design. The benefits and the technology advancement is driving the industry to improve every day , weather it is an online collaboration tool set or building a dynamic set of components for the customer data and customer support , Intranets are evolving and advancing to prove the worth. The study conducted across industry had provided an information that the cost of implementing an Intranet varies depending on the technology involved and the party associated but it is very much evident that the Intranet deployments definitely has better and higher Return on Investment and shorter payback period when compared to the client- server architecture. Form an Internet and software perspective, the web browser is becoming the single window to access all the corporate informational items and data and its incorporation into the current network infrastructure allows for inexpensive integration.

Organizations and Corporations need to get to know their employees better and have to leverage that knowledge to provide a better and more informative Intranet experience. The organizations should constantly and consistently build on what the information they have and evolve the design for a more productive future. Most importantly, they need to understand that while an Intranet can be a valuable asset in promoting different applications of corporate communications, it is the communicators themselves that need to be addressed. Ensure that the suppliers of corporate content have the tools necessary to promote this information, and in response, the customers of such information will consistently return.

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