Each intranet project is unique to a particular organisation and some do not even rely totally on Web technology. Edge Hill University College, based in Lancashire, is a good example of this situation. The college started a pilot for its intranet around one year ago with what resources the IT department had to spare. Now equipped with government funding, Edge Hill can start looking at running the network on a larger scale. Yet not all the software elements deployed fit the classic description of an intranet. The intranet is not just the Web
John Townsend, head of computer services at Edge Hill, explains that up to 150 people have been using the intranet up till now. So far this covers one academic department - Management and Social Sciences - out of more than 20. With funding agreed for its further development, Townsend sees the opportunity to expand this user base to include all 1,000 staff at the higher education establishment over time. And while the browser looks set to become a universal interface for Edge Hill, not all the technology deployed will come from the Web side of things.
All staff here will have intranet access, with cleaners and porters using shared PCs. Windows 95 and Office 97 are widely used with 32-bit viewers to pull off documents in original formats. This means top level pages are linked directly to Word documents. In many ways the popular definition of an intranet is an arbitrary one," Townsend says.
luxury hotels in SienaEdge Hill has an external Web presence, hosted by a Unix server, with Windows NT used internally for the intranet along with "bits of BackOffice", according to Townsend. A firewall sits behind the Web site on the public Internet. Firewalls have also been set up within the intranet, to regulate staff access to certain information based on authorisation. Edge Hill uses the (free) Apache Web server software, and both the Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers. The groupware also supports Novell groupware.
Low budget high function
A higher education establishment is a special case as it can often get core software free. As a result, Edge Hill is currently spending only between 1-5 per cent of its IT budget on the intranet, although the actual spend in the future will rise now the college has government cash for development of its online plans. This funded set of projects will run for an 18 month period, according to Townsend.
Originally the college's intranet was defined as a way of delivering information and archives to senior managerial and teaching staff on a faster basis. A strategic plan was agreed which would lead to an electronic information base within three years. One sidebar to this overall development is the opportunity to free people up from repetitive tasks and thus create a more interesting working environment.
Building up workflow
A good example of where Edge Hill staff can experience relief from complex and repetitive work relates to the materials generated by management meetings. The college has a complicated structure of committees. Rendering the inevitably large amount of minutes and documents in electronic form will mean less paper and easier distribution to relevant parties. Edge Hill is starting to add document management features to the intranet to facilitate this process. Workflow principles will be introduced, based on the browser interface. The trials also involve getting data out of various systems and forwarded to senior management.
Apart from minutes from management meetings, the content on the Edge Hill intranet covers several categories. The intention is to publish all policy documentation on the network. A coherent, organisation-wide quality plan has recently been put onto the intranet. All new documents are going onto the intranet, but Townsend admits the college is in catch up mode regarding the historical data which needs to appear on the network. The IT department also puts up information about the college's systems, such as outlining database activity levels and downtime.
Bring on the students
alberghi a L'AiaStudents at Edge Hill have only limited access to the intranet at present. This amounts to policies and procedural information generated by the personnel department. Now that Edge Hill has extra cash to spend on the intranet, however, it plans to develop a substrate of the main network dedicated to providing "an intranet for Teaching and Learning".
While the development of a formal Extranet has not been discounted at Edge Hill, Townsend explains that the college is effectively involved in one already. Like many higher education institutions, Edge Hill places a significant number of trainee teachers with over 30 local schools. These schools get cheap Internet access via the Edge Hill network and the college finds it can better manage the student teacher placement process.
In general terms, colleges like Edge Hill do not experience some of the network infrastructure issues faced by organisations in the purely commercial sectors. For instance, Edge Hill has an 8M bit/sec connection to the academic network. Each PC on the college's Ethernet network has access to this connection. Items like cabling, software and hardware do not represent significant additional costs to Edge Hill.
Mailand hotelsChanging the culture
hoteles LilleThe biggest challenges Townsend sees regarding the intranet concern cultural issues, rather than technical ones. He believes the real focus of developing the project is managing the change and drawing people along with the intranet concept as it progresses.
Sweden Hotels"The main benefits from an intranet involve new ways of working. This means change and some managers go along with this, while others don't. This is not a training issue - it's all about raising awareness," says Townsend.
Big savings in terms of time can accrue from centralising all information on the intranet, Townsend reckons, but the trick is persuading people that this pool of data is available locally on the PC. In the course of work, some managers at Edge Hill still migrate to where the document is being physically printed, not quite grasping the way information is distributed across the whole intranet.
Staff at Edge Hill look more than capable of altering working practices with regard to the intranet. There appears to be a strong technical knowledge base at the college, with many people capable of creating HTML documents. All the desktop users have been attached to networks of one kind or another for some time. And it is only a question of time before the intranet is seen as a valuable resource. " /font>
