25. Intranet

An Intranet Wiki is a collaborative platform for an organization to manage information about related topics for use by the members of that organization. A private network based on the TCP/IP protocol suite and designed to provide access to information resources within a company, university, or other organization. Designed to look much like a site on a private World Wide Web (WWW) and based on the same protocols, an intranet supports familiar client/server software such as browsers and e-mail. Intranets can be used for communications to and between employees to advise them of company policies, job postings, company events, product literature, press releases, and so on. On a password-protected basis, privileged users can access sensitive internal company information, including customer billing records and network usage data.

Intranets support the transmission of images, video clips, and sound clips, as well as textual information. Hypertext links can be included to hot link to other sites and databases. An intranet can be confined to a campus environment or can extend across the wide area to link together multiple, geographically dispersed locations. Access from an intranet to the wider public Internet is possible through a security firewall. Extranets are intranets opened to select groups of users outside the company. An Intranet Wiki is viewed very differently by (a) Intranet content managers and (b) Intranet end-users.

Intranet content managers: These groups generally are concerned with accurate, consistent information about a specific sector. They are, more often than not, the users who determine the way an employee sees his organization. For them an intranet should portray the corporate branding, contain positive, inspiring mission statements, organizational visions and other corporate propaganda. Content managers are often also moderators that have excellent content management and communication skills and background, but may be found lacking technical content knowledge on certain specialized topics.

Intranet end-users: End-users rely on intranets for business information to perform their job. For them an intranet should be accurate, stripped of nice-to-have's, and contain up to date information. This group will more often than not feed content managers with relevant information at the fast pace their fellow users require it. End-users are the technical source and target of the information, but they on the other hand, may not always have the content management and communication skills to match that of the content manager colleagues.