What is an intranet?

An intranet site is a web site (or collection of websites) designed to be accessed on an "internal network" (or 'LAN' - Local Area Network) instead of over the general internet. Intranets are ideal for storing client/customer information, product information, telephone directories or anything to help your staff be fully productive and to make it easier for them to achieve their goals.

How can an intranet help me?

An intranet, by keeping all your company information in a centralised location, can help improve staff productivity by making the information easier to access, more up to date and by providing a centralised resource: instead of each staff member keeping their own out-of-date client list in Excel, an Intranet could allow all the members of staff to be able to access it and keep it up to date - and with comprehensive record-tracking built in, you'll know who called who at what time and what about!

Intranets can assist in other ways - by interacting with other existing (or planned) systems such as e-Commerce solutions, internal hardware, email servers, web servers and business systems - intranets can help provide you with "information at your finger tips" and provide you with quick and easy to understand information in textual or graphical format: or it could just help produce your monthly invoices!

How Beebware can enhance your intranet

We have experience of building entire Intranet solutions from scratch using Perl and PHP (on MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS-SQL and MS Access databases) on Microsoft Windows and Linux environments - along with building additional functionality on already existing intranets. We have also enhanced Intranets by interacting with Microsoft Active Directory, Sun Solaris systems, custom hardware, e-Commerce, remote third party parcel shipping companies and financial reports - helping make the company's Intranet the "one stop resource" for their staff!

As well as bespoke solutions, we also have experience working with Wiki's and other major content management systems such as Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, php-Nuke/Post-Nuke and Xoops - along with bulletin board software such as phpBB and SMF.

Featured Project: Adlive PDF Preflighting System

Developed in 2002, this project utilised a third party Internet Explorer ActiveX component to allow customers of a printing company to "pre-flight" their files ready for printing on their own computers. The ActiveX component would upload an XML summary of the file to the Perl driven website which would check the details against records stored in an Microsoft Access database.

Once the file had been "passed", the user would then be able to upload it to an FTP server which was "watched" by Adlive - once the file had been uploaded, the user would be notified and the file would be placed within their "basket".

After the user had built their "basket", they could then select which of the 6 magazine printing companies the files should be sent to and the files would then be sent via FTP.