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to access, more up to date and by providing a centralised resource: instead of each staff member keeping their own out-of-date client list in Excel, an Intranet could allow all the members of staff to be able to access it and keep it up to date - and with comprehensive record-tracking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: eCommerce Sales Reporting

Pulling in information from a remote Microsoft SQL database Server (MS-SQL) and a remote PostgreSQL database server, this application allowed for online sales figures to be viewed for the two eCommerce systems in operation (previously there was no sales reporting information available) and for the information to be compared between the systems.

Written in PHP, this system utilised the Yahoo! YUI Javascript library to enable online graphs to be displayed and interacted with - along with allowing output in web page (HTML) and CSV (Comma Seperate Value) file formats for importing into Microsoft Excel. The system, due to the confidential nature of the data, had a strict user authentication system which used Active Directory network logons and PostgreSQL's user management faciltiies.