Hardly anyone had heard the term 'intranet' less than two years ago, yet today 90% of Fortune 1000 companies have, or are planning, a corporate intranet.      Companies have found intranets to be indispensable for information dissemination, information retrieval, Co-operation and conferencing. A typical corporate intranet may contain company newsletters, job postings, organization charts, policies, benefits information, employee and phone listings, discussion forums/bulletin boards, presentation materials, software repositories, and much more.      One of the most popular uses of intranets today is to enable access to existing databases. Intranets can, for example, let regional sales managers locate and analyze sales data for a particular region, give employees the ability to enter time sheets into an integrated payroll database, or trigger automatic mailings to be sent to a prescribed list of shareholders.      At P-K4, we’ve developed a number of intranet solutions. These have ranged from dedicated paging systems to warn system administrators of server overloads, to corporate communication sites integrating varying computer platforms and database systems. At our company, we're using a number of intranet applications. One is a scheduler that allows us to keep track of upcoming meetings and events. We can schedule who will be involved in a particular event, and those people will be reminded of the event (via e-mail or pager) beforehand. And because it is also accessible via the Internet, we have access to calendar and schedule information 24 hours-a-day, anywhere in the world.      Another application we developed is a system we use to keep track of customer support issues. When an problem arises, information about the problem — description, contact information, who is responsible for solving it — is entered into the system. Until the problem is resolved, those responsible for solving it are reminded (again, via e-mail) that the issue is still open until someone enters the system and closes it. This not only allows us to make sure that customer support problems do not go unresolved, but by entering information on how they were solved, we make it easier to solve similar issues that may arise in the future.      An electronic storefront is another example of a kind of “extranet”. It may allow customers to view product information and place orders, all via their Web browser. We developed one of Hungary’s first electronic storefronts for a client who uses it to sell computer peripherals.      The possible uses for intranets (and, now, even “extranets”) are limited only by the user's imagination. We would like to fire your imagination. Bring your network problems and challenges into us, and let us suggest solutions that you might never have considered.
	P-K4 1051 Budapest, Sas utca 9. Hungary Phone: (36-1) 266-6090 Fax: (36-1) 266-6131 Part of iSYS Hungary © 1997 iSYS Hungary Kft. All rights reserved e-mail: webmaster@p-k4.com