Standard Content
The act of standardizing on content (the output) rather than the tools that
create the content is what makes the Intranet work. If you hear someone
agonizing over whether to standardize their company on a particular brand of
Intranet browser or server, you can be certain they have not yet attained a
fundatmental understanding of what is important, and different, about the
Intranet. The maintenance of vendor independent content standards is the one
sacred goal that all users must defend in the market if they don't want their
benefits to vanish, and standard content is enforced by standard browsers. Any
content that starts with "This page best viewed with (fill in the brand name
browser)," is a step toward destroying the fundamental fabric of both the
Intranet and the World-Wide Web. Standard content and vendor independent
browsers are synonymous, and just as video tape recorders, CD ROMs and a myriad
of other technologies could not develop without strict adherance to their
standards, so Intranets (and the WWW) cannot develop without standard content
and vendor independent browsers.
This standardization of content, along with the
transparency of location, provides a significantly different
option for supporting applications than the traditional MIS
approaches. Not only does all the functionality no longer
need to reside on a single general-purpose server, a case
can be made that the single server approach often is not as
desirable. A specialty server is less complex, since it
doesn't have to solve the general problem, is significantly
smaller, since it doesn't have to integrate additional
functionality, and is more reliable and easier to maintain,
because it is significantly more simple. By spreading
smaller servers around the Intranet, there also is more
opportunity to distribute the traffic on the network. What
is important is that the server delivers standard content,
not the brand of server hosting a specific function.
A number of companies are coming out with very inexpensive turnkey web
servers (hardware and software) that can be installed and operated by
non-technical personnel (see: Cisco , Cobalt Microservers, Compact Devices,
and Microtest). One can anticipate other specialty servers that support
web-enabled databases, specific functions and vertical web application logic
(see Encanto Networks ). This is part of the Intranet trend toward
modularization of applications into functions that simplify the creation,
implementation, maintenance and use of the function. We will see both the trend
to break larger applications into simplified functions and the trend toward
domain specialists managing more of their own information and process functions
to continue into other areas of the Intranet.
Before finishing this discussion of standard content, it is important to note
that standard content no longer refers to text and graphics only. Logic (methods
and processes) also are being standardized. The winning standard appears to be
logic conveyed in the Java language. However, there are other options for
providing users with logical operations in the standard content environment of
the Intranet. The logic can be processed on a specific server and the user
interfaces (forms and reports in database terminology) can be provided so they
meet the content standards. In fact, this is the most widely used method for
providing logic on Intranets today. This also is the way many application
vendors are "web-enabling" their existing applications.
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