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By Mark Gibbs

Keep it simple. If there was a religion for intranet managers, this would be one of its commandments.

The trouble is, the difficulty of configuring applications on hundreds or thousands of desktops makes breaking the commandment easy - and sinning rampant. No wonder corporate-level configuration management has become IT's Holy Grail.

Even browsers, once so simple, have become complex: Netscape Communications Corp.'s Communicator requires 30M bytes of disk space and Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer calls for a whopping 90M bytes.

This complexity becomes a serious problem when you need to change browser configurations for the many users on an intranet. Necessary changes may be as simple as adding a new set of mandatory bookmarks or setting a new default home page, or they may be as technical and crucial to operations as designating which proxy server the browser should access.

You can address this browser management challenge with corporate configuration kits from Microsoft and Netscape. The kits - Netscape's Mission Control and Microsoft's Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) - give intranet managers control over most features in the Communicator and Internet Explorer browsers. They provide documentation and guidelines for planning configuration and rollout, as well as software that performs the actual configuration and distribution.

Mission Control is available for Netscape's Communicator 4.0, which runs on all versions of Windows, the Macintosh and several Unix flavors. It costs $1,995 or comes bundled with the SuiteSpot server suite. IEAK 4.01 is available at no cost for Internet Explorer 4.0, which runs on Windows 95 and NT 4.0.

Mission Control

The Mission Control tool suite uses a combination of HTML, Java and JavaScript. The Configuration Editor lets you set a range of user preferences, including a default start-up page, default news and mail servers, push channel settings and bookmark lists. The configuration files contain JavaScript scripts that the browser executes to modify the browser configuration.

Through Mission Control, you can program browsers to run periodic checks on a specific URL for configuration changes or updates to the browser software.

Mission Control also allows you to specify what product component sets to install: Communicator, Communicator Pro or the stand-alone Navigator browser. However, you can't specify particular components within those packages.

Mission Control's Java Archive Packager allows the inclusion of third-party applications in the installation package. The Page Signer, based on Netscape's Object Signing Model, packages and digitally signs Java applets, JavaScripts, plug-ins and other components to ensure secure, authenticated distribution.

IEAK

With IEAK, you use a wizard to set defaults for browser options such as mail and news servers and push channels. And, like Mission Control, IEAK periodically can read its options from a server.

Also, like Mission Control, IEAK allows you to configure custom installation packages. But unlike the Netscape kit, it provides control over which browser components get installed.

Microsoft's Authenticode system provides authentication. Authenticode uses digital certificates to establish a software publisher's identity and to verify that no one has tampered with the software. You can preinstall certificates, so users don't have to make decisions about downloading code on a case-by-case basis.

Also valuable is the ability to use IEAK for predefining Internet Explorer's security zone model. This allows for specific definitions of which servers are to be trusted and at what level.

Keeping the commandment

Both products are young and, as such, have a few rough edges - hardly surprising since Microsoft and Netscape are trying to keep pace with exploding feature sets. IT groups also are new to large-scale browser deployments, so the vendors face the challenge of trying to guess what features and facilities enterprises want.

Nonetheless, if you're running an enterprisewide intranet, you can't afford to be without these products - that is, if you want to keep things simple.

And you wouldn't want to break a commandment, would you?