By Beth Schultz
IntraNet, 7/21/97

What happens when IS and engineering - two technology-savvy departments - independently begin exploring the possibility of building an intranet?

Can you spell "civil war"?

IS's early Web efforts sprang from its responsibility for exploring new tools and how they might benefit the company. Frank Calabrese, IT manager, began working on an intranet project about a year ago as a result of his involvement in an early adopter program for Microsoft Corp.'s Office97.

The connection? He realized the tools in Office97 would greatly simplify the creation of Web content. Calabrese assembled an IS team to study the implications. He didn't want to approach intranets willy-nilly, but rather in a studied way.

Meanwhile, over in engineering, Dave Thomas, the chief engineer of research, was using the company's total quality objective as a jumping-off point for his dive into the Web world. Bose's engineering community was growing rapidly, making it increasingly difficult for everyone to stay in touch, let alone stay in synch. Thomas thought an internal Web might enhance the ability to collaborate across geographic regions and computing platforms.

Testing the Web concept

When the head of engineering systems brought Horman on board, he gave him three tasks: Build an online time-card system, automate the department's Engineering Change Notice form and create a Web-based job-posting application. "These tasks were picked to show the power of the intranet because he was interested in it for engineering.

The goal wasn't to take over the responsibility of managing the corporatewide intranet,'' Horman says. But in the end, that's what happened.

"When it came to figuring out which department was best prepared to support ongoing development - that is, the 'productionalization' of the intranet - engineering was standing ready. It was logical,'' Calabrese says.

Not that IS has taken a hands-off position. In fact, IS and engineering work hand in hand. Calabrese serves as a consultant for the intranet, helping with strategic planning and researching tools for the Web.

For example, Calabrese is evaluating push technologies as a way to potentially deliver time-sensitive corporate information to desktops.

IS also evaluates the needs of the particular user groups within Bose and decides whether the Web is a good fit for their projects.

"IS is naturally discussing client needs,'' Calabrese says. "When it looks like an intranet site may be the best means of fulfilling them, we're poised to work with Jason and his group to make sure those needs are met.''

From Horman's standpoint, that means developing databases, writing applications, building Web interfaces and putting security procedures in place. He does a lot of this work but also at times hires outsourcing firms.

Microsoft shop

When this application is online, employees will be able to simply search for a room that meets the conference requirements, then click for a booking. Administrators will get a secured super-user version of the application that lets them do additional things such as verify bookings and add rooms.

For this application, Horman is using Microsoft's Visual Studio and Visual InterDev tools to create the interactive pages sitting on the company's Internet Information Server (IIS) Web server.

Horman has stored the scheduling information in database program Microsoft Access, which links to IIS via Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).Prior to IIS's release, Web developers loaded content on a CERN Web server sitting on a Unix workstation in engineering.

Horman moved away from Unix toward Microsoft for a number of reasons: He finds it easier to develop applications for Windows, maintain security databases on IIS and share files on IIS.

The move to IIS also gives Horman the ability to develop "real" database Web applications based on Active Server pages and Access. Active Server is an environment that lets developers embed server-side scripts in HTML documents to create interactive Web pages.

"Being a small-scale intranet project, all of our database development had been based on text files," Horman says.

Horman spends a lot of his time building databases for the intranet. At times, he's working from scratch because the application, such as the conference room scheduler, is new. At other times, it's because he can't easily port the existing databases, primarily running on Unix systems, to the NT-based Web environment.

"We can't take applications and put them on the Web unless they're in Access,'' Horman says. "The Web is causing people to rethink the databases they're using and to come up with a better way to index information.''

To name just a few, Bose needs databases for the conference room scheduler, a job-posting system, an equipment-tracking application, a phone directory and a chemical index. These myriad databases are served right from Access using ODBC.

"Once we start to notice significant performance degradation, we plan to scale to Microsoft's SQL Server," Horman says.

Wrapped up in security

"Intranet security is a giant can of worms,'' he says. "I'll need to implement some sort of robust security package within the next few months because many of the Web applications we're developing will rely on some security mechanism to allow different levels of access,'' Horman says."What we want to avoid in implementing a new security system is the proliferation of namespace.''

Some Bose employees already have too many user names and passwords to remember, as they have to log on to Unix applications, NT applications, e-mail and various database systems.

"Ideally, we can use one of these existing naming conventions for our in-tranet security model,'' Horman says. "Even if we can't, we need to make sure that the intranet only has one namespace. This means if you log on to your intranet time card and then go to your department's project database, you don't have to type in another user name and password.''

Horman has been experimenting with Netscape Communications Corp.'s Enterprise and Directory servers, IIS and NT security and other wares. "We have been thinking about an all-NT solution.

This would mean we could create NT user names and passwords for everyone, regardless of whether the person is on a Windows machine, a Mac or Unix,'' he says.

Requests would be routed through IIS, which would authenticate the users through the NT domain. It sounds good on paper, but the scheme is somewhat problematic. "How do people in Unix administer their NT security groups?'' Horman asks.

Until Horman figures out the best answer for this and other questions, he's building custom security packages when applications call for them.

Netscape has a place, too

Because Bose licenses Navigator, Horman advises that departmental content providers use Navigator Gold for authoring.

Microsoft's Internet Assistants come in handy for the Windows users, Horman says. Advanced Web developers use other tools.

While Horman builds the Web and Calabrese evaluates Web-related tools, departmental workers are creating content. Representatives from nontechie, functional departments also sit on a Web team that Thomas chairs.

"Our objective is to increase the participation of all departments - we want at least one Web page from each. Then we want to push content generation to them,'' Thomas says.

"The Web team members are facilitators and authors," Thomas says "Ultimately, we'd like to be just facilitators and maybe consultants.''

Actually, Thomas adds, he would like to disband the team and see it become a formal corporate entity in the next budget year.

That might happen as higher profile, companywide applications hit the Web. Human resources, for example, plans to let employees conduct various transactions over the intranet, says Jodi Freeman, a communications specialist. "

We would like employees to be able to update their personal records and change benefits online,'' she says. "There's a lot of potential. We just want to get moving.''