PacifiCare's primary Planet-builders say the intranet was swept into the company by a receptive tide.

The first ripples were the simple Web pages that Cherie Ciotti-Roco, intranet project leader, and others on the application development team crafted in their spare time. Ciotti-Roco, with Gail Navarette, an intranet project developer, and graphics consultant Maria Angeloni, spent a weekend mapping out Planet. They hosted the first site last October, on a spare server underneath Ciotti-Roco's desk.

As PacifiCare employees learned to use browser-equipped systems, the company's text-based default interface, called InfoCare, started to look even older than its eight years. InfoCare was a 3270 application but employees with PCs could use emulation mode to access its VAX-based e-mail and databases.

Planet caught on with its clever graphics; easily navigable satellites to early, basic departmental sites; and intuitive access. More than 80% of employees were accessing some part of the intranet by its formal launch in March, Ciotti-Roco says. The IS department shut down InfoCare in May.

Now, PacifiCare's application development staff has a decided Web orientation. Most new application development is for the Web, and existing applications get more manageable browser interfaces, Ciotti-Roco says.

For example, an online reference manual is scheduled to debut early next month. PacifiCare's member services staff now relies on stacks of reference resources to answer questions from health service members about benefits, procedures and policies. The few online resources are accessible by logging on to a half-dozen emulation screens that draw data - slowly - from several legacy systems. Training takes several weeks.

Planet team members obtained electronic copies of many of the paper references and put them online. They built SQL databases to front end the legacy systems, and users can browse the reference sources simultaneously in different windows - the intranet supports six transactions per second for 500 users. Training should take only a day.

The applications development team works with Judy Ehrenreich, vice president of human resources operations, and her committee of intranet content masters, to help departments prepare Web sites. They developed a toolbox of templates, clip art, fonts and other resources. New departmental sites appear at the rate of about two per week.