By Peggy Watt
IntraNet, 12/15/97

Imagine you've just received a drawing from a telecommuter who portrays herself sitting at the bottom of a large funnel, getting flooded by the documents that people at headquarters keep pouring into it.

Dan Goussy got just such a drawing in 1995 when, as a reengineering consultant, he was helping Volkswagen of America, Inc.'s field staff adjust to a companywide reorganization. VW had closed its North American field offices and turned its remote staff into telecommuters.

In their isolation, the field workers were overwhelmed with information. The drawing helped Goussy get the picture. When he did, he headed straight to IT.

What Goussy wanted was help designing an electronic bulletin board system that would help the telecommuters manage the deluge. What he got was an intranet.

Jack Shafer, director of new technology, had just crafted the company's World Wide Web site. The men realized Web technology might answer VW's internal needs as well. They assembled a team - an interspecies group of marketing experts and technical staff, they joke - and launched Volkswagen's Internal News Knowledge and Information Exchange (VINNIE).

Earlier this month, to celebrate the intranet's first birthday, the team raised a few latte toasts to VINNIE. It hosted a cybercafé at VW's headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich., and invited colleagues to drop in and get acquainted with the latest on the Web.

Serving up espresso and cookies along with Web pages, the team demonstrated VINNIE, encouraged all VW employees to surf the corporate Web and previewed new features. Those include an application for ordering business cards and automated sign-up forms for training.

The goal, Goussy says, was to heat up employees' interest, which had been lukewarm during VINNIE's first year.

"We wanted to show each person something in VINNIE he or she didn't know was there," Goussy says.

VINNIE has grown from about 100 files to 1,300, but VW's 1,500 employees access it only about 1,000 times daily. Some do so directly from their desktops - the intranet launches upon boot up - and others access it from kiosks.

About 250 users stopped by during the three days the café was open, says Goussy, who has joined the IT department as intranet project leader.

Ironically, the cybercafé excluded the 300 field operations workers who were a primary reason VINNIE came online. Those employees, who Goussy plans to target with more training, only use VINNIE sporadically. It's a challenge to reach them because their time is at a premium, and they're dispersed across North America, Goussy says.

Goussy's marketing and advertising background leads him to emphasize ease of use and communications on VINNIE. "We have been somewhat inflexible on site design. Having different [home page] designs would be like hiring a different ad agency for each of our lines of cars,'' he says.

So across the bottom of every departmental home page is a ribbon of links for comments, forms, a search engine, Internet access and diversions. But there is room for creativity. For example, behind "Diversions'' is a screen of interesting, but not necessarily vocational, internal and external Web sites. For example, IT's Diversions page lists technical and vendor Web sites, plus the URL for Dilbert, the cartoon deity of IT, and the chocolate lover's page - one of Goussy's contributions.

VINNIE is largely a document library, with little database interaction.

For the document library, clicking on a category button activates a Com-mon Gateway Interface script that launches Interleaf, Inc.'s Relational Document Manager (RDM). The program dynamically generates a list of files for the chosen category, drawing from Interleaf's document database, and the user clicks for viewing.

One person in each workgroup - the content manager - has RDM tools and can link files for access. Technician Nick Panas, another team member, designed an easy fill-in-the-blanks process for posting.

This coffee klatch was to catch newcomers and encourage others to dig deeper into the Web. A slide show of tips flashed on a wall-sized screen, suggesting that visitors order VW parts online, visit the virtual VW museum, respond to an invitation to the holiday party or try dozens of other exercises.

Ever marketing, Goussy encouraged the coffee-sippers to do a little self-promotion with VINNIE's help. He asked employees to edit their password-protected personnel information in the online company phone book.

Employees are supposed to update not only the usual data - phone extension, e-mail address and title - but insert other useful information, such as previous jobs within VW, and miscellaneous skills and interests. All fields are searchable, so such data might prove useful to someone looking for background on a project or for a colleague who speaks a foreign language.

Blending talents

Over a typical programmers' feast - Chinese food - members of the VINNIE team kid about how they've converted the marketing guy into a techie. In fact, Goussy has become adept at HTML and is on the IT payroll, but other members of the team handle the bit-twiddling.

VW has three IT groups that must coordinate work: networking, consulting and the intranet/Internet team.

Panas and Shafer supervise script and link-building and maintain Web-related equipment with IT's network staff. For VINNIE, VW uses Netscape Communications Corp.'s Enterprise Server Web server software running on a Digital Equipment Corp. Alpha Unix machine.

In addition to the Unix server, VW uses Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT application servers. Netscape's Navi-gator 3.0 is its browser of choice.

VW had TCP/IP in place before VINNIE and is its own Internet service provider via T-1 lines. While the corporate Internet connection is fast, remote offices use lower speed dial-up services.

Because VINNIE is open to remote workers, security is an ongoing issue. Shafer claims his security philosophy follows a German proverb: "Trust is wonderful, but control is better.''

The company has strong firewall protection and a series of routers to distribute incoming traffic around protected areas. IT also restricts access, allowing HTTP traffic, but not File Transfer Protocol or telnet sessions.

VW is building a demilitarized zone (DMZ) with two firewalls - one allows DMZ entry and the other protects the corporate LAN. When VW opens its intranet to partners, parts of VINNIE will go on the DMZ, Shafer says.

Funnel vision

For VINNIE's second year, the intranet team is reassessing how to raise its profile and service to the field offices - the original target users.

It plans to activate a "subscribe'' feature on all the dynamic library pages so users can ask to be notified if a document or related files change.

Goussy is hopeful that the blend of talents behind VINNIE is up to the challenge of making the intranet mission-critical to field workers. "IT originally pushed the Web project," he says, "and now marketing and the whole company are pulling it."