The Intranet Advantage CD-ROM contains material that can help you develop an intranet that meets your organization's bottom-line business needs. The contents of this unique CD-ROM include software, resources, and most important, a demo intranet.
We have created a fictitious company called Demo, Inc., a world-renowned manufacturer of widgets, and created the company's intranet. This online demo is designed to demonstrate a number of intranet advantages, including:
Since the entire intranet exists on the CD-ROM, no databases actually exist; this demo is a "look-like," which means that it is designed to replicate the appearance of a real intranet, but does not actually function like one.
We are pleased to make this demo available to you for use in your organization. You may feel free to copy it to a hard disk and add elements and features to it as you require in order to create a functional demo that you can use to communicate the value of an intranet within your own organization. Please feel free to make whatever changes you like to any of the files; you can even change the company name to your own company's name, and add your own company logo if you like. In fact, there is no art or graphics associated with this demo, since Demo, Inc. isn't a real company. In addition to keeping the demo uncluttered, the lack of existing art will make it easy for you to add your own wherever you wish.
Many of the links contained in the demo are not active. These links were created to show the kind of information the intranet can contain; however, we thought it would be overkill to actually create dummy information just to fill these pages. Again, if having information for these pages will enhance the value of your own demo, feel free to add them!
You will find the greatest examples of the functionality of the Demo, Inc. intranet in the employee benefits enrollment, the online job application section, the employee performance review forms, the expense report form, and the online conferencing function in the Sales area.
We have included several software applications on this CD-ROM because of their ability to help you set up and manage an effective intranet. Following is a list of the software available for you on this CD-ROM:
The ZBServer is shareware, costing $150 for a registered version. You are entitled to try it out for up to 60 days without paying for it. The Web server will also handle Gopher. It will take up to 32 concurrent requests and it can handle up to 200 aliases. You can get more information from the ZBServer Web site at http://www.zbserver.com.
The recently released Internet Explorer version 3.0 is available for use and distribution completely free of charge, and it includes virtually all of the features of its for-a-price counterparts. It also handles ActiveX. Information on the Internet Explorer is available from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com.
One of the best freeware news readers available on the Internet, News Xpress features a killfile and autoselect abilities, along with sorting, filtering and mailing features. It also comes with an inline image viewer, along with various unencoding schemes. News Xpress is aptly named-it's very fast. Details on News Xpress is available from http://www.malch.com.
This graphics application handles just about everything Adobe PhotoShop does, and it's only $69; you can evaluate it using the software on the CD-ROM. Features include batch conversion, screen capture, a built-in browser for viewing an entire directory of images, color replacer, masking, interlaced graphics support (for 87a and 89a GIF files), and advanced image filtering. Information is at http://www.jasc.com.
This simple-to-use program allows you to create image maps for your graphics. It handles client-side image maps as well as both the CERN and NCSA image map protocols. Find out more about the program at http://www.cris.com/~automata/hotspots.shtml.
There's more on this CD-ROM. Other elements you can find here include the following: