Unit IV (Internet and Extranet)

4.1 Definition of Internet

 A means of connecting a computer to any other computer anywhere in

the world via dedicated routers and servers. When two computers are
connected over the Internet, they can send and receive all kinds of
information such as text, graphics, voice, video, and computer
programs.
 The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking
infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally,
forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any
other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet.
The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information
over the medium of the Internet.
 An electronic communications network that connects computer
networks and organizational computer facilities around the world.

Advantages / Merits / Uses / Benefits of Internet

1. Online Shopping: Now today’s the trend of online shopping is
growing up very fast. Users have now the facility of shop everything
what they want without going outside to stores and super markets.
2. Benefits for Students Studies: You are a student and you miss
the lecture. Don’t worry internet helps students to find notes,
essay, lectures, guidelines and more than points related to your
subject are available in your books.
3. Book Tickets online: In the race of technology and companies are
giving best services to their users. And almost all the airlines are
providing advantages to their customer to buy the tickets online on
internet. So people are no need to go to the agency or airline office.

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4. Learn Online From Videos: Internet is the solution of many
problems. If you face any problem in your mobile, laptop, cars,
television etc, you can easily find the solution on the screen with
the help of video providing website. Mostly used websites for videos
upload and download are YouTube, Dailymotion, tunepk, viemo and
etc.
5. Play Online Games: People fond of video games are easily access
to download multiple games. Also can play online games with the
help of internet connection. Without it you can’t play online either
can’t download.
6. Entertainment: Every day new movies and music lunched in every
country almost. People how are fond to watch movies or listen
music. They can easily find latest music and movies on Internet and
can download it and also watch it online.
7. E-mailing: Government Departments, Private Organization,
Businesses, NGOs, School, Colleges and Universities etc. And many
other departments and peoples are using the e-mail services.
8. Results and Roll No: Students of Universities and Colleges now
even the students of Schools are easily see their results on internet.
To access to the result you must need to put the right roll no in the
search bar of school or college website.
9. Company Profile: KFC, Pizza Hut, Five Star Hotels, Toyota
Company, Honda Company, Government Departments, NGOs,
Private Companies and many of other departments and companies
like these have their web sites. The information about these is
easily available on Websites and we can visit these websites easily
with the help of Net Connection.
10. Jobs: There are hundreds of mobile application, and thousands of
website in every country. They provide the services to find the jobs

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 to the jobless peoples on Internet in their national language related
to their experience and criteria.
11. Bank Accounts: Money in your bank account is now same like
money in your pocket. Yes you can login to your account and make
online transactions either bank is open or close.
12. Buy and Sell: If you have second hand or new bike, car, clothes,
shoes, jewelry, mobile or laptop etc. You can place an
advertisement to website and easily can sell on reasonable price as
compare to market. You can also buy same like this by contacting
the selling person.
13. Earn Money on Internet: Create a professional website or create
a channel on video website. Run for little time and place an
advertisement on your website or channel and earn money through
net. You can also earn money by affiliate marketing.
14. Hire Peoples for Work: You can hire online people to get
advantages to complete your assignments, petty works, designs,
data entry works etc. There are several famous website where you
can easily hire a person for your work. Fiver and Up work are good
example of it.

Disadvantages / Demerits / Drawbacks / Misuse of Internet

1. Shopping Quality: When you shop online on internet. The things
you buy sometime the quality of these things are very bad and will
give you the loss because you cannot see and touch the things
properly during online shopping.
2. Loss of Studies: Mostly students use the net for wrong purposes.
Because they spend more time while using online activates.
3. Loss of Money: The people who are playing online games and
spend money on these games. Once or two time you may win but

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 not every time. People can loss their money online by playing games
and also on other activates.
4. Health Disadvantages: Before hundred years ago there was no
any concept of Internet and computers. Now, every third person
uses these things. Because of it they are all the day in the home and
face many health problems and diseases.
5. Viruses & Malware: During browsing the different websites in your
browsers, some scripts are automatically downloaded and install it.
Some of them are viruses and these viruses can damage your
computer, laptop and mobiles very badly.
6. Accounts Hacking: Using of your account online may be chances
of Hacking. Yes if you are using your account in mobile application
and let suppose you lose mobile. The other person can easily
transfer your money to any other account.
7. Data Stolen Chances: If your computer is connected to the net, in
this case hacker can come and stoles your file easily from your
device.
8. Frauds: Many peoples and website on Internet are not real and not
trusted. These are fake and can fraud you for money and other
things.
9. Dark Web on Internet: You will be surprise to hear that we are
using only the 5% percent of website on net. And the remaining
95% web is hidden. On the dark web people can sell drugs, arms,
hire killers and do all the illegal activities on dark web. So be careful
and keep yourself far from these types of websites on net.
10. Governments Data and Files: Enemy countries hire special
hackers to steal the secrets file of government. These files may be
the atomic codes, arms modules, drone designs and many other files
like that are not secure in the presence of Internet.

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 11. Wrong News: Some fake channels and website publish wrong news
on net to get more views to become famous. So always use and
watch the secure and trusted websites and channels.
12. Far From Family: People are always far from their family, parents,
brother, sisters, and friends due to internet.
13. Wasting Time: More and wrong use of net is just like people are
waste their time. And they are far from sports activities. Because of
it now today’s people becomes dull and faces many diseases.
14. Waste of Money: In the end of the month we have the “Internet
Bill” and I think this is the waste of money. Spend this money on
your health drink juices and become health and live long and strong.

Information Superhighway (I-Way)

 It is High-speed global communications network that can carry data,

voice, video and other services around the world using technology
such as the satellite, optical fiber and cellular telecommunications.
Suitably equipped computers can access such information.
 The information super highway may be defined as a high capacity,
electronic pipeline to a consumer or business premise that is capable
of simultaneously supporting a large number of e-commerce
applications and providing interactive connectivity between users and
services. The I-way has emerged as the basic network infrastructure
for all types of e-commerce activities due to its capability to provide
integrate voice, data and video services.
 It is Internet-type global network of computers that, potentially, will
connect most of world's individuals, firms, and organizations. It is
envisioned to provide very high speed access to information in all
forms (text, graphics, audio, and video) via a telephone or wireless

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 connection. The term was first used in 1985 by the 45th US Vice
President (1993-2001) Al Gore (born 1948) in an American context
where every citizen is aimed to be so connected.

Components of the I-way

It consists of various components which can be broadly categorized as:
1. Network access equipment: It is at the consumer end and enables
the consumer to access the network. It consists of the hardware such
as computers, modems, routers, switches for computer networks, set-
top boxes for television networks and software platforms such as
browsers and operating systems.
2. Access media: It provides the communication backbone for the
transmission of data and information. The access providers may be
differentiating into four categories: telecom based cable TV based,
wireless based or computer based on-line systems.
3. Global information distribution networks: It provides the
infrastructure for connecting across the countries and continents. They
include such networks as the long distance telephone lines, the
satellite networks and internet.
1. Network access equipment: The customer access equipment or
customer premises equipment or the terminal equipment consists of the
equipment that the customer uses to connect to the network. This may
consist of the TV set-top boxes or the TV signal descramblers, the
computer and the modem, pagers and cellular phones etc.

2. Access roads or media: The access road is the way in which the
consumer homes and work places are linked with the backbone of the
network infrastructure for e-commerce. These can be categorized into
four major types:

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 a. Telecom based
b. Cable TV based
c. Wireless based
d. Internet, intranet and extranet based

Each of these access media has its own benefits and limitations and is
faced with a number of challenges in this fast growing world e-commerce.

a. Telecom based: The telecom industry provides both long distance

and local telephone services for e-commerce applications. The telecom
companies provide a high speed pipeline capable for carrying high
volumes of interactive voice, data and video to homes and businesses
connect these to the global information distribution networks, the
backbone of the I-way.
The telecom networks has become the primary foundation for the I-way
mainly for two reasons:
It is capable of handling millions of simultaneous calls.
It provides accurate usage tracking and billing.
However they have two limitations:
Lack of digital transmission capability
Uneven capacity distribution

b. Cable TV based: The cable TV network provides a popular media for

pushing high speed data to homes. Statistics have shown that cable runs
through 90 percent of the US homes today and still has a lot of unutilized
capacity. The cable TV based networks may be wired or wireless.

c. Wireless based: The wireless operators are typically radio based i.e.

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 cellular, paper and specialized mobile radio (SMR) based. The wireless
based systems have revolutionized the ways of thinking about
information delivery.

Technology is the most important factor. The rapid growth in technology

has impacted the wireless industry in a number of ways:
 Apart from the voice calls, the cellular technology today have also
facilitated short messaging services (SMS) using alphanumeric
display and the multimedia services.
 Internet connectivity using the cellular networks has been made
possible.
 The cellular networks using the analog technology are now
upgrading to digital networks to provide greater capacity at lower
costs as well as increase the quality and functionality of the cellular
network.
 Applications have been developed to facilitate mobile workers to exchange
messages and data from their offices while on the road.
d. The internet: The internet forms a well known component of the global
information distribution network. It targets a wide range of e-commerce
applications such as video on demand, home shopping, e-mail, information
publishing, information retrieval, video conferencing and many more.
All the components of the I-way together provide a network infrastructure
for the e-commerce activities. This requires the use of common standards
and installing gateways between various networks. A final requirement is the
hardware and software to move huge amounts of data effortlessly over the
complex network.

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3) Global information distribution networks
The global information distribution networks consist of the infrastructure
crossing the countries and continents. They include the long distance
telephone lines, satellite networks, and the internet.

Long distance networks

Long distance telephone connectivity is provided through cable by the inter-
exchange carriers. Long distance cellular networks use the wireless
technologies to connect the consumers worldwide.

Satellite networks
It plays a vital role in the communication industry. They have advantages
over the terrestrial networks in that:
 They are accessible from any point of the globe.
 They can provide broad band digital services to many points without the
cost of acquiring wire/cable installation.
 They can add receiving and sending sites without significant additional
costs.

Intranet
An intranet is a private network that is contained within an enterprise and is
designed in a way that links together different IT systems, hardware,
databases and other resources. An intranet uses TCP/IP, HTTP and other
Internet protocols and in general looks like a private version of the Internet.
Typically, larger enterprises allow users within their intranet to access the
public Internet through one or more gateway computers protected by
firewalls – a combination of hardware and software that maintain the privacy
and security of intranets by monitoring all traffic.
The main purpose of an intranet is to share company information and
computing resources among employees. This improved capacity for
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knowledge sharing increases the empowerment of individual employees and
enables them to operate more effectively. It also facilitates group decision
making and improves business processes throughout the organization, which
in turn has an impact on the quality of customer service being offered. The
kinds of facilities that are enabled and provided via an intranet are:
 E-mail and Web facilities – where corporate, department and
individuals can transmit, develop and display information in a Web
page format over the intranet.
 Database access – Web technology eases the problems of
incompatibility, which means that databases (including new and older
legacy systems) can be accessed centrally.
 Search engines and directory facilities assist key word-based
searches, similar to those used on the World Wide Web, making it
easier and quicker to find information.
 Interactive multimedia enables real-time communication via text,
audio and videoconferencing, including telephony over the intranet.
 Document distribution and workflow, where Web-based
downloads and routing of documents facilitates collaborative working
and sharing documents, which leads to improved decision-making and
project control and management.
 Integration with a number of different applications and systems
(including Web-based systems) to manage activities such as
purchasing, inventories, interacting with suppliers, providing customer
service and tracking orders using enterprise resource planning (ERP)
systems.
 Cost savings – Sun Microsystems estimate that the reduction of
printing and distribution of documents alone saves around US$3.5
million per year.

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Other advantages include: reducing paper; reducing errors by not having to
re-key the same information several times for individual databases; and
central software distribution and control to ensure compatibility of standards
across departments.

Figure: Architecture of the intranet

Components of Intranet
1. Know-how
Build know-how, at the beginning and throughout the project. It’s fine to
begin with a small application, which may ‘stretch’ the company (or the
business unit). A core team of interested and engaged people ensures
basic understanding of the solution through reading, learning and
networking.
2. Management
From a certain size, management support is irrelevant. This is especially
true for today’s intranets, because networking and collaboration over and
above organizational units should be encouraged and supported. Each
initiative requires sponsors, who want to drive changes for the company.
Introduce your initiative to ‘keen people’ and convey a feeling of what is
possible.

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 Don’t just involve management from one field. Try to find people from
various fields and inspire them.
3. Vision
Maybe you already pictured a certain vision of how the company (or even
just a part of it) should be in two or three years, how it should operate
and work differently. Together with the management, brainstorm about
how this vision could come to life. Maybe a half-day, or even a full-day
workshop can help you figure this out and to develop your vision to
reality.
4. Strategy
Once you have a clear vision, you should think about a strategy:
 Check and analyze the situation in your company (maybe with a SWOT
analysis).
 Define basic goals, which bring you closer to your vision.
 Determine who is concerned and who is involved, and make the
concerned involved.
(Also think about which external stakeholders you could involve.)
 Determine a rough framework for the schedule, cost and evaluation.
5. Measurements
Think about how you want to measure and document your progress.
Determine indicators, such as employee satisfaction or engagement.
Here, simple numbers (for example the number of comments per blog
article) or surveys can help. Carry out an initial measurement (a ‘zero-
measurement’), before you start with the intranet or making larger
changes, and regularly check for visible trends.
6. Engagement
Start with two or three cases, which you can implement in a few weeks
with relatively little difficulty (and resistance). Learn from the
implementation and don’t cling to a goal once set. You will possibly learn

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 about your company, its processes and employees, and change your way
of thinking.
Don’t just use these cases to learn from them, but also to better assess
reactions and attitudes within the company. Continue looking for cases
which require little effort that could be of great benefit to employees.
7. Market observations and networking
Constantly observe market activities and developments for intranets and
digital workplaces. Don’t restrict your observations to your industry, but
also watch out for the activities and initiatives of companies who might
only be partly comparable to yours or match in unusual aspects. When it
comes to intranets, problems and solutions are usually less related to
criteria like industry or size, but to factors like number and distribution of
locations, company culture and internationality.
Don’t just copy what others are doing. Just because a competitor was
successful with a certain method, doesn’t mean it applies to you. But also
don’t fall back to allegedly simple solutions, which have always worked in
the past. Neither a thoughtless imitation of the competitor, nor a euphoric
waving of flags is suitable approaches.

When observing the market, it is also important to network with

employees from other companies and to learn from their successful and
failed initiatives. Join an intranet work-group.
8. Capacities
Identify employees and managers in your company, who are open to
topics such as social media, networking and know-how. There might be
colleagues, who are active in social media in their private life, and are
consequently fond of such topics. To exchange experiences you might
create a regular round table, to which you can invite such persons, one
after the other.

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 Build capacity step by step. Not just for the core team, but also for
employees in operational areas. Build contact with employees in various
areas early on. Try to win employees as ‘ambassadors’ or ‘gurus’ in
operational areas.
Be sure to involve the IT department early on. Even though today’s
technology is significantly simpler and cheaper, you should not approach
IT four weeks before your planned start date and confront them with a
predetermined solution.
9. Governance
Build a policy of guidelines and rules. This policy should convey security,
support and strength to all employees and help you avoid legal pitfalls.
Important components for this are, for example:
 Social Business Guidelines
 Reporting to or holding round tables with the executive board, or
top-level management
 Data protection, data security, terms of use
 Responsible and competent persons
 Business applications in process descriptions
10. Evaluation
Constantly check your progress and components.
1. Know-how
2. Vision
3. Management
4. Strategy
5. Measurements
6. Engagement
7. Market observation and networking
8. Capacities
9. Governance

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Intranet Development
When planning an intranet, the most important thing is that somebody
needs to be in charge. Depending on the organization's size, this could be
one employee or a team of employees. This individual or intranet team will
determine what content is published on the intranet and what technology
will be used in the process.
Once the intranet team is assembled, they have to sit down and consider
many important questions that will dictate the size, cost and functionality of
the intranet. Here are some general considerations when planning an
intranet:
 Who is the intranet's primary audience? All employees? Or only certain
departments?
 What are the intranet's goals? Improved document access? Better
collaboration? Cut down on printing costs?
 How will the success of the Intranet be measured?
 What types of documents and which corporate databases will need to
be accessed?
 What Web-based applications will be accessible from the intranet?
 How will the site be structured? What will be on the homepage, the
different main landing pages and sub-pages?
 Will everyone be allowed to publish content to the intranet or only
certain employees?
 Who will be in charge of communicating editorial guidelines and
maintaining editorial consistency?
To get the intranet off the ground, the intranet team will have to address
several technical considerations as well. Here are a few basic technical
questions that need to be answered during the planning phase:

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 Who will be in charge of configuring and maintaining the Web server?
 Will the server and network be administered by in-house information
technology staff or by contractors?
 What security precautions need to be in place (firewalls, security
software) to limit access to the intranet?
 How much network bandwidth will the intranet require? For example,
will it host streaming audio and video, lots of graphics and photos,
etc.?
 How will new applications be tested before being added to the
intranet?
 What content management system (CMS) will be used to create and
publish content?
 How will employees be trained on the CMS?
 Who will be the contact for technical issues/questions about the CMS?
 How will the company back up intranet data? How does intranet data
fit into the company's larger disaster recovery plan
After answering all of these important questions, the intranet team needs to
come up with a proposed budget to be presented to the executives in
charge. In larger organizations, these would be the chief technical officer
(CTO) and/or chief information officer (CIO). Cost projections for the
following items should be included in the intranet budget:
 Web servers
 People to administer servers (in-house or contractors)
 Web development and design (in-house or contractors)
 Content management system
 Application development (software and personnel)
 Security hardware and software
 Long-term maintenance costs

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Setting up a secure and reliable intranet requires these components:
 Web server (hardware and software)
 Networked PCs
 Firewall hardware and software
 Content Management Software
 Other Application software
A Web server is two things: hardware and software. The hardware you use
for an intranet Web server depends on the intranet's size, the content to be
published and the number of people accessing the intranet at any given
time.
For example, if your intranet is text-only Web pages being accessed by five
people, you don't need a powerful machine running your server software. If
you're going to use your intranet to host streaming video to be accessed by
thousands of employees at once, then you'll need a large, dedicated server
or cluster of servers with significant bandwidth.
The server software handles all requests for files hosted on the server, finds
the file and sends it off to the right computer. The most popular Web server
software, Apache, is free. The second most popular Web server software
is Microsoft Internet Information Server.
As for installing and configuring the Web server in a network, a company
must first consider how critical the intranet will be for day-to-day operations.
The more the intranet is used for "core business processes," the more
redundancy needs to be built into the system.
In organizations where the intranet is a low-priority application, it's OK to
throw everything in the same box: Web server, databases, applications and
Web page content. In companies where employees rely more heavily on the
intranet for Web-based business applications, it's smart to employ a backup
server or even a networked server cluster that share responsibilities. In

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those cases, it's also smart to host databases on separate machines so that
if one server goes down, the rest can still access the databases.
For employees to access the intranet, their computers need to be connected
to the organization's local area network (LAN). These computers also need
to have Web browser software like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari.
Firewall hardware and software both accomplish the same thing -- they're
the gatekeepers. Firewalls stand between the outside Internet and the
corporate intranet, monitoring all incoming and outgoing data packets for
unauthorized or suspicious requests. A firewall is essential for intranet
security, particularly if the intranet includes extranet extensions or allows
remote login from outside of the corporate LAN.
For creating, publishing and managing the content on the intranet, most
companies use a content management system (CMS), a Web-based
application that makes it easy to create standardized Web content without
having to know HTML or other programming languages [source: KM
Column]. The CMS can be hosted on the Web server or on a separate
applications server.
Other software can be loaded onto the intranet Web server or applications
server as the company sees fit. This may include a Web-
based conferencing application, a project management tool or a
comprehensive CRM tool like SAP or PeopleSoft.
If you don't want to worry about setting up servers and installing software,
you could subscribe to a hosted intranet service where your intranet is
hosted by a third-party for a monthly fee. You would access the intranet by
logging into the service provider's web-site.

Intranet vs Extranet
There are many network systems that are utilized in business in order to
increase productivity; Intranets and Extranets are one of them. An Intranet
is basically a small personalized version of the Internet. It’s typically just a

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Local Area Network where Internet protocols like HTTP, FTP, and SMTP are
implemented to provide a more uniform and easier environment to pass
around information at work. An Extranet is an extension to an Intranet
where other users who are not necessarily a part of the company are given
limited access.
It may not seem directly obvious why other companies or organizations
should be allowed access to an Intranet. But letting customers or business
partners have access to information does present major benefits since it
automates inquiries and cuts down on human resources. Extranets are often
secured since only a select few are allowed access to it and the general
public is kept out. This achieved by the numerous ways of user
authentication.
Comparatively, users that are on the Intranet can utilize more resources
than the users on the Extranet. The information that is made available on
the Extranet is limited to what that specific network needs. Intranet users
are mostly employees who need to communicate and access certain
resources like records and databases.

Although Intranets and Extranets can exist outside of computers and the
World Wide Web, it is here where we can see most modern applications of
both. Intranets are often implemented within company computers and
servers; although some companies allow access to the Internet or remote
access via VPN. With Extranets, there is no way of escaping the Internet as
it is the most economical means of connecting to separate networks.

Security-wise, Intranets are a lot more secure due to the limited interface
with the Internet. Extranets are made less secure not only by the use of the
Internet as a medium but also by the fact that the administrators of the
Intranet have no control over the networks that connect to the Extranet.
When sensitive information is being transmitted on the Intranet, all parties
need to take all security precautions to prevent spying and other similar
activities.
Summary:
 An Intranet is owned by a single group while an Extranet extends to
users outside the group
 Intranet users have more access to resources than Extranet users

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  Intranets do not usually go through the Internet while typical
Extranets do
 Intranets are easier to secure than Extranets

Role of intranet in Business

Intranets are extremely useful as a business tool. Few of the key intranet
benefits include:
 Better internal communications - intranets can act as communication
hubs for staff. You can store corporate information such as memos, staff
news and announcements centrally and access at any time.
 Sharing of resources and best practice - you can create a virtual
workspace and community to facilitate information storing, sharing and
collaborative working. An intranet can also act as a training platform
when providing online training content to staff.
 Improved customer service - better access to accurate and consistent
information by your staff can lead to enhanced levels of customer service.
Advantages of intranet for business efficiency
You can improve your business' efficiency by using intranet for
 Publishing - delivering information and business news as directories and
web documents
 Document management - viewing, printing and working collaboratively
on office documents such as spreadsheets or databases
 Training - accessing and delivering various types of e-learning to the
user's desktop
 Workflow - automating a range of administrative processes, including
dealing with holiday requests, staff performance reviews and appraisals,
meeting room and equipment booking, etc
 Front-end to corporate systems - providing a common interface to
corporate databases and business information systems

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 Email - integrating intranet content with email services so that
information can be distributed effectively
It is a good idea to give your intranet a different image and structure from
your customer-facing website. This will help to give your internal
communications their own identity and prevent employees confusing internal
and external information.

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