Directorate of distance education

Usefulness of an Intranet
An intranet within an enterprise makes it easy to make a wide variety 
of different documents available to employees, which provides centralized 
and coherent access to the enterprise’s knowledge, which is referred to 
as capitalization of knowledge. In this manner, it is generally necessary 
to define the access rights of the users of the Intranet to the documents 
located thereon, and consequently authentication of such access rights to 
provide them with personalized access to certain documents.
Documents of any kind (text, images, videos, sounds, etc.) can be 
made available on an Intranet. In addition, an Intranet may provide a very 
interesting groupware function, i.e. allow groupwork. Here are some of 
the functions which may be provided by an Intranet:
➢ Access to information regarding the enterprise (bulletin board)
➢ Access to technical documents
➢ Search engine for documentations
➢ Exchange of data among coworkers
➢ Staff roster
➢ Project management, decision-making aid, agenda, computer-
aided engineering
➢ Electronic messaging
➢ Discussion forum, distribution list, direct chat
➢ Videoconference
➢ Internet portal
An Intranet therefore favors communication within the enterprise 
and limits errors as a result of poor flow of information. Information 
available on the Intranet must be updated to prevent version conflicts.

---

Notes
279
Advantages of an Intranet
An Intranet makes it possible to create an information system at 
a low cost (specifically, the cost of an Intranet may very well be limited 
to the cost of the material, its maintenance and updating, with client 
workstations operating with free navigators, a server running under Linux 
with the Apache web serve, and the database server MySQL). On the other 
hand, considering the “universal” nature of the means in play, any type of 
machine can be connected to the local network, i.e. the Intranet.