I have been considering setting up an office intranet at my boss' request. I hope you can recommend a low-cost solution. All my boss wants is that our sales staff be able to share their schedule and contact list over the Internet. We have a 64-kilobits per second leased line to an Internet service provider and all 15 staff have reasonably-powered IBM compatible PCs with unrestricted Internet access. I already have a few ideas about how to set up this basic intranet but would like to try a cheap solution to see if my boss is satisfied. Afterwards, we can spend whatever is necessary to carry on using it and growing with it. What do you suggest? NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED There is little point in spending large amounts on an intranet if it is not what your boss expected. Also, whatever you set up will be useless unless you get your sales staff to use it religiously. To get started, you might want to consider using an on-line free scheduler and address book function such as that offered by Yahoo! These services offer a basic intranet-like facilities without costing more than a few minutes of your time to set it up. All you have to do is go to my.yahoo.com (no 'www' necessary) and set up an account with Yahoo! Let's say you use 'mycompany' as your selected login with an easy-to-remember password like 'password' (not recommended in real life . . . it is one of the first words would-be hackers will try as a password). My Yahoo! functions as an Internet portal.
You then share that login and password with sales staff and boss allowing them to use their Web browsers to go to my.yahoo.com and enter schedules and contacts. Contacts can be imported to My Yahoo! from common database formats. You also can use the page to set To Do items for staff.
One of the better features of the on-line scheduler is an alert feature that can be set up to e-mail participants automatically in an event at a pre-set time.
Remember, My Yahoo! is free, so it has limitations such as the amount of information allowed per login. Also, it does not use the most expensive of intranet firewall and security technology, so you may not want to put company secrets on-line. It is, however, a good way to test if a basic intranet will work for your company.
If this proves satisfactory, you can evaluate the need to set up a more complex intranet as your needs grow. As you say, you already have some idea about how to go about doing this, so when you are ready, go for it.