Intranet User's Guide
Welcome to the Intranet User's guide section of the R&D Intranet.
This help came with our Instant Intranet and will answer many of your questions
about how to use our new intranet and all its great features.
Click on a link below to find answers to the following questions:
Additional Resources
To find out more about the Internet and intranet features in Office 97,
check out the Office home page at http://www.microsoft.com/office/
To find out more about the benefits of intranets, check out the Office
Intranet home page at http://www.microsoft.com/office/intranet/
To get in-depth information about using Microsoft Office 97 to create or
contribute to a team or departmental intranet, look for Official Microsoft Intranet
Solutions by Micro Modeling Associates, Inc. with a local bookseller, or check out the
Micro Modeling Home Page at http://www.micromodeling.com/
To find answers to specific questions you have about any Microsoft
Office 97 application, open the application, go to the Help menu, and select one of the
following:
 | Microsoft [Application] Help. Type your question in the space provided
when the Office Assistant appears |
| Microsoft On the Web: Frequently Asked Questions |
| Microsoft On the Web: Online Support |
What is an intranet?
Simply put, an intranet is a corporate network designed around Internet
metaphors, protocols, and technology. Like a collection of shared folders on a server, an
intranet gives you and your co-workers the ability to save a file, content, or information
in a central location where others can find, view, and/or modify it. However, intranets
include many additional features and benefits beyond those of traditional shared network
folders. These benefits include:
| the ability to quickly search through many documents and find
information. |
| the ability to hyperlink from one resource to related resources. |
| the ability to navigate from one part of the "server" to
another part more easily, because of the navigation metaphors used on the Internet. |
Why should I post information to the intranet?
Think of all the things you do with the documents you create. You
develop a financial forecast in Microsoft Excel 97 and include it as an attachment in
email to the managers in your department. You write a business plan in Microsoft Word 97,
print it, and make copies to distribute to your team. You create a presentation in
Microsoft PowerPoint 97, give the presentation to your co-workers, and then save the
presentation to a shared folder on the network so that others can review the slides if
they missed the meeting.
Consider the benefits an intranet provides over each of the examples
noted above:
Benefits Over Email Attachments
| Assume you send a document as an email attachment to ten people in your
department. If the document is 500 KB, you have just taken up 5 MB of server space because
that 500 KB document has been saved to 10 different inboxes. Now, 5 MB, by itself,
isn’t that large. But consider how many people in your department are sending email
attachments on a daily or weekly basis. The amount of server space taken up by redundant
attachments escalates quickly. By posting your document to the intranet and sending around
a hyperlink in email, you virtually eliminate this redundancy. |
| Consider what happens if you send one document to five individuals for
review. If each individual makes changes, you need to consolidate feedback from each
individual and incorporate it into your original document—a time consuming and
unnecessary process. By directing your co-workers to your document on the intranet (and
using the shared workbook and tracking features in products like Microsoft Word 97 and
Microsoft Excel 97), all revisions are made to the same document, and you simply need to
review those changes and decide which to keep. |
Benefits Over Printed Documents
| When you print a document on paper and make copies, you increase costs in
your department. Your portion of that cost may not be significant, but if you add up the
costs of everyone in your department printing documents and making copies for others on a
daily basis, the cost is significant. Using the intranet as your primary
"printer" reduces this cost considerably. |
| It is less efficient for others to modify or revise printed documents
than it is to modify or revise electronic documents—both for the person making the
revisions, and for you when you try to incorporate those revisions. When you post your
documents to the intranet, all revisions are made online, and you can accept or reject
modifications online. |
| Look around your desk or your office. If your team or department relies
heavily on printed documents, you probably have numerous reports, memos, and plans lying
around. If you’re lucky, these are stored in a filing cabinet. But you may also have
a pile here and a pile there. Not only does this add to clutter, but consider the
difficulty in finding a specific document, let alone finding relevant information within
a document. When you post documents to an intranet instead of creating physical copies
for everyone on your team, you not only reduce the clutter in their offices, but you also
make it easier for them to find the document. In addition, because of the search
capabilities of an intranet, you make it possible for your co-workers to quickly find
specific information within the documents you have created. |
Benefits Over Shared Folders
As we mentioned in the introduction, at its basic level, an intranet is
like shared folders on a network server. To review the additional benefits an intranet
provides, consider the following:
| When looking through shared folders on a network, you generally have to
rely upon document titles to determine which document contains the information you need.
(If you are fortunate, the document creator may have also included a document summary,
though this is the exception, not the rule.) Intranets give you the ability to search
quickly within documents to find the information you are looking for. |
| Intranets give you the ability to hyperlink from one resource to other
related resources. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or later, you remain
within your browser, regardless of the file type you are linking to (whether it be HTML,
Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). |
| To go from one part of a traditional network server to another, you have
to navigate through levels of file hierarchies, sometimes a time consuming and confusing
process. And what if you forget the location of a subfolder? Intranets give you the
ability to navigate from one part of the "server" to another more easily because
of the navigation metaphors (for example, hyperlinks) used on the Internet. |
As you see, posting your documents to an intranet has many benefits over
the traditional ways of distributing information in a department. That isn’t to say
that you won’t occasionally include a document as an attachment in email, print a
document and distribute it, etc., but by posting your content to the intranet, you gain
many advantages.
When should I post information to the intranet?
Any time you want others to find, read, review, or modify a document you
have created, you should post it to the intranet. The intranet becomes your all-purpose
printer. As a result, in most instances, you should post information to the intranet
instead of
| including file attachments in email messages |
| printing documents, making copies, and distributing them to others |
| saving files to a shared network folder |
In essence, remember that "Any time you want others to find, read,
review, or modify a document you have created, you should post it to the intranet."
What programs should I use to create content for the
intranet?
Microsoft Office 97 is an excellent tool to use to create content for
your intranet. Office 97 enables you to save your files in HTML format (the standard
format of the Internet) or in native file formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).
This means that rather than considering which tool would be best for an
intranet, you can create content using the application that is best suited for the
information you are working with. For example, Microsoft Word 97 works well for
text-based documents; Microsoft Excel 97 works well for financial, statistical, or
graphical information, and Microsoft PowerPoint 97 works well for presentations.
If the information you are planning to put on your intranet already
exists, there is no reason to re-create it. Simply open the document in Office 97 and save
it as HTML or in an Office 97 file format.
The main points to remember are:
| The best program to create content for the intranet is the program
that is best suited for the type of information you are working with. |
| Microsoft Office 97 applications (like Word 97, Excel 97, and PowerPoint
97) are ideal for creating content for your intranet because (1) each is integrated with
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 and (2) each application gives you the ability to save to
an intranet in native file format or as HTML. |
Where should I post my content on the intranet?
Your intranet administrator (or the person who created the intranet)
likely created a user folder for you on the intranet server. Ask this individual for the
location of this folder. Then, save all of the files you want to share to this folder.
When you save to this location, you enable the intranet’s search engine to access
your documents when a user executes a search. If one or more of your documents contains
data that others are searching for, they will be able to find it more easily.
You should also include a hyperlink from your personal home page (and
possibly from the intranet News and Projects pages) to documents that need to be highly
visible to your team or department. (For example, a business plan and forecast.)
In what format should I save my files on the intranet so my
co-workers can view them?
When developing content for your intranet, you can choose to post your
finished product as HTML, the traditional format of the Internet, or in the native Office
format you used to create it —Microsoft Excel 97, Word 97, or PowerPoint 97. The best
choice for posting —HTML or Office format— will depend on how the
information will be used once it’s up on your site.
If the content you are posting is static—in other words, if you are
posting it primarily for informational purposes and it will not change regularly, or if
you do not want others to revise your content—you should save your files in HTML
using the applicable Office 97 application.
If the content you are posting is dynamic—in other words, if the
content you are posting will change often or if you want others to modify and revise what
you have written—you should save your files to the intranet in their native file
formats. In this way, when co-workers open your documents, they will be able to revise
them and save them back to the intranet with Office 97.
The points to remember are:
| If the information you are posting is static, meaning it will not change
regularly or you do not want others to revise what you have posted, save as HTML. |
| If the information you are posting is dynamic, meaning it will change
regularly or you want others to revise your content, save it to the intranet in its native
file format. |
The 60 Minute intranet kit contains the full text of this help file
in the Foundation Instant Intranet. In addition, the Training Module contains the
training file in a frames based environment to further enhance your users experience.
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