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Another example is the introduction of an online room booking service some
years ago. For a total development cost of £150,000, the service initially reduced
direct costs by about £450,000 p.a. The cost savings were achieved through the
near elimination of a call centre that previously handled the bookings.
Source: Adapted from IBF (2008)

In addition to these‘classical’ uses of intranets, intranet developer Odyssey (www.odyssey-i.com)
identifies some less common intranet applications which involve internal communications:
1 Employee incentive scheme. Companies reward the best employees according to anony-
mous voting by their peers. At the end of each quarter, prizes such as DVD players and
televisions are awarded.
2 Text messaging. A distribution company keeps in touch with its sales staff and drivers through
SMS (short message enabling staff to contact colleagues who are ‘on the road’ using SMS text messaging.
services) 3 Holiday booking. A workflow system forwards holiday requests to the relevant manager
The formal name for text
messaging. and informs the applicant automatically. Team managers can also check on the intranet
when people within their group have booked holidays.
4 Resource booking. Viewing and making bookings of meeting rooms is another simple
application that can save time.
5 News screen. Displaying the company’s latest news and most recent achievements on a
dedicated screen can give a focal point to a waiting room or foyer area.
6 Integrated external resources. Route planning, mapping or traffic news sites can be integrated
into the intranet to save time for staff. One example of this is a housing authority that stores
its list of properties on the intranet. Each house has a link to a mapping site (e.g. Multimap
www.multimap.com), which will display the location of the property based on its postcode).
The management challenges of implementing and maintaining an intranet are similar to
those of an extranet. In the next section, we examine five key management issues of
extranets. Each of these issues also applies to intranets.
A suitable technology is also required to enable staff to manage their own content. For
large sites, it is not practical for all changes to web content to be sent through to a webmas-
ter to update the pages. Think about a large site such as the BBC site (www.bbc.co.uk) which
has over 80 million pages indexed in Google (according to the Advanced Search syntax
‘site:www.bbc.co.uk’ which returns all pages in Google’s main index from the site). Many of
Content
management these pages are news stories which must be updated in real time. The only practical method
system (CMS) is to provide journalists and other content providers with access to a system which allows
Software used to manage them to add and edit web pages. Such a system is known as a content management system
creation, editing and
review of web-based (CMS). As explained in more detail in Chapter 12, a CMS is a means of managing the updat-
content. ing and publication of information on any web site, whether intranet, extranet or Internet.

Extranet applications
Although an extranet may sound complex, from a user point of view it is straightforward. If
you have bought a book or CD online and have been issued with a username and password
to access your account, then you have used an extranet. This is a consumer extranet.
Extranets are also used to provide online services which are restricted to business customers.
If you visit the Ifazone (www.ifazone.com) extranet of financial services company Standard
Life, which is designed for the independent financial advisers who sell its products, you will
see that the web site only has three initial options – log-in, register and demonstrations. The
Ifazone extranet is vital to Standard Life since 90 per cent of business is now introduced