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298 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure

is arranged by a simple click-and-drag operation on the computer screen to
select the names of the conferees. Voice mail and e-mail can be combined
into a single directory.

Unified Communications
In the past, each of the firm’s networks for wired and wireless data, voice
communications, and videoconferencing operated independently of each other
and had to be managed separately by the information systems department.
Now, however, firms are able to merge disparate communications modes into a
single universally accessible service using unified communications technology.
Unified communications integrates disparate channels for voice communica-
tions, data communications, instant messaging, e-mail, and electronic confer-
encing into a single experience where users can seamlessly switch back and
forth between different communication modes. Presence technology shows
whether a person is available to receive a call. Companies will need to examine
how work flows and business processes will be altered by this technology in
order to gauge its value.
CenterPoint Properties, a major Chicago area industrial real estate company,
used unified communications technology to create collaborative Web sites for
each of its real estate deals. Each Web site provides a single point for accessing
structured and unstructured data. Integrated presence technology lets team
members e-mail, instant message, call, or videoconference with one click.

Virtual Private Networks
What if you had a marketing group charged with developing new products
and services for your firm with members spread across the United States? You
would want to be able to e-mail each other and communicate with the home
office without any chance that outsiders could intercept the communications.
In the past, one answer to this problem was to work with large private network-
ing firms who offered secure, private, dedicated networks to customers. But this
was an expensive solution. A much less-expensive solution is to create a virtual
private network within the public Internet.
A virtual private network (VPN) is a secure, encrypted, private network
that has been configured within a public network to take advantage of the
economies of scale and management facilities of large networks, such as the
Internet (see Figure 7.10). A VPN provides your firm with secure, encrypted
communications at a much lower cost than the same capabilities offered by
traditional non-Internet providers who use their private networks to secure
communications. VPNs also provide a network infrastructure for combining
voice and data networks.
Several competing protocols are used to protect data transmitted over the
public Internet, including Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP). In a process
called tunneling, packets of data are encrypted and wrapped inside IP pack-
ets. By adding this wrapper around a network message to hide its content,
business firms create a private connection that travels through the public
Internet.

THE WEB

About 239 million people of all ages use the Web in the U.S.—three-quarters of the
population. The Web is the most popular Internet service. It’s a system with uni-
versally accepted standards for storing, retrieving, formatting, and displaying
information using a client/server architecture. Web pages are formatted using

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