[NOTE: this story was one of the first that I wrote for c|net back in 1996. It is provided as a snapshot of history.]

Here is a quick and easy way to build your Intranet, and it doesn’t require adding IP to every desktop or even having to put up any web servers. 

I used to think that the term “Intranet” applied to those internal web servers popping up all over userland: not visible to the rest of us from the outside Internet, they serve up pages of human resources’ manuals and last quarter’s financials. 

Well, that is part of what Intranets are all about: but there are circumstances when you don’t want or need a web server and you can still have a perfectly good Intranet. You may not have the expertise to deploy a web server right now, or may not want to put IP everywhere. You already have people that are skilled in running NetWare servers, and don’t really want to learn yet another server operating system (like Unix or NT). Finally, if you are tired of hearing how everyone else has their own web server, there is a way to get started without waiting any longer.

You have come to the right place. Here’s how you do it.

Take your existing NetWare file server (come on, admit that you still use ’em). You don’t have to do anything to it for now. But if you want to connect it eventually to the Internet, then you’ll want to consider one of the products mentioned in the box below. You will have to re-write your files in HTML to make your documents on the server web-friendly. 

You can either add an IP stack to your desktops, or else modify the WINSOCK.DLL (if you are running Windows) to talk through IPX. Novell includes this as part of their IntraNetWare solution, or you can make use of the products mentioned in the box. 

Now, run your web browser. Tell users to bring up their web pages using the “open file” command instead of typing in an http: address. Guess what? That’s it — you have your Intranet and no web server in sight.

Indeed, you actually aren’t missing much: your users can still traverse links embedded in your documents, but they are file-based instead of web-based links. You can still load up your pages with images and sounds, provided your links refer to mapped drives on your network (file:///G|\document instead of http://servername/document). 

Okay, so what is the catch? Well, you can’t do a few things: You can’t run CGI programs and perl scripts, and that means that forms will be pretty tough to do. But who cares — most people don’t really want to fill out forms anyway. And you can’t track how people move through your web since you don’t have any log files. But so what — who really has the time to write scripts and analyze these logs anyway? (I am being somewhat cynical here: I actually think logs and forms are very important and key to understanding how you need to evolve your web. But we’ll leave those issues for another day) 

I think this strategy makes perfect sense. It is also somewhat timely, given Novell’s big push this month to package its various pieces of software under the “IntraNetWare” label. The key is beginning to use HTML as your corporate document standard.

That will take some doing: most of your documents, I’ll bet, are in Word or some other word processor, and getting them converted won’t be easy. 

Another suggestion: consider getting a few Macintoshes and using them to add the multimedia experience to your file-based webless Intranet. Why Macs? They have the best tool set for adding images, sound, and video to static text. And since you’ve already got your NetWare file servers, they can see them just fine (as long as you load the Appletalk support properly, which is fairly easy to do.) 

I can see another situation where a non-web Intranet  makes sense: where the center of the Intranet universe is email-based, rather than anything to do with the web and HTML. But that topic is for another day.