intranet (redirected from Intranets)

(1) An inhouse Web site that serves the employees of the enterprise. Although intranet pages may link to the Internet, an intranet is not a site accessed by the general public.

Using programming languages such as Java, client/server applications can be built on intranets. Since Web browsers that support Java run under Windows, Mac and Unix, such programs also provide cross-platform capability.

Same as the Web
Intranets use the same HTTP server (Web server) technology, communications protocols and HTML hypertext links as the public Web. It thus provides a standard way of disseminating internal information to employees locally and in remote offices worldwide. Examples of such information include employee handbooks, corporate policies and medical insurance instructions. See extranet and infranet.

(2) The term as originally coined in the preceding definition has become so popular that it is often used to refer to any inhouse LAN and client/server system rather than an HTTP-based Web server infrastructure.

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(networking)

intranet - Any network which provides similar services within an organisation to those provided by the Internet outside it but which is not necessarily connected to the Internet. The commonest example is the use by a company of one or more World-Wide Web servers on an internal TCP/IP network for distribution of information within the company. Since about 1995, intranets have become a major growth area in corporate computing due to the availability of cheap or free commercial browser and web server software which allows them to provide a simple, uniform hypertext interface to many kinds of information and application programs. Some companies give limited access to their intranets to other companies or the general public. This is known as an "extranet".