Many organisations now promote teamwork because it is so effective - The value of teams is enhanced when they are properly supported and there is no single area which gives a better return than technology: Team members can now talk to each other almost anywhere, thanks to the cellular phone. They can pass ideas and documents around using email. And they can post information onto web sites.  

A look at some of the web technology
you can use to support teams,
written for the non-technical!

All this on top of the kinds of applications we almost take for granted these days: word processing, presentation aids (where would we be without PowerPoint?) and spreadsheets, to name but three.

I'm not going to get to hung up on the basic technologies here: The Microsoft Office applications and other equivalent offerings are mainstream business tools now. I still tend to think of the PDA as being somewhere between a luxury and a very expensive toy - Where it actually falls, in a given instance, seems to be down to its owner! So I'll stay on the fence there. Web servers are almost as easy to install as a desktop application.

What I'd like to discuss here are the technologies we have available to support the team's communications and to avoid getting too involved in their technicalities. The communications, as here:

• The team's leader becomes strong and effective
• The team makes informed decisions, meeting clearly-define objectives
• The team acts quickly to implement and reacts quickly to improve
• Finding a balance in skills and motivation in team members
• Talking to one another and sharing ideas 

But these properties begin to make the team insular, tending to operate for the good of the organisation without letting the organisation know what it is the team is achieving. In the long term, especially with permanent teams, the team can also begin to loose sight of the current requirements of the organisation.

Taking team members out of the general organisation takes away their opportunity to learn what it is that the organisation needs. So there needs to be a mechanism by which the team can talk to the organisation and the organisation can talk to the team.
 

Before web technology became widespread, documents were usually pushed out to their recipients. Books, directories, hard-copy from word processors and spreadsheet applications, presentations on OHP slides. All these physical documents cost money to print, store and distribute. Often their life expectancy is very short: They go out of date and version control becomes an issue. And - in spite of the production, distribution and storage costs - once they are out of date they are mostly useless: They are usually thrown away, which also costs money.

Also, links between material in one document and another were restricted to a list of references which, by the time you follow it up, may or may not still be current.

A document tended - before the web - to be worked on by one person at a time. More recently, a draft may have been emailed around a work group or team, or its location on a file server notified to team members but collaborative working, in real time, wasn't truly possible.

All of this means that it was always hard to get the most up to date documentation and the IT available didn't actually support team work.

The advent of web technology has changed this model forever: Almost all public information is now available on the worldwide web on the internet.

An intranet is a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) that connects together the computers, printers, scanners and other IT resources in an organisation.

Generally we would consider an intranet to reach all corners of an organisation but be private to the enterprise.

An intranet can include computers running web servers, providing intranet web sites. These sites will have uniform resource locators (URLs) like http://servername rather than worldwide web addresses like http://www.google.com.

The implementation of an intranet is important, as highlighted by this item, Poor intranet design hampers usability, from Computing, dated 21. November 2002 (See original item at computing.co.uk)

And, where there are links between one information source and others, hyperlinks are there to allow you to follow references at the click of a mouse.

Only a couple of years back, most enterprises saw a web site as being something perhaps desirable but also being something apart from their core business processes - Like mounting a billboard poster campaign: Key to improving business results but nothing to do with the workings of the business itself. Now, web sites are much more closely integrated with business processes. Since most organisations now have an intranet - a local area or wide area network (see What is an intranet?) - the benefits of web technology can be seen here, too: Reducing the costs of paper documentation, improving version control and access to current information, improving documentation and making documentation interactive, collaborative.

The next step from there in web technology is to make it genuinely interactive. In many companies few users has direct access that allows them to place their documents on the web site or to update existing documentation. The usual procedure has been for users to submit material to a systems administrator (a webmaster, even) and for that person to place the content into the web. The web administrator probably doesn't understand the content of the pages posted (or their importance) and the document's originator doesn't control the presentation of the material.

And there is an inevitable time delay in a two-step posting - a delay which could be unacceptable if the document is updated often, maybe hourly, as might be the case with despatch documents when vehicles are being loaded and goods despatched to customers 24x7.

For a company intranet to become a genuinely effective, interactive resource (rather than a network of computers) its web sites must allow everyone to contribute and become involved in the presentation of content.

For an interactive web to work properly everyone must be using compatible file formats and software which is, at least, equivalent functionally. (At its most basic, a web site will struggle to present a site that looks exactly the same when viewed in different browsers. The pages of many internet sites contain masses of coding just to determine what browser the client is using and to deliver properly formatted pages for that particular browser.)

In some ways all this shows that organisations using wall-to-wall Microsoft products have a distinct advantage in implementation. On an intranet with Windows 2000 servers and Windows 2000/Office 2000 on the desktop, almost anyone can set up and maintain a collaborative web site and anyone able to use the Office applications can both use the site and contribute to it. Same with Windows XP.

As you move, through Windows NT or 98, Apple Mac, Unix and Linux, away from the current-release Microsoft model the implementation needs to address more issues individually but, with some development effort, a site's usability should be at least as good and the cost of providing the site will, if anything, be reduced.

If you're just testing the water on web technology, bear in mind that providing dynamic pages can be achieved through buying in third party products or by developing them. There are WYSIWYG editors in highly-functional development applications, like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft's FrontPage. There are developers out there writing code in JavaScript, PHP, VBScript and others and talking to some of these guys could be a useful step in scoping and costing a site.

Other points to bear in mind might be that, Dreamweaver for instance, is not server specific and allows development of sites for any web server. PHP and JavaScript are supported by most web servers - Apache and Microsoft's IIS, to name but two - while active server pages (ASP) using VBscript is restricted to Microsoft IIS servers.

Before we look at how a web site might be created and run, let's take a brief look back at what we've covered so far.

Most enterprises now have an intranet although it may well be known as a network. It will probably have been implemented to connect together computers and to share resources like printers, disc storage and internet connection.

Microsoft products provide a range of compatible applications (most of which are probably already in use on a Microsoft desktop) that can be used to facilitate a web. Microsoft products use the same model that can be emulated using other applications which include Lotus and a wide range of open source, public licenses products. You can do it yourself or you can get someone in to do it for you - You can spend almost nothing or you can spend an enormous amount.

The important point (as with most technology deployments) in getting all this to work properly is :

If everyone is involved, if everyone feels confident then anyone can use and contribute to a web site. And when everyone uses it, it becomes a valuable resource.

First off we need to decide on the toolkit we're going to use. Which applications you'll be using to

• Create WP documents
• Spreadsheets
• HTML web pages
• Business diagrams

To touch on but a few.

You'll also need to decide how documents will be rendered - Text placed in HTML web pages, available to download as WP files or neatly packaged up for viewing as PDFs, more commonly known as Acrobat files.
 

We also need to decide which web server to use. And where it will be installed - It doesn't have to be on a server (it can be on your desktop machine, for instance) but remember that, whichever machine you choose, it will have to be left switched on and connected to the network to be accessible.

The familiar URL http://address will still be used for an intranet site but instead of a worldwide web address - like http://www.google.com - your site will need an address on your network and this will usually be your computer's name.
 

In the example shown here, with the computer called teamsite (rather conveniently for the web-site's name!), the site will be at http://teamsite.

There's no reason why you can't make the site available on both your intranet and the internet if you want to. You can either

• set up a second version of the site (called a mirror site) and upload that to an internet web site - Means more admin, though
• make the same site available to your intranet users and to the worldwide web - Speak to your internet web site ISP about doing this

If you take the second option and make the same site available to both audiences, your intranet, internal users will access http://teamsite while internet, external users will use, say, http://teamsite.ourdomain.com, rather than your usual internet web site at http://www.ourdomain.com.

If you need added secure access (using secure sockets), for confidential information, say, you can use the secure https protocol, in which case internet access to your site will be https://teamsite.ourdomain.com.

Again, you can check with your ISP to see if this is available (it almost certainly will be part of your basic package) and how to use it.

Users of your web site will need a browser, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator or Opera (amongst others) to get access to your site plus applications to open any documents you might post to your site.

Theses additional applications could be Microsoft Word, Excel and suchlike but, in cases where the audience will be reading but not changing the documents, they can use products like Microsoft's Word Viewer which is free to download. (Microsoft's Download Center at http://office.microsoft.com/ downloads/ 2000/ wd97vwr32.aspx or search Microsoft for the text Word viewer). There are viewers for other Microsoft products: Each from http://www.microsft.com for the product name and the text Viewer.

One of the most popular viewers (for one of the most popular online document formats) is Acrobat Reader from Adobe, which allows you to read files saved as PDF documents (PDF stands for Portable Document Format). Again, this can be downloaded free of charge from the Adobe web site (http://www.adobe.com/ products/ acrobat/ readstep2.html) and is also a regular on cover CDs from computing and internet magazines.