Linking Intranets to Corporate Data

Tired of static HTML on the corporate intranet? If you answered yes, you are probably not alone. More and more companies are connecting their intranet to back-end legacy databases for the delivery of dynamic content. As the number of companies connecting their internal web sites to mission-critical information grow so grows the number of ways to deliver this content.

The first corporate intranets were nothing more than HTML versions of paper documents that were updated about as often as their paper counterparts. These pages are difficult to maintain and rarely keep the interest of the end user. Intranets that rely on static HTML documents to deliver information to employees quickly become stale. Content has always been king on the World Wide Web and the rule is no different for the intranet.

Linking the web-intranet interface to internal databases can offer a new paradigm. Instead of managing of managing hundreds of HTML documents, the intranet team can manage one database that publishes content to many dynamically-generated pages. This new data-driven intranet offers the user up to the date information and point-and-click access to information otherwise unavailable. With the addition of user profiles and preferences a database-driven intranet can deliver customized content and individualized web applications. Faster and better access to corporate information leads to more informed employees making better decisions for the future of their company.

Information does not have to flow just from the database to the intranet. It can also flow in reverse. With an link established between the intranet and database, authorized employees can use a web interface to maintain corporate information. No longer is a database administrator needed to make updates to the company SQL or Oracle databases. The person most responsible for the quality of the data is now in control of it.

Once a decision has been made to open the intranet-database gateway, certain factors must be taken into account when so that proper strategy is selected. The choice of technologies, development tools, and implementation methods will depend greatly on the current talents that exist within the organization (in-house or outsourced) and the current platforms running on the internal network. An organization that has made no commitment to a particular database or operating system vendor will find a vast array of web-database integration tools available. Those that have invested in a proprietary database or operating system vendor may find their choices more limited.

Two years ago the choices of how to access the corporate database were primarily limited to the use of CGI (Common Gateway Interface). This access normally ran from a program on the web server called by the web page. This program, normally written in Perl, would gather data from the database and pass it back to the web page. This process has proven to be very slow as the program must be executed each time a request is made from the intranet web site.

Today most database gateway products work directly with web server APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) such as ISAPI for Microsoft Internet Information Server and NSAPI for Netscape servers. Instead of a complete launch of a Perl program for every request, now the database query is powered by a file loaded into memory increasing query performance as much as 10 fold. When searching out products for intranet-database integration look to see if the product uses CGI or an API. If it works with an API, look to see if that API is used by your choice of web server.

The choice of technology and development product will depend greatly on what type of database you are looking to connect to and how much desire exists for open standards. Most database vendors such as Oracle, Lotus, and Informix offer web-database integration solutions. Most of these products are database specific and cannot be applied to other vendor databases. If a company has made a strong commitment to a particular database vendor then these products should be evaluated. The company must be wary of locking themselves into a proprietary solution. When in doubt choose an open standard.

Products built on a more open standard for database access normally use ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) drivers. These database specific drivers are used to connect to many types of databases making web applications more platform and database independent. Cold Fusion, by Allaire (Macromedia), is a great example of this type of product. Cold Fusion uses a server-side markup language, SQL statements, and powerful OBDC drivers to drive data to and from many types of corporate databases. LiveWire from Netscape and Active Server Pages from Microsoft are other good examples of web-database environments that can be used for intranet data publishing. Many of these products are specific to UNIX or Windows NT so be sure to investigate which products will best fit with current systems.

One of the newest ways to link an intranet and database is through the use of Java and JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) drivers. JDBC, inspired by ODBC, is the connectivity standard for developers programming in Java. Developers can use the combination of Java applets and JDBC to access corporate data. Currently this method of database connectivity will probably yield slower performance than tools using OBDC but better portability of applications across platforms.

Giving company employees access to the vast repositories of corporate knowledge can have a great positive impact on the effectiveness of the intranet. The weight of impact will have a lot to do with what development environment is chosen. Remember to look for products that fit well with the current organization and its future technology direction.