The Computer Revolution/Networks/Intranet

What is an Intranet and what are its benefits?
An intranet is a privately maintained computer network that can be accessed only by authorized persons, especially members or employees of the organization that owns it.

The main purpose of an intranet is to share company information and computing resources among employees. An intranet can also be used to facilitate working in groups and for teleconferences over long distances. It is similar to the internet as users search for information, however it is rarely used to store information outside the scope of the users occupation and industry.

Benefits

 * 1) Simple routine question and answers can be kept on the intranet to cut down on interoffice chatter.
 * 2) Form Finding. Do your employees spend time chasing paper ? trying to hunt down paper forms, reports, documents? How much time would be saved if each form is saved on the internet and is with a few key strokes of everyone's fingertips!
 * 3) Company Growth and targets. Having such information as the company's targets and goals for each employee can educate employees on how their jobs affect the company's targets and ultimately bottom line.
 * 4) Training. By having on-line training materials. Employees can learn during their work hours right at their own desks.

So Who has Intranets?
Surprisingly enough, a lot of corporations use intranets. Most education system use them to provide on-line courses,registration information, administration steps for current students. Banks are connected to show current account information from branches across the globe. Airline have on-line booking of ticket schedules for travel agents around the world.

Ethernet crossover cable network
A simple, two-computer network between two computers can be created using an Ethernet crossover cable. As in any other TCP/IP network, each computer needs to be assigned a unique IP address. In this network configuration, a default gateway is not used and can be unspecified.

Information on how to deploy such network on Windows systems can be found here