The intranet is dead, long live the intranet!

Working with a client more than a year ago on an information management requirement, i tried hard to avoid usage of the term intranet, because, as implemented at the time, it was little more than a thin wrapper around a set of shared network data drives. There was also a long menu of entry points into various legacy applications that grew as web services proliferated out of control.

More recently i have seen the same thing elsewhere, in this case, a leaky wrapper that is easily bypassed by anyone who knows the share names and how to connect to a network drive...

So i have promoted the use of different terms, or phrases, like "shared information portal" or "internal information services", clumsy stuff i know. The term intranet just carries so much currency, it is difficult to supplant, even though its meaning becomes less distinct by the day.

Today i came across a useful post from Jane McConnell (by way of Step Two) that shows the way forward. It also refers to an earlier post that relates efforts to replace the term intranet with something better.