"Intranets are exactly the same as Internets with the exception that information and access is restricted to the boundaries of a corporate network," says Alan McCartney, senior software engineer and Intranet pioneer at Storage Technology Corp. (www.stortek.com) in Louisville.

StorageTek started its Intranet effort in 1993 as an experiment, long before the Web explosion. The major difference, he explains, is that people outside the corporation are not allowed access.

Although there are no statistics yet showing how much Intranets save in terms of productivity and company resources, Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., estimates more than one in five large corporations now run Intranets, up from almost none in 1994.

"People are already familiar with using Web browser technology, so it's a natural progression to use it in business," Forrester analyst Don Stromberg says.

Intranets and the Internet use the same tools and techniques, protocols and products, drawing heavily on the standards of the TCP/IP world. Intranets usually begin as a grassroots effort, with just a few people putting up Web pages because it was fun. "Then we realized it could be used for real information," says Kim Snyder, engineer at Qualcomm in Boulder (www.qualcomm.com), headquartered in San Diego.

Efforts like these quickly attract enough users on the corporate network to warrant the attention of top management.

"We started doing internal Web stuff after hours to show its importance: We wanted the company to let us develop this during regular hours. Our senior vice president saw what it could do and sold the Intranet to the company," says Christine Park, an engineer and project lead for Web efforts for Qualcomm's 3,500-employee San Diego office.

Now Qualcomm has five full-time people and 50 others at headquarters contributing, along with Snyder and engineer Ray Keller in Boulder, who spend a few hours every week adding local information. "But the truth is, whoever takes an active interest here can do it," Snyder says.

"Running internal Webs is the best way to distribute information in the company in terms of implementation, multi-platform support, ease of maintenance and use, and built-in capabilities," notes Paul Worthington, system administrator of Evolving Systems, or ESI (http://www.evolving.com), headquartered in Englewood, with a Boulder office. "Companies can create one set of Web pages that can be viewed on any type of operating system."

What's on an Intranet? You name it: corporate policy, human resources and benefits information, training manuals, company phone books, job postings, product and pricing information, financial data, maps, local recreation and sporting events, and internal discussion groups. ESI even has local restaurant menus from which employees can order lunch.

Other companies use an Intranet for videoconferencing, swapping files, inventory, product information and pricing. Anything that was traditionally printed is now on-line, thus saving labor, printing costs and "time to locate paper phone books and look up numbers," Park says.

ESI's Worthington added Frequently Asked Questions to the firm's internal site so "we no longer have to keep answering the same questions. We can direct users to problem-solving documents on the Web," he says. Software engineers "distribute project-related information among themselves and technical writers can rapidly publish some documents. We have been able to get important information out of people's desks and notebooks and onto the Web where anybody anywhere in the company can reach it whenever they need it. This is a huge benefit."

The most popular feature on Qualcomm's Intranet is the "Photo Phind." Users type in any employee's name and his or her photo pops up, along with their position in Qualcomm's hierarchy and the name of an immediate supervisor, the people on the same level, and the people who report to him or her. According to Park, this allows employees to better grasp the corporate structure and determine who should be consulted on important decisions.

One of the most requested Intranet features for larger companies is the ability to schedule conference rooms. The Digital Foundry (http://www.digitalfoundry.com) in Boulder helps solve that problem with its Intranet software, Reserve.

With it, companies also can schedule facilities, training centers, racquetball and tennis courts, and a variety of equipment. "Even with e-mail and voice-mail, it gets confusing and hard to track who has scheduled what room when, especially on large campuses," such as U S West and Storage Technology, according to Digital Foundry Vice President Tim Carlin.

"Right now, applications for these purposes, like Meeting Maker for the Mac, are specific to a platform. Unix or PC users are locked out. But you can use Reserve on most Web browsers on any platform," he says. Reserve enables a company to put up maps or floor plans of its campuses, with highlighted conference rooms, for example. Click on a room, and up comes a calendar showing the times of reservations and who to contact. "You don't need any additional software for the basic applications," Carlin says.

He envisions future uses in libraries and health clubs as they get internal sites.

Most Intranets have a password or other security restrictions to keep out prying eyes and hackers. Storage Technology is investigating security "in the form of encryption and authentication," McCartney says. To avoid problems, "the system is self-policing. Items of questionable nature are usually not put on to the system." ESI and Qualcomm both use password protection.

"The biggest downside is defining who can see what. There's a human process and education problem. Sometimes an engineer will need to get information or drawings to a client or potential customer, so he'll download it from the internal site and fax it to them, forgetting that those pages are proprietary," Park says.

Park also says educating employees is an ongoing process that needs to be done more aggressively.

What's in store for future Intranets? ESI's Worthington offers these suggestions: