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A recent attempt at home renovation taught me a valuable lesson in foresight. While readying his home for sale, my friend and I spent countless hours sanding, painting, and covering up all the places his wife's little pug had marked its territory. The only thing that was left to be done was to wax the hardwood flooring in his former home office. It was a fairly small room so I convinced him that I would take care of it while he and his family go out and savor the warm weather.

A little more than 30 minutes later, the floor was shining like a new penny. I stood up to bask in my handiwork, the fresh smell of varnish making me more than a little giddy. Then my smile quickly turned to a frown. I looked at the blank wall behind me, to the floor beneath me, and then to the door — at the opposite end of the room.

"Rookie mistake," I thought to myself; I had waxed myself into a corner. After some very colorful expletives that made the neighbors cover their children's ears from my verbal onslaught, I managed to climb out through the window and execute a maneuver that can only be described as downright Spiderman-esque.

I blamed this lapse in judgment on the long hours and the paint fumes but I should have known better, I should have thought ahead instead of just hoping to get the job done quickly.

The Art of Intranet Forecasting

The system you build today may not be the system you end up with tomorrow. This is entirely normal since intranets are directly affected by changes in business requirements, shifting priorities, and organizational restructuring. Having nothing happen is the real symptom of a faltering system. If everything changes around an intranet and the intranet somehow stays the same, as though in a bubble, someone isn't doing their job.

Developers and content owners must follow the changes within their organization and adjust their intranet accordingly. In order to do this, your intranet must be flexible enough to accept these changes without requiring you to rebuild larges chunks of it. And this flexibility must be built into an intranet during system conception.

Intranet specs need to address issues that extend beyond the reach of your immediate requirements. What you think you don't need today may very well be a necessity a few months down the road. Aside from the obvious issues of technology — disk capacity, processor speed, network bandwidth — you also need to take into account organizational and business flux.

All of these things will affect the state of your intranet throughout its lifecycle. The only real issue is how much work will be required to make the necessary adjustments. To ensure that you don't end up developing yourself into a corner, you should always try to follow these rules:

• Build an extensible infrastructure
• Use industry standard technology
• Implement a modular intranet structure
• Encourage transfer of knowledge

Build an Extensible Infrastructure

I'm sure that many of us who grew up with an older sibling have less than fond memories of trotting off to school wearing clothes that were just a bit too big for us while our parents insisted, "you'll grow into them."

The memories of trying to run in shoes that felt as though they were more suited for some circus clown may have been buried deep within our subconscious, but we can now make use of these unwanted flashbacks to our advantage by applying the same principle to the implementation of our intranet infrastructure: it may seem like a lot for the intranet we have right now, but it will grow into it.

It's a fact of corporate life that we would try to do as much as possible for as little as possible. And as such, we are often tempted to save time, effort, and money by building only what's required to meet immediate needs. But departments and workgroups who were not part of initial planning may decide they would like to have a presence on the intranet, or remote branch offices may need access to the information on the corporate system via virtual private network (VPN). In a blink of an eye, disk capacity and bandwidth is maxed out.

This will lead to a reactionary mad-dash to boost the resources of an intranet that seems to be shrinking while requirements grow all around it. And soon the echoes of the sentiment “that should be enough for now” will ring in the heads of those tasked with implementing the upgrades.

You need to plan for the eventuality that your intranet will grow beyond your current infrastructure. This doesn't mean that you need to double up on everything, it just means that you should factor in ample wiggle room for future expansion.

The more adaptable your intranet is to the erratic changes in business requirements and priorities, the more likely it is to see the other side. Implementing a flexible intranet infrastructure should include addressing issues such as:

• disk capacity; present and future
• adequate bandwidth to handle growing user traffic
• memory and processor speed for database driven applications
• server distribution
• content and application structure (this is discussed a little later)

Use Industry Standard Technology

The longevity of your intranet depends not only on its content, but also the technology used to build and maintain that content. We have come to accept the fast-paced world of technology as a matter of fact and rarely stop long enough to consider the consequences that these changes have on our intranet.

With the speed in which technology — and the software vendors who support these technologies — changes, you may find yourself trying to support an intranet on defunct technology or using orphaned development tools from companies that are no longer in existence. This is why it's so important to use industry standard technology rather than proprietary technology.

Industry standard technology gives you a far greater advantage in:

• Personnel: You're much more likely to find experienced personnel to replace those who leave the company or are transferred to other groups. You won't be forced to find and possibly pay exorbitant consultation fees for niche programmers familiar with a very narrow and specific proprietary software or language.

• Flexibility: You won't be handcuffed to any one vendor's technology, so the fate of your intranet rests in your own hands rather than on the success or failure of a third party that you have little control over.

• Support: There are many more channels of support — Web forums, newsgroups, books — to help you overcome any obstacles you may come across.

Page 2: Implement a Modular Intranet Structure