An intranet is a computer network that uses Internet Protocol technology to share information, operationalsystems, or computing services within an organization. This term is used in contrast to internet, a network between organizations, and instead refers to a network within an organization. Sometimes, the term refers only to the organiz

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Banks > Advantages and Disadvantages of ATM Machines and Bank/Debit Cards

Advantages and Disadvantages of ATM Machines and Bank/DebitCards 

Advantages Disadvantages

Debit

Card

You don’t have to carry cash around with you.

If your card is stolen, the thief cannot get your money without your PIN.

You can use it to pay at some retail shops.

Keeps your money safe.

 If you forget yourPIN number you cannot use the card.

The system can be off-line.

Training is needed. Difficult to

maintain spending discipline.

ATMorBankCard

You can withdraw cash at any time, day or night. The banks don’t need tobe open.

ATMs offer the convenience of multiple locations. You can withdraw cash at any bank that is part of the system to which your ATM card is linked.

Your ATM card is protected by a PIN, keeping your money safe.

You don’t need to fill out withdrawaland deposit slips as is required at the bank.

ATMs are faster than going to the bank—no long lines.

You can withdraw cash at ATMs in foreign countries.

ATM may be off-line (system down).

You may forget your PIN number.

Risk of robbery whenyou leave the ATM.

The ATM can break down or run out of cash.

Fees charged to use ATMs of other banks can become expensive.

© Microfinance Opportunities. Extract from Bank Services: Know Your Options, 2006. Product of the Global Financial Education Program.

<< Tips For Using Debit Cards, POS Machines and ATMs Safely

How to W ithdraw Money from an ATM >>

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ation's internal website, but may be a more extensive part of the organization's information technology infrastructure, and may be composed of multiple local area networks. The objective is to organize each individual's desktop with minimal cost, time and effort to be more productive, cost efficient, timely, and competitive.

An intranet may host multiple private websites and constitute an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration. Any of the well known Internet protocols may be foundin an intranet, such as HTTP (web services), SMTP (e-mail), and FTP (file transfer protocol). Internet technologies are often deployed to provide modern interfaces to legacy information systems hosting corporate data.

An intranet can be understood as a private analog of the Internet, or as a private extension of the Internet confined to an organization. The first intranet websites and home pages were published in 1991,[1][2] and began to appear in non-educational organizations in 1994.[3]

Intranets are sometimes contrasted to extranets. While intranets aregenerally restricted to employees of the organization, extranets mayalso be accessed by customers, suppliers, or other approved parties.[4] Extranets extend a private network onto the Internet with special provisions for authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA protocol).

In many organizations, intranets are protected from unauthorized external access by means of a network gateway and firewall. For smaller companies, intranets may be created simply by using private IP address ranges, such as 192.168.0.0/16. In these cases, the intranet can only be directly accessed from a computer in the local network; however, companies may provide access to off-site employeesby using a virtual private network, or by other access methods, requiring user authentication and encryption.

 

Table of Contents

1 Uses

2 Benefits

3 Planning and creation

4 Intranet software

5 See also

6 References

Uses [edit]

Increasingly, intranets are being used to deliver tools, e.g. collaboration (to facilitate working in groups and teleconferencing)or sophisticated corporate directories, sales and customer relationship management tools, project management etc., to advance productivity.

Intranets are also being used as corporate culture-change platforms.For example, large numbers of employees discussing key issues in an intranet forum application could lead to new ideas in management, productivity, quality, and other corporate issues.

In large intranets, website traffic is often similar to public website traffic and can be better understood by using web metrics software to track overall activity. User surveys also improve intranet website effectiveness. Larger businesses allow users withintheir intranet to access public internet through firewall servers. They have the ability to screen messages coming and going keeping security intact.

When part of an intranet is made accessible to customers and others outside the business, that part becomes part of an extranet. Businesses can send private messages through the public network, using special encryption/decryption and other security safeguards toconnect one part of their intranet to another.

Intranet user-experience, editorial, and technology teams work together to produce in-house sites. Most commonly, intranets are managed by the communications, HR or CIO departments of large organizations, or some combination of these.

Because of the scope and variety of content and the number of systeminterfaces, intranets of many organizations are much more complex than their respective public websites. Intranets and their use are growing rapidly. According to the Intranet design annual 2007 from Nielsen Norman Group, the number of pages on participants' intranetsaveraged 200,000 over the years 2001 to 2003 and has grown to an average of 6 million pages over 2005–2007.[5]

Benefits [edit]

Workforce productivity: Intranets can help users to locate and view information faster and use applications relevant to their roles and responsibilities. With the help of a web browser interface, users can access data held in any database the organization wants to make available, anytime and — subject to security provisions — from anywhere within the company workstations, increasing employees' ability to perform their jobs faster, more accurately, and with confidence that they have the right information. It also helps to improve the services provided to the users.

Time: Intranets allow organizations to distribute information to employees on an as-needed basis; Employees may link to relevant information at their convenience, rather than being distracted indiscriminately by email.

Communication: Intranets can serve as powerful tools for communication within an organization, vertically strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organization. The type of information that can easily be conveyed is the purpose of the initiative and what the initiative is aiming to achieve, who is driving the initiative, results achieved to date, and who to speak to for more information. By providing this information on the intranet, staff have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with the strategic focus of the organization. Some examples of communication would be chat, email, and or blogs. A great real world example of where an intranet helped a company communicate is when Nestle had a number of food processing plants in Scandinavia. Their central support system had to deal with a number of queries every day.[6] When Nestle decided to invest in an intranet, they quickly realized the savings. McGovern says the savings from the reduction in query calls was substantially greater than the investment in the intranet.

Web publishing allows cumbersome corporate knowledge to be maintained and easily accessed throughout the company using hypermedia and Web technologies. Examples include: employee manuals,benefits documents, company policies, business standards, news feeds, and even training, can be accessed using common Internet standards (Acrobat files, Flash files, CGI applications). Because each business unit can update the online copy of a document, the most recent version is usually available to employees using the intranet.

Business operations and management: Intranets are also being used asa platform for developing and deploying applications to support business operations and decisions across the internetworked enterprise.

Cost-effective: Users can view information and data via web-browser rather than maintaining physical documents such as procedure manuals, internal phone list and requisition forms. This can potentially save the business money on printing, duplicating documents, and the environment as well as document maintenance overhead. For example, the HRM company PeopleSoft "derived significant cost savings by shifting HR processes to the intranet".[6] McGovern goes on to say the manual cost of enrolling in benefitswas found to be USD109.48 per enrollment. "Shifting this process to the intranet reduced the cost per enrollment to $21.79; a saving of 80 percent". Another company that saved money on expense reports wasCisco. "In 1996, Cisco processed 54,000 reports and the amount of dollars processed was USD19 million".[6]

Enhance collaboration: Information is easily accessible by all authorised users, which enables teamwork.

Cross-platform capability: Standards-compliant web browsers are available for Windows, Mac, and UNIX.

Built for one audience: Many companies dictate computer specifications which, in turn, may allow Intranet developers to write applications that only have to work on one browser (no cross-browser compatibility issues). Being able to specifically address your "viewer" is a great advantage. Since Intranets are user-specific (requiring database/network authentication prior to access), you know exactly who you are interfacing with and can

personalize your Intranet based on role (job title, department) or individual ("Congratulations Jane, on your 3rd year with our company!").

Promote common corporate culture: Every user has the ability to viewthe same information within the Intranet.

Immediate updates: When dealing with the public in any capacity, laws, specifications, and parameters can change. Intranets make it possible to provide your audience with "live" changes so they are kept up-to-date, which can limit a company's liability.

Supports a distributed computing architecture: The intranet can alsobe linked to a company’s management information system, for example a time keeping system.

Planning and creation [edit]

Most organizations devote considerable resources into the planning and implementation of their intranet as it is of strategic importance to the organization's success. Some of the planning wouldinclude topics such as:

The purpose and goals of the intranet[7][8]

Persons or departments responsible for implementation and management

Functional plans, information architecture, page layouts, design[9]

Implementation schedules and phase-out of existing systems

Defining and implementing security of the intranet

How to ensure it is within legal boundaries and other constraints

Level of interactivity (e.g. wikis, on-line forms) desired.

Is the input of new data and updating of existing data to be centrally controlled or devolved

These are in addition to the hardware and software decisions (like content management systems), participation issues (like good taste, harassment, confidentiality), and features to be supported.[10]

Intranets are often static sites. Essentially they are a shared drive, serving up centrally stored documents alongside internal

articles or communications (often one-way communication). However organisations are now starting to think of how their intranets can become a 'communication hub' for their team by using companies specialising in 'socialising' intranets.[11] The actual implementation would include steps such as:

Securing senior management support and funding.[12]

Business requirements analysis.

Identify users' information needs.

Installation of web server and user access network.

Installing required user applications on computers.

Creation of document framework for the content to be hosted.[13]

User involvement in testing and promoting use of intranet.

Ongoing measurement and evaluation, including through benchmarking against other intranets.[14][15]

Another useful component in an intranet structure might be key personnel committed to maintaining the Intranet and keeping content current. For feedback on the intranet, social networking can be donethrough a forum for users to indicate what they want and what they do not like.

Intranet software [edit]

Microsoft SharePoint is the dominant software used for creating intranets. Estimates indicate that around 50% of all intranets are developed using SharePoint,[16] however there are many alternatives.[17] Other popular intranet software includes:

Autonomy Corporation

Atlassian Confluence

Drupal

eXo Platform

Liferay

Lotus Notes

OpenText

Plone (software)

SAP NetWeaver Portal

IBM Websphere

Interact Intranet

Intranet Connections

Claromentis

Intranet Dashboard

Jive Software

Joomla

Sitecore

Sorce Intranet

Oracle Fusion Middleware

ThoughtFarmer

Tridion

See also [edit]

eGranary Digital Library

Enterprise portal

Intranet portal

Intranet strategies

Intraweb

Intranet Wiki

Local area network

SharePoint

Virtual workplace

Wide area network

Web portal

Kwangmyong (intranet)

References [edit]

^ Luk, A. (9 May 1991). "Fujikama goes Unix". IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal Processing, 1991 (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 2: 783–786. doi:10.1109/PACRIM.1991.160857. ISBN 0879426381. Retrieved 2013-03-

04. "The internet and intranet Unix network provide a functioning email facility around the world." 

^ Richardson, C.; Schoultz, M. (14 October 1991). "Formation flight system design concept". Digital Avionics Systems Conference, 1991. Proceedings., IEEE/AIAA 10th: 18–25. doi:10.1109/DASC.1991.177138. Retrieved 2013-03-04. "The data transfer task is broken up into two network solutions: an intranet used for transferring data among formation members at high update rates to support close formation flight and an internet used for transferring data among the separateformations at lower update rates." 

^ Nielsen, J. and Sano, D., '1994 Design of SunWeb - Sun Micro-systems' Intranet', Useit.com, 1994.

^ Callaghan, J (2002). Inside Intranets & Extranets: Knowledge Management AND the Struggle for Power. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-98743-8. 

^ Pernice Coyne, Kara; Schwartz, Mathew; Nielsen, Jakob (2007), "Intranet Design Annual 2007", Nielsen Norman Group

^ a b c McGovern, Gerry

^ Wright, Andrew. "8 good business reasons for having an intranet". Retrieved 3 September 2013. 

^ Wright, Andrew. "From innovation to operation: the role of the intranet". Retrieved 3 September 2013. 

^ Ward, Toby (2006-06-11). "Leading an intranet redesign". IntranetBlog. Retrieved 2009-04-03. 

^ LaMee, James A. (2002-04-30). "Intranets and Special Libraries: Making the most of inhouse communications". University of South Carolina. Retrieved 2009-04-03. 

^ Scaplehorn, geoff (2010-03-01). "Bringing the internet indoors - socialising your intranet". IntranetBlog. Retrieved 2010-03-03. 

^ Ward, Toby. "Planning: An Intranet Model for success Intranet". Retrieved 2009-04-03. 

^ "Intranet: Table of Contents – Macmillan Computer Sciences: Internet and Beyond". Bookrags.com. Retrieved 2009-04-03. 

^ "Intranet benchmarking explained". Intranet Benchmarking Forum. Retrieved 2009-04-03. 

^ "Benchmarking intranet end user satisfaction". Retrieved 2013-09-03. 

^ Wright, Andrew. "On what technologies do companies use to develop their intranets". Retrieved 3 September 2013. 

^ Wright, Andrew. "What alternatives are there to SharePoint for an intranet?". Retrieved 3 September 2013. 

McGovern, Gerry (November 18, 2002). "Intranet return on investment case studies". Retrieved 2009-04-03. 

"Making the most of your corporate intranet". April 2, 2009. Retrieved 2009-04-02. 

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Intranet&oldid=37481"

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BRIEF HISTORY of the INTERNET

The Internet originated in the late 1960s when the United States Defense Department developed ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency network), an experimental network of computers designed to withstand partial outages such as a bomb attack. The agency sought to create a web of computers that could continue to communicate witheach other, even if some of the computers were disabled. In the mid-1980s, when desktop computer workstations became increasingly popular, organizations wanted to connect their local area networks (LANs) to ARPAnet. If computers could link together and share resources, everyone would benefit.

To help speed the connections, the National Science Foundation(NSF) established five super computing centers in 1986, creating the NSFnet backbone. In 1987, the NSF signed a cooperative agreement to manage the NSFnet backbone with MeritNetwork, Inc., and by 1990, ARPAnet had been phased out. NSFnet continued to grow, and more and more countries around the world connected to this Internet backbone.

1991 was a big year for the Internet: The National Research and Education Network (NREN) was founded and the World Wide Web was released. The Internet is still dominated by scientists and other academics, but begins to attract public interest. With the release of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993 and Netscape in 1994, interest in and use of the World Wide Web exploded. More and more communities become wired, enablingdirect connections to the Internet. In 1995, the U.S. federal government relinquished its management role in the Internet and NSFnet reverted back to being a research network. Interconnected network providers are strong enough now to support U.S. backbone traffic on the Internet. However, the presidential administration encourages continued development of the U.S. backbone of the Internet, also knows as the National Information Infrastructure (NII)-- and, most commonly, as the "Information Superhighway".

SEE Timeline of Internet History

http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HI T.html

Return to The Internet and Your Children Discuss everything to do with organization advantage

Explore Answers About

Benefits of a Company Intranet

Advantages of Intranet in Business

Intranet Definitions

Advantage Disadvantage Intranet

Benefit Intranet

Intranet Internet Difference

Disadvantages Intranets

Setting up an Intranet

Advantages of Using Intranet

Intranet Design Examples

Advantages of Intranets

Workforce productivity: Intranets can help users to locate and view information faster and use applications relevant to their roles and responsibilities. With the help of a web browser interface, users can access data held in any database the organization wants to make available, anytime and - subject to security provisions - from anywhere within the company workstations, increasing employees' ability to perform their jobs faster, more accurately, and with confidence that they have the right information. It also helps to improve the services provided to the users.Time: With intranets, organizations can make more information available to employees on a "pull" basis (ie: employees can link to relevant information at atime which suits them) rather than being deluged indiscriminately by emails.Communication: Intranets can serve as powerful tools for communication within an organization, vertically and horizontally. From a communications standpoint, intranets are useful to communicate strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organization. The type of information that can easily be conveyed is the purpose of the initiative and what the initiative is aiming to achieve, who is driving the initiative, results achieved to date, and who to speak to for more information. By providing this information on the intranet, staff have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with the strategic focus of the organization.Web publishing allows 'cumbersome' corporate knowledge to be maintained and easily accessed throughout the company using hypermedia and Web technologies. Examples include: employee manuals, benefits documents, company policies, business standards, newsfeeds, and even training, can be accessed using common Internet standards (Acrobat files, Flash files, CGI applications). Because each business unit can update the online copy of a document, the most recent version is always available to employees using the intranet.Business operations and management: Intranets are also being used as a platform for developing and deploying applications to support business operations and decisions across the internetworked enterprise.Cost-effective: Users can view information and data via web-browser rather than maintaining physical documents such as procedure manuals, internal phone list and requisition forms.Promote common corporate culture: Every user is viewing the same information within the Intranet.Enhance Collaboration: With information easily accessible by all authorised users, teamwork is enabled.Cross-platform Capability: Standards-compliant web browsers are available for Windows, Mac, and UNIX.

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Intranet Connections Blog

Bank Intranets Do Better Business

by Carolyn Douglas | 1 comment | Add a comment

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Intranet Connections’ Sample Credit Union Intranet

It was Wednesday morning and I had just hit the office after battling the Edgemont Village crowd piling intoStarbucks for their morning caffeine fix. I ran up the stairs and plunked down my Starbucks cup to find an

invitation to attend a bank intranet tour with Ephrata National Bank from Ephrata, PA.

We LOVE Banks

Banks are awesome customers. We have over 260 customers in the financial sector who have purchased Connections and many of them, like Ephrata National Bank, have been on our intranet software for coming up

on a decade. We feel fortunate and amazed to have such terrific customers.

Bank Intranet Champions

Our champions over at Ephrata National Bank were so kind to take 90 minutes to show us their “Buzz”, thebank’s intranet. The enthusiasm they have for their intranet shone through and we had a great chat about howwe could help them more in processes like on-boarding and delegation of sites, including a desire to

a site for their Board of Directors and secure it so that the Board can login with tablets and shareinformation, review documents and cast votes on Board initiatives. They have a lot of sites on their bankintranet, including sites for all departments and branches. As Ephrata is expanding, they are adding new

branch sites all of the time on their intranet.

Trending Bank Intranet Ideas

We are definitely seeing the pendulum swing on bank intranets. A curiosity has arisen from social tools, butmostly it is about core business functions for the intranet to streamline and support, and facilitatingself-sufficiency, which is huge for their tellers. These are front-line employees directly serving the

customer and they need access to information and the ability to fill out online forms on the intranet, asthey interact with the customer.  For example, the tellers use their bank intranet to report any large cashtransactions. Their BSA department uses this online form heavily, with the added benefit of staged

workflows and capturing, storing and reporting on these transactions for auditing purposes.

Because we have such a wide range of customers in the financial sector, we see some great examples on how toleverage a bank intranet.  Here are some other interesting ideas on how to leverage your bank intranet:

Compliance Checklist

To ensure proper procedures are followed, a compliance checklist application can be created through ourApplication Builder tool. It would list the number of steps an employee would check off as completed forcompliance. This could then be routed to their immediate supervisor or a workflow of managers to sign off

on, and then stored for compliance audits.

System Up/Down Notifications

Create an application that allows employees in various locations to report when different systems are onlineor down. Triggers can be set to notify the IT department. The workflow process looks similar to:

1. Summary page which displays current status of all systems2. User can report an outage, and IT can respond they are aware3. Users can see of other users have already reported an outage

4. IT can report status updates5. Notifications when system is back up

Know Your Client

When selling financial products, investment advisors need to comply with “Know Your Client” regulations. Forexample, they may need to prove that the investment matches the customer’s risk profile. You can use our

Form Builder to build a form where the investment advisor answers questions regarding a customer’s income,time horizon, knowledge sophistication, and then shows which investments are suited based on the answers.

This can easily be done through form triggers, built right into our Form Builder. If certain investments areselected, it can kick off a review of high risk, moving through a workflow routing and approval process.

The Power of Intranet Connections

When you have in-depth functionality through powerful applications, it allows you to build what you need foryour own bank intranet. We extend that by offering you a highly easy to use and versatile platform to

essentially give you a “sky is the limit” environment.

Better business is usually about saving costs, streamlining processes, facilitating staff to deliveroutstanding customer service, sharing team wins, and the power of culture and sharing rewards.

was about how to do that with a bank intranet, but truly, there is just so much you can do when you leveragethe tools you have! It is about realizing the potential, and using your intranet to build better business

practices. We are truly thrilled to be in a position to help you do that.

Bio

Latest Posts

Carolyn Douglas

Founder & CEO at Intranet ConnectionsSince the launch of Intranet Connections in 1999 we have had the awesome experience of seeing our intranet software

grow with a global client base of over 1600 organizations world-wide. Our company philosophy is to provide a drop-deadsimple intranet software, go the extra mile with our customers, and to deliver on business engagement with a blend of

creativity and ease of use.

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Filed under: Best Practices,Finance Intranet | 1 comment | Add a comment

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One Response to “Bank Intranets Do Better Business”

1. Toby Ward says:

June 13, 2013 at 5:01 PM

Very well-written and positioned, Carolyn And I know that Edgemont coffee crowd can frazzle thebrain… so, kudos!

Perhaps we should have you and your client speak at our next available conference?

-Toby

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