Intranets used as corporate cosmetics, says Soft Option chief

NEWS Many firms are hyping up their intranet development in a bid to appear forward-looking. The accusation came from technical director of Soft Option, Mark Howells, in an exclusive interview with Silicon.com. "People are trying to project their company as a forward-looking company by claiming intranet functionality," he said. When Soft Option - a Windows migration software specialist - conducted a survey earlier this year, it found that companies rating intranets high on their list of priorities. However, Howells claimed many are just dipping their toes in the water, putting small amounts of information on an office intranet, and keeping their core business on more conventional systems. Rob Hailstone, research director at Bloor Research, says the issue isn't whether companies have implemented full-scale intranets, it's that they are making genuinely useful information available company-wide. He also commented that the intranet seemed to be reaching a second phase in which most applications made use of a browser interface effectively making the intranet the most common office infrastructure. Howells rejected the idea that intranets could mean the end of the paper-based office, and claimed that mistrust of computer systems for all office procedures is understandable. "I don't think we need to give the intranet total control of everything that a computer operates upon - a certain amount of paper provides an auditable trail and there is no reason to rush to replace all of that." The full interview with Mark Howells is available on Silicon's Intranet Channel.