“Wilson Street’s intranet site is now being built – the first on Sites4Doctors. This will be a separate password-protected site with the address intranet.wilsonstreetsurgery.co.uk. We already have ideas for a number of innovative features for intranets, including a document-management system with update tracking and (programming skills permitting!) a holiday rota manager.”

…I can now tell you that Wilson Street’s intranet is operational, with full Site Management System functions. It is password-proteced using the same technology as the Site Management System, and has six security levels (0 to 5) so that access to specific folders can be restricted. Someone with a security level of 3, for example, can see any folders with access levels of 0-3 but none higher. Rather than upset people by telling them they can’t see certain content, the buttons for prohibited folders simply don’t appear on the button bar.

On document management (for both intranet and Internet sites) there is now a trap which is triggered if you try to upload a document with the same name as one already on your system. This will be developed so that, if you decide to over-write the existing one, the old one will be renamed by adding a timestamp to the end of its filename; you will then be able to retrieve earlier versions to track changes. If you use MS Office’s ‘Track Changes’ function, this provides a system for checking who has changed a document and when.

The URLs for intranets will be of the form ‘intranet.yourdomainname.co.uk’.

More features are under development, as – as always – any suggestions will be carefully considered.

The pricing for intranets is straightforward: both set-up and hosting/support are half the cost for the WWW site (£100 and £125 respectively).