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By Peggy Watt
IntraNet, 12/15/97

Many intranet management tasks are the same as general network administration: tracking traffic and balancing the load, making backups, and guarding against security breaches and viruses. For Web-specific issues, intranet managers first relied on home-grown tools, but the selection of commercial offerings is growing.

For example, Aziza, a division of object database vendor Objectivity, Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., specifically designed its Aziza Web tool suite to handle large sites. To do so, it built in functions such as replication, which distributes the usage load across several servers.

Aziza offers a console of four views: hierarchical, physical, a project view for authors, and a user's view that shows a person's Web whereabouts and lists who is accessing the site. It links to any Web server and uses the search engine from Verity, Inc., says Betty Watkins, director of marketing communications at Aziza.

Aziza also can create virtual servers as needed, and all replicated servers are peers for more efficient operations. A manager can replicate a database across several servers. If part of the system goes down, Aziza will shift the load and synchronize the data later.

Matthew Lonergan, Webmaster for the Stanford University Business School, in Stanford, Calif., is evaluating Aziza as a solution to version control problems created by having too many content editors.

"The guy who stores the document last wins when we have editing conflicts,'' Lonergan says. "Aziza converts the whole mess to a database and gives us real control, like we would have with a database - record-locking, version control and a clean interface.''

Lonergan has tested a variety of tools, but none has the industrial strength he needs for the 1,100-user mixed Unix and Windows NT environment at Stanford.

Ipswitch, Inc.'s What'sUp Gold provides what Autodesk, Inc., in San Rafael, Calif., needs to monitor traffic on its massive intranet, says Steven Litras, intranet technologies architect. Litras says he likes the tool because it supports a variety of protocols.

What'sUp Gold 3.5, shipping this month, adds support for IPX, displays network use statistics through a browser and provides network maps.

High-end solutions like Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView would no doubt do the job but offer more management detail than he needs, even on Autodesk's large intranet, Litras says.

The Canadian National Foreign Affairs and International Trade Office manages 6G bytes of material on its intranet with the help of the Basis document management suite from Information Dimensions, Inc., of Dublin, Ohio.

"The biggest challenge has been the actual information management - how we keep track of information, what kind of management rules we impose,'' says Diane Crouse, deputy director of information sources at the Ottawa offices. "As with a lot of Web projects, it started small and grew, and once we'd gone too far to go back, we had to make sure it was well-oiled.''

Basis provides a central console of document management functions, stores files in its database and can Web-enable documents for browser access. The Canadian government offices installed a Basis database nearly three years ago and implemented the Web layer when the intranet went in about a year ago.

The database contains documents that range from consulate instructions and economic summit texts to the more typical human resources manuals and employee policies. The database also stores e-mail messages, many of which have large document attachments, says Crouse, estimating that some 9,000 users at Canadian government offices around the world rely on the information.

"Searching the database is now easier, faster and more productive, and the results are easier to download,'' Crouse says. Incredibly, many of its functions replaced hand indexing of paper documents.

Mercury Interactive, Inc.'s Astra SiteManager helps Webmaster Mark Vivanco track the ever-growing volume of documents and reports generated by users at TriTech Services, a Scataway, N.J.-based division of Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. Vivanco uses the Web mapping and management functions primarily to identify and clean out duplicate and superfluous files.

"We generate so many dynamic reports on a busy market day, we've been known to run out of disk space if we try to archive them all for too long,'' Vivanco says. "With Astra, I can scan the whole site, identify objects, even identify Java applets, and check all the links,'' he says.

Vivanco also took advantage of Astra's open API to develop custom plug-ins for TriTech applications. Mercury Interactive also is taking a cue from browser manufacturers. Astra accepts plug-ins, notably a log analysis and reporting tool called NetIntellect, from WebManage Technologies, Inc., in White Plains, N.Y. For intranet managers, NetIntellect 2.1 gathers information such as the number of visitors, peak usage times and most frequently viewed pages and files.

- Peggy Watt