You can think of an intranet as an internal Internet designed to be used within the confines of a company, university or organization. What distinguishes an intranet from the freely accessible Internet, is that intranets are private. Until recently most corporations relied on proprietary hardware and software systems to network its computers, a costly and time-consuming process made more difficult when offices are scattered around the world. Even under the best of conditions, sharing information among different hardware platforms, file formats and software is not an easy task. By using off-the-shelf Internet technology, intranets solve this problem, making internal communication and collaboration much simpler.

Intranets use TCP/IP to transmit information across the network, as well as HTML to create documents. Information is stored on one or more company servers and accessed by using a web browser, such as Navigator or Internet Explorer. This self-contained, miniature Internet can have all the same features -- individual home pages, newsgroups, e-mail - but they are restricted to company employees and contractors.