| This thesis examines the impact of Intranets on data communication implementation in the presence of client/server systems. Case studies, an online survey, and a practical implementation of a client/server system and an Intranet, test the hypothesis that Intranets are altering the structure of data communication implementation in comparison to client/server systems. The future of data communication will heavily depend on the combined strength of client/server architecture. The simplicity and openness of the Internet provides the tools to protect and leverage existing skills and investments for building stable information systems, and are the focus of this thesis. The unique properties of the Intranets and client/server systems as a communication medium and the literature on them have been employed in this thesis to derive the hypothesized effects on the introduction of Intranets into data communication in the presence of client/server systems. These are as follows: (1) Intranets save time; are easy to develop, deploy, and maintain; are platform independent, can access data from complex structures throughout a network, and involve no user re-training for new interfaces, low administration and support costs; (2) Client/server quality levels are suspect, their development methodologies are very immature, data consistency among client/server applications is questionable, and their maintenance costs are steep. |
