The last two chapters explained how to set up your word processor and spreadsheet packages for use on your Intranet. This chapter turns to other everyday office applications you can use in your Intranet. I cover a variety of simple and complex packages, ranging from Access and PowerPoint (key components of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite) to a couple of other applications that were born on the Internet: News Xpress and Eudora.
Even if you don't use Microsoft Office, there are comparable commercial, freeware, and shareware applications to those in this integrated suite of programs. Competitive office suite packages like Corel's Perfect Office and Lotus's SmartSuite have similar applications. Whether you use Microsoft Office or any other type of document-creation software, you'll undoubtedly pick up ideas on how you can use your own applications from the examples in this chapter.
One example would be the Cardfile program that used to come free with Microsoft Windows 3.1 (and earlier). You may recall that Cardfile was a very handy electronic rolodex, but it seems it is no longer included with Windows 95 and Windows NT. Perhaps your office uses a different electronic rolodex and you can set it up on the Intranet just like Access and PowerPoint.
This chapter wraps up Part III of the book by discussing a few programs you won't typically find in an office. But now that the Internet has become such a hot area, more and more corporations are being forced to learn how to send and receive e-mail and files on the Internet. And it should come as no surprise that those same applications will work just fine on the Intranet too. Eudora Light (available on the CD-ROM) is the most popular e-mail client on the Internet, partly because it is free. Microsoft Exchange is also free when you buy Windows 95 or Windows NT. This chapter discusses these programs as a very economical way to increase the efficiency of communication within your organization. To put it simply, no Intranet project should overlook the power of simple e-mail.
If you want to help your team conduct timely business research
on the Internet, or if you plan to run your own NNTP server for
the purpose of Intranet collaboration (see Chapter 28,
"Collaboration on Your Intranet"), don't miss the opportunity
to educate your customers on the potential uses of a good newsgroup
reader. I'll show you how later in this chapter when I discuss
News Xpress. News Xpress is a powerful and simple GUI newsgroup
reader that your customers will want to be aware of. (And by the
way, it is also on the CD-ROM, and it is also free, courtesy of
the City University of Hong Kong.)
| Note |
Microsoft has recently announced a new e-mail client and newsgroup reader program for Windows 95. A beta version of the software is currently available for free download from its Web site at |
Your primary objective in setting up your Intranet is to make it easy for your customers to retrieve and share information using World Wide Web technology. You can do this with the data files generated by virtually any application your customers use. As with word processing documents and spreadsheet data files, there are other ways of sharing these files, ranging from NetWare and other kinds of fileservers to passing floppy disks around the office. What's different with your Intranet is that your customers have access to shared data using their favorite Web browser, a simple front end that virtually everyone already knows how to use. Using the sample applications in this chapter on your Intranet will enable you to make important corporate information available to your customers with just a click of their mice.
For example, you could use Microsoft Access to enable access to corporate Access databases directly from your customers' World Wide Web browser. You could use Microsoft PowerPoint to distribute presentation graphics to your customers or to conduct corporate training through your Intranet. You'll come up with more ideas of your own as you go through the examples in this chapter, but first you need to go through some setup preliminaries.
If you've read through the previous three chapters, you are by now a MIME expert. I won't bore you in this chapter by repeating details of server and client MIME setup. Because you are already familiar with how to do it for the word processor and the spreadsheet, you can easily apply those same concepts and instructions to the office programs covered in this chapter. I will follow a similar, albeit much briefer, outline in this chapter, but I will refer you back to the specific sections in the previous two chapters to refresh your memory on the steps involved. Remember, very little difference exists between the setup of common helper applications that handle audio or video and the setup of PowerPoint or Access.
The first step in setting up PowerPoint and Access as helper applications on your Intranet is to configure your Web server to know about their data files. With small differences, as are noted in context, the instructions in this section apply not only to PowerPoint presentations and Access databases, but also to spreadsheets and word processor documents as discussed in the previous chapters.
As you learned in Chapter 12, "MIME and Helper Applications," Web servers use the MIME mechanism to identify documents according to their MIME data type/subtype. Recall that the MIME mechanism divides data into a relatively small handful of data types, with each type further subdivided into subtypes. PowerPoint and Access data files fall into the application data type. You also learned in Chapter 12 how Web servers use filename extensions to map data files on the server to a MIME data type/subtype. You associate the filename extensions with MIME types/subtypes in the Windows NT Registry on the Web server, if you are using IIS, or in a configuration text file, if you are using some other Windows NT Web servers.
Please refer to the section titled "Editing the Registry MIME Map" in Chapter 13, "Word Processing on the Web" for detailed information about configuring IIS. The concepts described in that section for word processors are exactly the same steps you need to follow to configure your server for Access and PowerPoint.
The only difference between your word processor and the applications in this chapter is that the MIME types/subtypes should look like the following in the NT Registry as viewed by RegEdit:
application/msaccess,mdb,,5 application/mspowerpoint,ppt,,5
Microsoft Access commonly uses the .mdb
filename extensions for its data files, and Microsoft PowerPoint
commonly uses the .ppt extension.
You can use any filename extensions you want for these applications,
in addition to or instead of these. If you use nonstandard ones,
make sure you use them consistently, so your customers can set
up their Web browsers to access the data you're providing using
the right filename extensions.
| Warning |
Double-check your filename extensions to make sure they don't duplicate any of the other MIME entries. Otherwise, your customers will see incorrect or inconsistent results. |
You've completed the setup of your Web server to properly identify
and serve your application's data files. Next, you need to populate
your server with the data files that you want to make available
on the Intranet.
| Note |
Please see the section titled "Adding Spreadsheet Data Files to Your Web Server" in Chapter 14, "Publishing Spreadsheets on the Intranet." That section gives advice about sharing and mapping drives on the Web server so that you can copy files conveniently from your primary workstation. |
After you have the Access and PowerPoint files on the Web server, create an HTML page to describe them; this page provides your customers with clickable links to the presentations and databases. This page can be as simple or as complex as you like because including hyperlinks to presentations and databases is exactly the same as setting up links to other kinds of documents. A simple HTML listing (PowerPoint.htm), using Microsoft PowerPoint slides as an example, might be something like Listing 15.1.
Listing 15.1. PowerPoint.htm
is a simple page providing links to PowerPoint documents.
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>PowerPoint Slides</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>PowerPoint Slides</H1> This directory contains a set of Microsoft PowerPoint slides. Just click on one to open it up in PowerPoint. <UL> <LI><A HREF="qrtrly_sales.ppt">Slide 1</A>, Last Quarter's Sales </LI> <LI><A HREF="qrtrly_prod.ppt">Slide 2</A>, Last Quarter's Production </LI> <LI><A HREF="cpi_fcast.ppt">Slide 3</A>, Consumer Price Index Forecasts </LI> </UL> If you haven't already done so, you must set up your Web browser to understand PowerPoint slide data files. <A HREF="ppt_setup.html">Here are instructions.</A> </BODY> </HTML>
You've seen HTML code almost identical to this example in the preceding two chapters. This code could be just as easily adapted for your specific purposes to provide your customers with a way to get to your Access and PowerPoint data. Before you can use this page to load the hyperlinked data files, however, your Web browser must be set up to use the correct program as a helper application. The source code is available on the CD-ROM in the file PowerPoint.htm. Figure 15.1 shows this simple catalog of PowerPoint slides as it would appear running in Internet Explorer 2.0.
Figure 15.1: The Intranet home page for PowerPoint slides.
Microsoft now has available for free download from its Web site (http://www.microsoft.com) a version of its Internet Assistant (IA) for PowerPoint. Like the companion IA products for Microsoft Word and Excel, this package enables you to save Microsoft Office data files (in this case, PowerPoint slides) directly to HTML format for use on your Intranet. Exported HTML slides include hyperlinks to all the slides in a multi-slide presentation. IA for PowerPoint currently supports Windows 95 only, but you can expect that Windows NT support will be announced as soon as Windows NT 4 is officially available.
Setting up Access and PowerPoint on the clients is accomplished in exactly the same manner as setting up word processors and spreadsheets. Chapter 13 gives detailed instructions for configuring your word processor as a browser helper application. Please consult the section titled "Setting Up Microsoft Word as a Helper Application on the Client" in that chapter for the step-by-step help you need to apply to Access and PowerPoint.
Microsoft has available for free download from its Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/) Access Ready-to-Run, a read-only viewer for Access database applications. (A copy is also on the CD-ROM with this book.) This package enables users who don't have a full copy of Access to read and run queries against Access databases. Access Ready-to-Run supports Windows 95 only, but it can read older Access databases.
You will also find a free PowerPoint Viewer on the CD-ROM here and at the Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/mspowerpoint/Internet/Viewer/default.htm
As an Intranet champion or as a Webmaster, you will find Usenet newsgroups a valuable resource for keeping up-to-date on the latest Web development techniques. Newsgroups are also important to help you troubleshoot problems with hardware or software. News Xpress is a freeware Usenet newsreader that allows you to easily organize the newsgroups you want to subscribe to.
To install News Xpress from the CD to your hard drive, follow these steps:
| Warning |
It is important that ctl3dv2.dll exist in only one directory on your system. That one location should be the \WINNT\SYSTEM directory on NT or the \Windows\System directory on Windows 95. Applications that use ctl3dv2.dll will give you a non-fatal warning message when loading and they will not look good if the DLL appears in multiple locations. |
You now have one of the best Usenet newsreader client applications available to help keep you up-to-date.
Suppose you want to read articles about Microsoft SQL Server so you can learn more about how to support that key component of BackOffice. The newsgroup that you can scan to help you with this task is comp.databases.ms-sqlserver.
The following are the steps of a simple getting-started session with News Xpress 1.0:
One of the first things you are going to need for your Intranet construction project is e-mail capability. You have to be able to communicate with software vendors, network consultants, contract programmers, office managers, database designers, and so on, as you go through the process of establishing a successful Intranet. For all of these reasons, you need to get your e-mail act together quickly.
The Exchange e-mail client comes with Windows NT 4 and Windows 95. Allow me to assume that you won't set up Exchange on your Web server, and that you will want to set it up on a Windows 95 machine. The following are the quick steps for configuring Exchange for Internet e-mail on a Windows 95 client machine (the steps should be almost identical for Windows NT 4 Server or Workstation):
Those are the basics of Exchange. If you choose to use it as your e-mail client, you will find it to be a useful tool.
Eudora Light is on the CD with this book or you can download it from Qualcomm. Eudora is described by its author as postcardware, which means that he only asks you to mail him a postcard to register the product. The following are the quick steps to getting up and running with the Eudora Light e-mail client:
Figure 15.5: The New Message dialog in Eudora Light.
| Tip |
For more detailed information about the configuration and use of Eudora Light, see the file eudora.doc, included in the Eudora zip file on the CD. This file is the official Eudora User's Guide in Word format. You can obtain information about the latest Eudora software, including the commercial version, at this URL: http://www.qualcomm.com/quest/QuestMain.html |
This chapter has been the last of a group of three chapters devoted to using everyday office applications as Web browser helper applications in your Intranet. You've learned about a range of useful productivity applications including the Microsoft Access database package, Microsoft PowerPoint presentation slide maker, two e-mail clients, and a Usenet newsreader.
This ends Part III of the book. By now, you have a basic understanding of the helper application mechanism, including how to use MIME data type/subtype information to integrate almost any application your customers might use on your Intranet. You should have an inkling of the virtually unlimited possibilities for your organization represented by these capabilities. Subsequent chapters build on these fundamentals to help you bring wwmore advanced, specific capabilities into play on your Web.