Illustration by Brendan Davis

Intranets are not something new. Well before browsers like Mosaic and Netscape became commonplace, engineering groups were sharing information between individuals, teams, and machines using protocols like NFS.

Coinciding with the release of the first Netscape browser things began to change. Intranets went mainstream. The sharing of documents, files, and other standalone information sources had demonstrated that sharing was valuable and contributed to the overall efficiency of organizations, but there was more.

As we worked with business managers from areas outside of Engineering, we found they wanted to alter the form and function of their intranets to suit the needs of their particular area. These business groups expressed the promise of an intranet as an ability: "put the right information into the right hands at the right time."

The "holy grail" for these business managers is to enable their staff to make well-informed decisions as quickly and as accurately as possible. Initial intranet implementations based on the engineering "tradition of sharing" paradigm did not completely satisfy the need. Employees had a difficult time finding the information they were looking for. In addition, there was fear that the information published on the intranet might not be accurate, and result in sub optimal decisions.

In addition, managers wanted to use the intranet to disseminate information about the direction and focus of the company. They asked for an instrument to help them deliver this information unfiltered to all of the employees within their branch of the organization.

Into this new landscape of intranet as business tool enters Zope and the Content Management Framework (CMF). In our work with intranets, Zope provides many of the fundamental elements necessary to fulfill the intranet promise. First and foremost, Zope is a cataloging mechanism. It provides a mechanism for cataloging all items added to its database, the ZODB, by assigning metadata to each item at the touch point of user interaction, addition and modification.

With Zope and the CMF, this catalog mechanism uses a standard metadata schema from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The use of Dublin Core is important because it supports the second major strength of the Zope environment, searching.

Search "engines" are extremely effective in helping people find information, but they have a cost. In simple search applications this cost is passed on to the user who must wade through the numerous results returned by the engine. But there is a more effective way to narrow the search results, at least in terms of a business intranet. When a user adds an item to the search engine's database, they characterize the item with metadata. The search engine uses this metadata to deliver a better set of results. In this last case the "cost" is paid by the process - human or program - which assigns the metadata to each stored item.

This is the elegant part of the Zope. It uses the more sophisticated metadata-based search basis to obtain a narrower set of results, and spreads the cost of maintaining the metadata to all of the users who maintain content in the environment. As we said, a simple and elegant solution.

In addition, the CMF provides a framework to further abstract the problem in support of key elements for the design and maintenance of intranet portals. For example, CMF provides a skinning mechanism that allows for a consistent application of information policy across the site, as well as providing an easy way to update or enhance the site's look & feel.

All of this comes together in an application serving environment which is OS agnostic, scaleable, readily deployable, and - for the IT staff - easily supported. Armed with an instrument for fulfilling the promise - Zope - we wanted to augment the search capabilities to provide even more leverage to the business. We developed a framework for organizing content into logical groups of information, providing an immediate narrowing of the search results based on search context.

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