As cultures change within organistions to the point where even each department moves towards their own individual mission statements, the Intranet technology provides the ideal medium to communicate current information to the Department or Individual. Simple Groupware applications With HTML forms support, sites can provide sign-up sheets, surveys and simple scheduling. This can be done with 'Java' which allows the creation and transparent distribution of objects on-demand rather than just data or applications. This is indeed possible more easily with the newer versions of Linux which has builtin support for Java. With the move to the use of Intranet mail products with standard and simple methods for attachment of documents, sound, vision and other multimedia between individuals, mail is being pushed further forward as a simple, de facto communications method.
Mail is essentially individual to individual, or individual to small group, communication.
Several utilities are available on the Linux platform to setup an E-mail system like sendmail, pop3d, imapd . The Intranet technology is evolving so rapidly that the tools available, in particular HTML, can be used to dramatically change the way we interface with systems. With HTML you can build an Interface which is only limited by the creators imagination. The beauty about using Intranet technologies for this is that it is so simple. Clicking a hyperlink from HTML can take you to another page, it could ring an alarm, run a yearend procedure or anything else that a computer program can do.