Bored with the Internet? Get ready for the Intranet

Last year, the buzzword was “Internet,” as droves of companies launched wares on the World Wide Web. This year, internal Web sites, known as Intranets, are sweeping corporate America in record numbers.

Lotus, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Novell, Netscape and Microsoft all announced major new Intranet-related products, and hundreds of vendors are preparing new Intranet product lines.

Intranets are the same as Internets, except that they are designed for an company’s internal computer users, “focusing on sharing information within the company,´ said Ron Hanson, technical marketing manager for Fort Collins-based Invision Marketing (www.w3net.com), which designs and maintains Intranet Web pages for area companies.…