In recent times the plain old LAN has blossomed into the more exciting and fashionable intranet by virtue of the addition of a few Web severs and browsers. Although much is made of the intranet in the computer press, it is important not to get too overwhelmed by all the hype. Most organisations already have the basic components and infrastructure to create an Intranet in the shape of the existing corporate LAN. For many companies, once they have installed some Web server software on one of their file servers they are ready to go - and most of today�s network operating systems include a Web server in one form or another.

However, a Web server is of little use without some relevant information to put on it. Most organisations have a huge investment in their existing IT systems and the information stores they use, yet find it difficult to disseminate all that information to interested parties due to the problem that almost every system has a unique user interface. Installing each and every interface on every single client would be a major headache, not to mention the problems of training users to operate these different interfaces and handling the resulting support calls.

The traditional approach, however, involves just that sort of pain. Users with multiple clients or terminal emulation sessions on their PCs, sometimes even multiple PCs on their desks (or a PC and a green screen). Trying to pull together data from several different sources involves screen scraping from the legacy green screen applications and cobbling this together into a pseudo-Windows front-end, where it is married to data from other Windows-based applications. Because of the complexity of such applications, they can take forever to build and involve an awful lot of custom coding. For those organisations without the resources for such a project, the user is forced to pull up screens and run reports from several applications and collate the data by hand. The lament of "can I get back to you in a couple of hours to let you know how your order is progressing?" can be heard up and down the country.

Web technology provides the perfect means to publish a wealth of corporate information since it offers two distinct advantages:

• The information is presented in the same format no matter where it comes from

• The data is accessed via a common client � the Web browser � no matter what platform the user has available

The thin client approach offered by the Web browser is the ideal way to access corporate data, but many organisations fail to make all of this data available due to the difficulties involved. For instance, much of the corporate data may still reside in mainframe-based legacy systems, making it difficult to get at unless extracted, reformatted and presented in an entirely different way.

Even when this happens, there is the problem of Web data being relatively static, rapidly becoming out of date as the host data is changed. Once corporate data is changed from its source form into HTML pages, there is no direct link between the two. The Web site is immediately out of step as ongoing updates are made to the source, but because the Web site comes under the control of the MIS department, updates take time to implement. All too frequently, such updates never happen, leaving stale and outdated documentation on the Web.

The amount of work involved in the initial conversion, let alone the task of keeping the Web data up to date, means that the hapless user is often left to scrape together the appropriate data from a number of different sources. When this data also includes facts and figures buried in various databases, how on earth can you hope to represent it effectively on a static Web page?

This was the question posed by Wall Data to itself when it was pondering the question of whether there was really life after terminal emulation. For those of you who have been in this industry a while, Wall Data will be most familiar as a purveyor of terminal emulation (TE) and PC-to-host connectivity products � Rumba being its best known offering. Whilst rumours of the death of the mainframe have been greatly exaggerated, the demise of the margins in this particular market are a reality, and so TE vendors who want to survive are forced to reinvent themselves.

For Wall Data, this reinvention comes in the form of Cyberprise, a Web application server that enables organisations to deliver intranet, extranet, and Internet business solutions by providing the foundation for Web-enabling existing systems, and delivering both internal and external content to employees, partners, and customers through any browser. Many different companies promise the same thing, but fall short in only covering part of the story, or in requiring hefty amounts of custom code to make them work. Where Cyberprise scores is in its comprehensive coverage of all the bases, and its ability to publish data dynamically to the Web, from a wide range of sources, without the need for a single line of code.

At the heart of the product is the Cyberprise Server, which provides all the user and group management, content management, security, licensing and performance management for the whole of the enterprise. For large organisations or mission critical applications, multiple Cyberprise servers can be clustered for redundancy and load balancing. Common data is also replicated automatically between Cyberprise servers.

The aim of Cyberprise Server is to present the same common interface to every client no matter the location of the data they are viewing. This holds true for the administrator as well, who simply logs on via a standard browser like any other user, though with far greater powers, obviously. New users and groups can be defined quickly and easily, though there did not seem to be any means of importing existing user details from underlying operating systems or directory databases.

Having created your user base, Cyberprise controls the look and feel of the client from that point on. A number of standard templates can be applied, each on a global, per user or per group basis, and new templates can be created to provide a unique look and feel for your organisation. Down the left of the screen are a number of channels, and these provide the means for users to access data and applications.

The administrator can create any number of channels, each containing one or more "tabs", and with each tab pointing to a data or application resource. A channel can be as simple as a link to an external URL, or a URL on the corporate intranet. Or perhaps it can point directly to a document or spreadsheet somewhere on the network � more on all that later. Suffice it to say that the channel can be thought of as a collection of data resources that enables you to combine external information with corporate content, and which can then be made available to end users through the browser interface by "publishing" it.

Channels can be published to single users, groups of users or globally at the click of a mouse button, and they can be "pushed" to users � making them a mandatory feature on the channel bar - or "pulled" by users, who will have to "subscribe" to the channels they want to see. Built in security features ensure that users only get to see those channels they are supposed to. The push technology idea extends one step further, too, since whenever new material is added to a channel, or existing material is updated, all users subscribing to that channel see a "ticker tape" display informing them of the updated content.

Of course, you wouldn�t expect Wall Data to shed its heritage in one go would you? Besides, Web-to-host connectivity is "the next big thing" in the TE world. Cyberprise Host provides the means to connect multiple clients to legacy hosts through the Cyberprise Server, and have those terminal sessions running in the standard browser screen. The Host client can take the form of a "full function" beast (with a large footprint, but high levels of functionality), a lightweight Java client, or a zero-footprint HTML-only client. With the latter, your green screen display is converted into pure HTML and sent down the wire. The ability to have the functionality either client-side or server-side is very powerful, and provides the means to access host sessions from thin clients such as PDA�s and CE devices.

Although it is perfectly possible to run the same old green screen interface within your browser window, Cyberprise Host provides automatic transformation of a green screen into a GUI without recourse to coding of any kind. Although this works well, it does little to enhance the operation of the application, so for important screens a little effort can transform them into something that would be indistinguishable from your common-or-garden Windows app. TE sessions can be channelised and published as normal, providing the same interface for the end users as for all the other Web-based applications. Using channels, you can deploy a terminal emulation session to thousands of users with a single mouse click.

When talking about channels earlier in this article I mentioned having the channel point to a particular document. The Cyberprise Data modules provide the means to dynamically convert existing data � whether it lies on ODBC-compliant database or in static repositories such as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets � and publish it directly to the Web with no further intervention by the administrator or Webmaster.

InfoPublisher takes source data referenced by channels and converts it on the fly as the end user selects the channel. In other words it is not a "convert once and then forget" type of operation, and this means that the data that is presented to the user is always the latest � as soon as a document is saved to the network, it is instantly available to Cyberprise subscribers.

It is not necessary for the end user to have the source application installed, since InfoPublisher takes care of all the necessary conversion. Presentation of the converted data can take different forms, depending on how the channel has been configured. The quickest and most flexible is to use OLE, making it look like you are running Word or Excel within your browser. However, that is obviously no use to those users who only have thin clients available, so InfoPublisher can also convert the source document to pure HTML. All graphics and text can be converted, and a complete set of thumbnails (for PowerPoint presentations) or hyperlinked table of contents *for Word documents) can be generated automatically. Now you can run your PowerPoint presentation over the Web using only your Psion Series 5.

DBApp Publisher is another Cyberprise Server extension that manages the interaction between user, application and database. It allows the user to perform queries against a database and dynamically generate Web pages (termed Query on Demand) from the results. The user can easily create, read, update or delete data, and this component automatically generates SQL and performs transaction management and rule enforcement. Pre-defined reports can be assigned a channel, and these are run in real time to provide dynamically updated Web content for the user.

Taken together, Cyberprise Data components provide a comprehensive Web-based solution for publishing reports, queries, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes and documents. The Cyberprise Cube Option is an On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) application that will create OLAP cubes from ODBC-compliant databases, display them and allow real-time manipulation within a standard browser window.

Although all of this can be achieved with little or no coding straight out of the box, Cyberprise also includes a set of tools for developing database applications from scratch, or designing reports, queries and OLAP cubes.

DBApp Developer, for instance, allows database schemas to be designed using a simple GUI interface, following which it generates the database structure, Active Server Pages, forms and SQL queries, still without the developer needing to write one line of code. The Host Developer provides the means to re-engineer legacy green screen applications, easing the user's interaction with the host application and making it graphically appealing. Finally, for those who simply have to do some coding of their own, the whole Cyberprise product can be wrapped up in third party development environments such as Visual Studio for the ultimate in flexibility.

It�s hard to describe all the features of a product like Cyberprise whilst getting across the ease with which they can be put to use. The Cyberprise Server merges Web technologies with existing systems and enables the building of powerful new solutions in one easy environment, and at first glance, it all appears to be too good to be true. But everything mentioned here can be achieved straight out of the box with the standard software, and almost all of it without any coding whatsoever.

Of course, careful thought needs to be given to server sizing and scalability when all this dynamic data conversion is happening at the server instead of the client, and the hardware requirements can often bump up the cost of a major project. At the end of the day, however, it is the sort of product you can only appreciate by evaluating it on site.