Intranets: Location, Location, Location

Cushman & Wakefield puts in-house data on an internal Web site

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By Clinton Wilder
Issue date: March 25, 1996

Though Cushman & Wakefield Inc. has been managing office buildings, factories, and other commercial properties since 1917, the real estate brokerage's most important development project this year may be its internal World Wide Web site.

Joining a wave of companies across a wide swath of industries, Cushman & Wakefield has set up an int ranet on an existing TCP/IP wide area network that makes corporate policies and human resources information easily accessible to nearly 2,000 employees in 40 locations across the United States and overseas.

That's only the beginning. By year's end, the New York company plans to deploy on its intranet a client-server real estate application with detailed data on thousands of commercial properties around the world. Also on the Web-conversion docket is a commissions-accounting system that runs on an IBM AS/400. The real estate application, called Site Solutions, and the commissions-accounting system will help hundreds of employees and contract brokers access information through their Web browsers.

"As far as users are concerned, it's the Net," says David Solomon, Cushman & Wakefield's director of office technology. "In reality, we're simply using Internet tools over our WAN."

All this is happening at a company with an external Web presence that is, to put it cha ritably, modest. Cushman & Wakefield's external Web site , which was first posted Dec. 1, is a single home page with links to a handful of text-only pages that describe Cushman & Wakefield's history and businesses, such as its commercial brokerage and building maintenance services.

That's about as basic as it gets in cyberspace. While there is talk of jazzing up the content, "quite frankly, we're still in the selling stage to business management on that," says Solomon. "On the internal stuff, they are already sold-slam dunk."

That wasn't hard, because Cushman & Wakefield is spending well under $10,000 on its intranet. The company already had its WAN infrastructure in place, with T1 lines from MFS Telecom Companies in Oak Brook Terrace, Ill., and 56-Kbps lines from InfoNet Inc. in El Segundo, Calif., linking its Manhattan headquarters to offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Contract brokers and em- ployees in other branch locations dial in from 40 existing Hewlett-Packard Vectra XM 590 PCs with internal U.S. Robotics 28.8-Kbps modems to a 3Com Access Builder asynchronous communications server in New York.

Cushman & Wakefield's only significant intranet expenses are Netscape Communications Server 1.1 server software, Netscape Navigator 1.22 browsers for its employees and brokers, and the programming and technology costs of converting the presentation layer of its business systems to the Web's standard HTML.

"That's the beauty of internal Web content," says David Pann, product manager in the server group at Netscape in Mountain View, Calif. "You just drop it in, and it works on the TCP/IP network that you already have. For an internal Web application, you don't have to run any wires or put in a new protocol."

Cushman & Wakefield's attention to its intranet has plenty of adherents throughout corporate America. Thousands of companies are rushing to convert documents and data to HTML to enable them to be accessed by employees from Web browsers on internal networks. Two-thirds of all U.S. companies already have installed, plan to install, or are evaluating intranets, according to Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. (IW, Jan. 29, p. 15) . More than 70% of revenue at Netscape, the leading Web software vendor, comes from sales of server software for internal Web sites, according to Mike Homer, Netscape's VP of marketing.

Stephen Auditore, president of Internet market research and consulting firm Zona Research in Redwood City, Calif., calls Cushman & Wakefield's ambitious intranet, limited external Web presence "fairly classic. The Web is a great way to share information internally. And it can be very incremental-you can start small and grow it." Auditore notes that, in many cases, an internal Web can be less costly than groupware solutions such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.

Cus hman & Wakefield's intranet starting point was its Employee Resource System (ERS), which includes all of the company's human resources, benefits, legal, and policy and procedures information. The firm had planned to deploy the system by distributing CD-ROMs to employees and HR professionals, designed in part with multimedia content created with Toolbook authoring software from Asymetrix Inc. in Bellevue, Wash. This would have included a video clip of Cushman & Wakefield president Arthur Morante speaking about the company's corporate vision.

Update Problems
But much of the benefits and policy and procedures information requires updating many times a year. That would have meant lots of Cushman & Wakefield software technicians flying around the country to install patches at each office. "It looked like a logistics nightmare," says Tom Michelli, a

Cushman & Wakefield LAN analyst. Instead, the firm decided last September to build an intranet; the Web-based HR system was complete within three months. "We needed a platform for content that was dynamic and easily distributable," recalls Solomon. "That's a description for a Web page."

Solomon's staff converted most of its HR content from Microsoft Word documents to HTML with HTML Transit, a conversion tool from InfoAccess Inc. in Bellevue. When Cushman & Wakefield's HR department changes a policy, it runs the Transit software, which updates the Web page. The company soon plans to convert existing Toolbook multimedia content to the intranet using Web development tools such as Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java language and/or Shockwave from Macromedia Inc. in San Francisco.

After completing the HR phase, Cushman & Wakefield next plans to make the intranet more interactive by adding an online chat forum based on NetThread from Net.Genesis Corp. in Cambridge, Mass., the same technology used on the Boston Globe and New York Times external Web sites. Online forums "can be a mor e effective business tool than E-mail, which is point-to-point," says Solomon.

But Cushman & Wakefield's most ambitious business use of the intranet will occur this fall, when it makes its property-tracking Site Solutions database available online. This strategic business application includes all of the company's completed, under construction, or planned commercial real estate ventures, as well as leased and available office space. The system is housed in a Microsoft SQL Server database running over Windows NT 3.51 on a Compaq ProLiant server. Users access the data through a custom client interface written in Visual Basic, Visual C, and Microsoft Access.

To ensure easy Web access, Solomon's staff wrote a program that converts CGI script user queries from a Web browser into standard SQL queries against the SQL Server database. The first beta test of Site Solutions on the Web was due to take place in February. "If a broker has clients in Los Angeles that want to know about a buil ding in Washington, D.C., this will make it a lot easier," says Michelli. "We expect to save quite a bit on project management costs."

Because the Site Solutions system only runs internally, there are no unusual security concerns. Cushman & Wakefield's external site operates with a firewall that asks dial-up users to send a user ID, password, IP address, and packet check through the company's Cisco Systems 2501 router.

Cushman & Wakefield is looking to its intranet to provide a higher level of technology standardization than the company currently enforces, even though it has standardized on Windows.

"If you have five different Windows applications on the network, they all have somewhat different look-and-feels and different drivers for different PCs," says Solomon. "By making them all Web-centric, you eliminate that."

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