Well what do you need to do with it? An intranet is a very loosely-defined entity -- in the simple case you might just have a firewall, hub/router, and some networked machines. Or you might require internal Web servers, database servers, print servers. Do you need to have applications running and communicating via some RPC mechanism? Do you require particular parts of the intranet to be exposed in a restricted manner to the public?

What sorts of projects will you be developing in .NET? If the project is not well-defined then I really do not envy you prototyping on that platform. Unless you've got some clear specs on what this thing is supposed to be capable of, I strongly recommend prototyping in Perl or Python, or at the very least on a platform that the developers already know, perhaps J2EE if these are enterprise types. (I guess I'm assuming that there aren't yet legions of .NET experts out there. I may be wrong.) The point though is that expectations are going to be fluid at least for a while, and you don't want your development tools themselves to be a hindrance, which is common with the more stodgy languages.

Finally, progressively ramp up your spending on hardware as the network's purpose becomes better defined and expectations rise. Don't go out and buy expensive servers before the project goes live, because you may find they don't do what you need or aren't where you want them to be. For example, a company I worked for a couple years ago went bust in part due to asinine spending policies such as purchasing superhigh-powered servers for a prototype e-commerce app that easily could have run off a normal desktop.

In reply to Re: OT: Intranet Design by djantzen
in thread OT: Intranet Design by Theseus

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