Intranet, 8/18/97

Please step in and lie down, Steve Blass is in for consultations. He understands the strains felt by people developing and managing intranets. Send your problems to dr.intranet@paranet.com.

Q. How can I block access to inappropriate Internet sites from my intranet?

A. You can monitor and restrict traffic to particular URLs at the workstations and the firewall boundaries. However, this adds cost and complexity to network operations without guaranteed compliance. A better approach may be to implement an acceptable use policy statement that includes unique user logon IDs and passwords. If you do this, you've got to make sure users understand the consequences of breaking the rules. When they log on, they should should be flagged that use constitutes consent to monitoring. Try to coincide the rollout of policy implementation and enforcement standards with an employee education blitz. It's a good idea to identify serious offenders from firewall and proxy logs and explain the new policy to them directly.

Blass is intranet services technology leader at Paranet, Inc., a distributed computing systems services provider based in Houston.