ken over the management responsibility from the government-funded organizations and service providers. In 1995, the National Science Foundation (NSF) retired its network and turned it over to these new providers. Intranets Larger enterprises have been so impressed with the success and ease of external Internet technology-such as Web servers, Web browsers, and hypertext-based applications-they have now used the same technology internally as their own business communications tool. These organizations have discovered the same features that make the Internet technology attractive for interenterprise communications, also make it an excellent technology for intraenterprise communications. In particular, very large organizations with various applications, hardware platforms, and multiple sources of information can benefit from this technology due to its platform independence. This movement toward intranet technology is supported by other industry trends. For example, TCP/IP has become the de facto standard as the multivendor protocol of choice in many corporate networks due to its robustness and simplicity. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is rapidly becoming the popular standard for internal e-mail systems. Web browsers are becoming very popular as a simple user interface not only for surfing the Net, but also for navigating and accessing organizational data housed on several computer systems and operating systems (OSs) software. At the business-to-business level, the Internet is quickly becoming the most popular means of handling interenterprise communications. Although most businesses continue to use a wide variety of private and public net- work services, the Internet is the common denominator typically used by most of them. As a result, service and software providers are moving quickly to develop secure, reliable products to enable organizations to trans- act business over the Internet. Business trust in the Internet has grown sig- nificantly over the last year, and some businesses are now transmitting mission-