Circa 1999 a small Intranet spawned in my organisation based on a single Lotus Notes database hosted on Domino. The team that supported the content and development of the Intranet were a small team of Lotus Notes developers. The Intranet was an IT project, somewhat of a pet project in the first instance. The business still primarily used Novell file shares to store documents and Lotus Notes for email.
The Intranet supported a number of small applications such as the Telephone Directory (also a Lotus Notes database) and various discussion forums and document libraries.
By the year 2000 the Intranet had started to gain some real traction as a communications tool providing daily news updates and information about the company. Still, it was a very simple system and required heavy IT involvement to make changes. Working together with the business, IT enhanced the Intranet to allow editing of certain content, delegating the responsibility to business people who were designated 'content managers'.
Shortly after this some fragmentation happened. One of the business units within the company decided to create their own Intranet. This was to be the 'intranet next generation' and was built from the ground up on the Microsoft platform of IIS and ASP3. This new Intranet was more attractive and was tailored to the purposes of the Sales business unit. It was, however, not part of the 'corporate' Intranet and did not contain the company information that was available on the Lotus Notes based Intranet.
As the Communications team strived to compete for the user populace and ensure that the corporate messages were available for all a new initiative was conceived to revamp the corporate Intranet. The new Intranet would be built from the ground up utilising the existing Lotus Domino infrastructure and supplementing it with ASP3 for certain applications. At this same time a shift began in the development teams behind the Intranet. The old guard of the Notes developers was on the decline and a new generation of ASP3 developers began on the ascendency. Most of the development team had been contractors and new ASP3 developers were brought in (contractors too) to bring fresh skills and begin the transition from Lotus Domino to a more IIS based web environment.
The new project which would deliver the first 'real' Intranet for the organisation had its own Project Manager and development team assembled. The new Intranet would be known as Origen.
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