Many organizations have already realized the benefits of the Internet as a means of rapidly publishing information. Companies today are using the World Wide Web primarily as an electronic storefront, billboard, or yellow pages ad. Many have applied these same principles to internal communication, establishing intranets to exchange mission-critical information across local, regional, and even global enterprises. Until recently, this information has been predominantly static, preformatted HTML documents, not interactive, user-centric applications.
The Internet is becoming a more dynamic and interactive environment. Whether in traditional distributed computing or on the Internet, businesses and users need to access and manage an ever-expanding amount of information, from anywhere, at anytime.
By connecting Internet or intranet Web servers to relational databases like Microsoft SQL Server, many organizations have moved beyond static document publication to an active Internet, where content is generated dynamically from a database, automatically, or in response to a user request. An active Internet application can use electronic forms to collect orders, customer information, and other transactions, then store them in a relational database. The database, in turn, allows processing, retrieval, and analysis with a variety of off-the-shelf tools. An active Internet can store information in a single, secure place—without duplication—regardless of whether that information is accessed internally or over the Web.
To allow secure business transactions to occur over the Internet, companies are building a new class of active Internet business applications, based on products like Microsoft Internet Information Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and the BackOffice family of products.