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Intranets.com this week disclosed plans to jump-start intranets for small and midsize businesses by offering a free service on the Web.

The company, formerly known as IntraNetics, will let businesses, departments, and other workgroup communities quickly acquire an intranet site where users can collaborate via the Web.

Unlike a typical corporate intranet deployment which requires the purchase of software and servers and may take several months to roll out, a small business can easily register for the service and be "ready to go" in a number of minutes, according to the company.

Intranets.com includes a free custom URL, hosting, online support, and five applications: a bulletin board, a company calendar, an employee directory, a group contact database, a document library, and news.

Basic online help-desk support is available, with additional telephone support priced at $29.95 per incident. Companies receive 25MB of disk storage space. Supplementary disk space is also available at an additional charge.

Intranets.com will nearly double the number of free applications it offers businesses within the next year and add a threaded discussion database, a human resource policy manual, and chat/instant messaging capabilities, company officials say. The sites run on Windows NT servers with SSL security.

The company expects to earn its revenue through advertisements. Intranets.com will also receive a portion of sales that are made through ads on its site, officials say.

Large Opportunity for Smaller Firms

"The company is targeting the right business size segments, as the small and medium sized companies are the least penetrated, but represent a large opportunity for intranet suppliers," comments Mike Comiskey, an analyst with International Data Corp. "The service will be attractive to company project teams and interest groups."

"Offering a free service with some basic intranet applications will attract a lot of users, but it remains to be seen whether businesses will feel comfortable using a hosted service over the Internet with limited security," Comiskey adds.