Scripting Languages
When the hosting environment has been determined, it is necessary to determine what server-side scripting language will be used during the development of your intranet. It will be used for reading and writing information to your database(s) and for dynamic generation of the intranet pages.
The choice here will depend mostly on what hosting environment has been chosen (Unix or NT) and what scripting languages are supported on the web server(s). Another relevant point is what skill-sets are available to you through existing resources. If the only languages that are known to your existing resources were last used in the last millennium, then it's advised to find another resource.
Also consider what the corporate standard is. If your IT team developed a sophisticated Internet site that they maintain, then they would likely be very up-to-date on the development environment used to create it. If that's the corporate "standard," then you would likely take advantage of it to maximize the effectiveness of that knowledge and experience to your organization.
The socially acceptable scripting languages in the year 2003 are: Cold Fusion, ASP, PHP, JSP and ASP.NET. When making a decision about these languages, keep in mind the future growth of your company's intranet. If your current system (Windows 2000 and IIS) proves to be unmanageable and you decide to change it, what technologies can you bring with you versus what will you have to start over with? For example, if you lock yourself into MS/ASP and IIS and decide that you're tired of patching IIS 10 hours a week and want to move to Apache, you may have to leave ASP behind (though Chilisoft publishes software that allows ASP to run on Unix machines) Since solutions such as PHP and MySQL are available cross-platform, that combination should be a strong contender during your consideration process.
It is irresponsible to create a static site that does not leverage a technology that allows for some degree of separation between content and formatting. The efficiency of your site's development and maintenance processes are inextricably and proportionately related to the initial and ongoing costs of your Intranet.
Still, however, many companies move forwards with HTML-based intranets due to the attractiveness of short-term cost saving. This book stresses that the medium-term maintenance costs will far outweigh the short-term savings. Ignore this warning to your own future malaise.