Note: Many topics at this site are reduced versions of the text in "The Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications." Search results will not be as extensive as a search of the book's CD-ROM.

During the 1980s, organizations began to install local area networks to connect computers in departments and workgroups. Department-level managers usually made decisions about what type of computers and networks they wanted to install.

Eventually, organizations saw benefits in building enterprise networks that would let people throughout the organization exchange e-mail and work together using collaborative software. An enterprise network would connect all the isolated departmental or workgroup networks into an intracompany network, with the potential for allowing all computer users in a company to access any data or computing resource. It would provide interoperability among autonomous and heterogeneous systems and have the eventual goal of reducing the number of communication protocols in use. Toward this goal, industry organizations were formed to create open standards, and vendors developed their own strategies.

An enterprise network is both local and wide area in scope. It integrates all the systems within an organization, whether they are Windows computers, Apple Macintoshes, UNIX workstations, minicomputers, or mainframes.

An enterprise network can be thought of as a "plug-and-play" platform for connecting many different computing devices. In this platform scenario, no user or group is an island. All systems can potentially communicate with all other systems while maintaining reasonable performance, security, and reliability.

This has largely been achieved with Internet protocols and Web technologies that provide better results at lower cost and fewer configuration problems than the enterprise computing models. TCP/IP is a unifying internetwork protocol that lets organizations tie together workgroup and division LANs, and connect with the Internet. Web protocols (HTTP, HTML, and XML) unify user interfaces, applications, and data, letting organizations build intranets (internal internets). A Web browser is like a universal client, and Web servers can provide data to any of those clients. Web servers are distributed throughout the enterprise, following distributed computing models. Multitiered architectures are used, in which a Web client accesses a Web server and a Web server accesses back-end data sources, such as mainframes and server farms. See "Multitiered Architectures" for more detail.