WHAT have Hallmark Cards, Turner Broad casting, Levi Strauss and Silicon graphics got in common? The makers of gushing greetings, CNN, jeans and workstations all use a fast growing new technology called the Intranet.

Intranets are basically a way of sharing information across a corporation that cuts through the problems of incompatible systems and overloaded information services departments.

According to Zona Research in San Francisco, investments in Intranets will increase from $475 million in 1995 to $8 billion in 1998. They are easy to set up, straightforward to manage and they allow anyone in the company to share information such as sales leads, policy documents, market information and most helpful hotel concierges among their colleagues.

In the 1980s technology from Lotus, called Notes, promised this kind of free information flow the promise so impressed IBM that they bought Lotus just for Notes. However, the explosive growth of the Internet took the rug out from under Notes, a proprietary system expensive to implement and manage.

Lotus/IBM has finally recognised the overwhelming momentum of the Net and is aligning Notes much closer to it. What caused Notes to stumble was the unexpected arrival of Netscape which took advantage of the Internet's World Wide Web to create the Navigator cross platform browser.

Large corporations also took note of how the browser - a simple application, freely distributed - was roaring from desktop to desktop, ignoring formal procedures and competing operating systems. From this groundswell came hundreds of Intranets.

Why are they becoming so powerful, and what can they do?

In the first place they are cheap to set up, especially compared to a Lotus Notes system. They require a browser which can be licensed for less than $40 a copy, and server software which costs around $500. A company can then spend as much money as it likes to make its Intranet faster, more secure, more appealing to use and more accessible to employees in remote sites. At a recent conference in Palo Alto, the technology guru at Levi Strauss put the cost of implementing their planned 10,000 user corporate Intranet at $50 per seat, fully loaded.

Secondly, the Intranet is an unbeatable way to share up to date documents - if you've ever tried to rely on an internal phone directory or searched for the latest policies and procedures on corporate benefit plans, you'd welcome having them online.

Also, consider the lone salesperson on the road preparing a new business presentation. She could log on to the corporate Intranet, get the company's press releases and financial data, do a search for her colleagues' sales reports to see if there were other parts of her prospect's business being serviced, download the latest version of the sales contract (ever the optimist) and take a copy of the most recent successful sales presentation which one of her colleagues had put online.

The vision at Levi Strauss is to share "any information with any employee, anywhere in the world, at any time and in any form". Already they "are seeing benefits from the system as it is rolled out.

Their Japanese market researchers, for example, take digital photos of what people are wearing on the streets of Tokyo, put them on the Intranet together with commentary and instantly those photos are available to design studios in Italy and San Francisco.

At Turner Broadcasting, they use the Intranet to test out new creative ideas on employees. Employees can check out rough edits of cartoons scheduled for Turner's Cartoon Network: they can send their opinions straight to the animator. The response helps fine tune programmes and other content before they go public.

At Hallmark, the Intranet has replaced both difficult to retrieve archives of successful cards and walls where rough ideas for greetings cards were pasted up. Artists and writers at Hallmark can now share ideas and rough concepts over the network, and look online at those honeyed phrases and illustrations that worked in the marketplace.

Silicon graphics, the high profile workstation company based in Mountain View, California, has one of the most admired Intranets, known as Silicon Junction, which holds more than 10,000 pages of information and is accessible, not just by employees, but by its dealers and suppliers.

New applications for the corporate Intranet are appearing daily. A company in Silicon Valley called Whizdom is selling corporations on the idea of doing interactive simulations to spread institutional knowledge around the organisation using the power, ubiquity and immediacy of the Intranet.

Simple desk to desk video conferencing is also now possible using sub $100 cameras and freely available software. Oops, better sit up straight, the boss is watching . . .