By far the most popular use of the Internet is e-mail. Almost everyone you know whether professionally or personally probably has an e-mail address. Many people now use e-mail for general correspondence in business and pleasure. Internal e-mail has been around for a lot longer with products such as MS Mail, MS-Exchange, Lotus cc.Mail, Novell MHS having been used in companies to send memos, schedules, documents etc. to many people in the company for several years. Now this useful company tool is extended through the use of the Internet to a worldwide scale. Internet email is fast becoming the main form of inter-company and inter-personal written communication..

You may want to give your employees access to the world wide web, the part of the internet used for displaying text, pictures, and multimedia content via a web browser, but you already know about that as you are using this right now. Web access can be an important tool to your company allowing you access to your suppliers information, online ordering, online databases and technical libraries. However many companies may want to limit what sites employees can open and should certainly ensure that correct equipment is specified to protect your own network when connecting to the Internet.

You may wish to run your own website to advertise your products and services. This is an advertising medium that can reach literally millions of people all around the world, and be updated instantly as often as required to reflect changing products and/or prices. You can easily keep in contact with your customers via the web keeping them updated will all your latest product news.

An extension of a web site, which is becoming increasingly popular, as people's fears of security are re-assured, is e-commerce. You may well have heard of people selling their products on the Internet. Many sites allow you to register as a shopper with them, browse their virtual store and add goods to a "basket", paying by credit card at the end. Obviously not all products are suited to this method of selling, but many are, and the reduced overheads involved often permit companies to sell products at a lower cost than their competitors. As well as "shopping basket" applications, e-commerce may be used to connect you to your suppliers MRP systems and to allow your customers access to your online systems.

VPN (Virtual Private Network) allows you to use the Internet to form a connection between two sites. By the inclusion of appropriate hardware or software at two sites, connected only via the Internet, you can create your own private network between the two site. This privacy is maintained by encrypting your your traffic as it is transferred over the internet.

VPN is becoming an increasing way of providing WAN connectivity between sites, using the internet as a "switched network". The cost saving of VPN can be significant, particularly if communicating between sites over large distances.

Traditionally voice and data traffic have been kept very separate, indeed in many large organisations it would be a completely separate person responsible for the two functions within the company's infrastructure.

With the advent of Voice over IP (Internet Protocol) this is set to change. Software and hardware solutions now exist to give high quality voice transport over IP networks, such as the Internet. This could allow your company to make enormous savings on telecom costs by sending voice traffic anywhere around the world via your internet connection, or across your own private network. This would be particularly attractive to companies with offices distributed around the globe, particularly those with an existing network in place for data traffic.