Daniel, Modern computers have gotten very good at generating documents. So good in fact current office workers are drowning in them, trying to set up decent workflows in the fat station world windows inflicted on us is not fun anymore (when networking was poor at least people finished documents instead of sending them to everyone as soon as they add a new paragraph). Why do you think google desktop search is so popular ?
Intranet web app means you only need to coordinate a few servers instead of worrying about every single computer on the network. You can use nas, ldap, etc easily. In the old "thin client" thin client talked to a big mainframe which centralised processing. Then everything was broken up to do client-side processing. Now we're going back to server-side, except the servers are not big mainframes anymore but lots of small servers talking to one another. The only question is if we're moving to servers glued to clients via proprietary tech like sharepoint or to a pure Internet-like HTTP model. (consumer media hubs/wifi hubs... work the same way BTW. People are so sick of setting up fat stations they buy what's actually small home servers to offload fat client maintenance pains) Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot
