Before the era of Slack, Teams, and Google Drive, there was the intranet. And for thousands of employees at CJ Group (CheilJedang) and its subsidiaries, CJNet wasn't just a network; it was a digital universe.
(P.S. If you are looking for CJ's modern network solutions, they have likely migrated to a cloud-based SD-WAN. But the ghost of the old proxy server lives on.)
So, pour one out for the old intranet. Rest in peace, CJNet. You were slow, but you were safe. Share your worst "password reset" story in the comments below! Before the era of Slack, Teams, and Google
On CJNet, a logistics manager could check inventory metrics while a marketing intern booked a screening room for a movie premiere. It was a centralized nervous system for a sprawling empire. We look back at networks like CJNet and laugh at the loading times (60 seconds to open an email) and the cryptic error codes ("Error 404: Permission Denied").
Today, we have hyperspeed cloud networks, but we also have "Shadow IT"—where employees use personal KakaoTalk or WhatsApp to share trade secrets because the corporate system is too annoying. CJNet was a walled garden. It was ugly, slow, and required a manual IT ticket to change your desktop background. But it was ours . If you are looking for CJ's modern network
If you worked in a South Korean office or a global logistics firm between 1998 and 2010, those five letters——probably trigger a very specific fight-or-flight response.
Here is my ode to the beige, clunky, yet groundbreaking world of the corporate intranet. Logging into CJNet was a ritual. You couldn’t just "connect to Wi-Fi." You had to launch a specific dialer (if you were remote) or a web proxy script. You had to remember a password that expired every 30 days and couldn’t contain a single syllable of your actual name. You were slow, but you were safe
But here is the truth: It was secure before security was cool. It forced employees to actually talk to each other because the chat function was always broken.