The Web is displacing traditional sources of information and interaction. It transfers historically paper-based tasks to online applications.
Information sharing over the Web is universal in the sense that receiver need not bother with file types, end machine types, and application preparation at receiver's side.
Indeed, information/knowledge sharing is the main usage of web-documents. The strong point of web contents is that they are (1) freely updated as required, (2) qualified by means of web-multimedia technology.
"Web-based information communication" is like "preparing a book". Here "prepare" means "wait". If we want that a book functions, we need announce its presence. It is the reason why e-mail remains an indispensable communication media — e-mail is of prompt ('push') type of communication. We use e-mail to announce that some web-based information is prepared at some place.
Thus it is important to realize nice combination of e-mail ('push'-media) and web-page ('wait'-media).
The Web automates routine inquires. Benefits are brought to both the organization (cut down on support personnel) and users (control and verify the data being entered).
And server side coding plus database-driven brings out such contrivances as interactivity and user adaptive page generation.