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Time: 8 hours
Level: Advanced
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 Introduction Resource- This unit examines the type of system which is described by the umbrella term ‘e-commerce’. A number of typical application areas are examined including retailing using the internet, supply chain management...
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- 1 Distributed systems Resource
- The past four years have seen an amazing growth of interest in distributed systems which address the business needs of companies and which use network technology – primarily the technology employed in...
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| | 2 Commerce and the internet
- 2 Commerce and the internet Resource
- There are a number of ways in which companies can make money from the internet. Probably the best known way of making money is by selling some commodity; this could be a non-IT commodity such as a CD or...
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| | 3 E-commerce applications
- 3.1 An example – supply chain management Resource
- Before looking at the wide variety of e-commerce application areas that have flourished over the last decade in more detail, it is worth looking at one which may not be familiar to a reader, but which...
- 3.2 E-tailing Resource
- The next example is probably the one that you expected me to introduce first: that of selling goods over the internet. However, I deliberately introduced supply chain management first since it is an area...
- 3.3 Procurement Resource
- The term procurement is used to describe the purchase of goods and services which are not directly used in the main business of a company. For example, a car manufacturer will procure stationery for its...
- 3.4 Auction sites Resource
- These are sites on the web which run conventional auctions. There are two types of auction: those that are carried out in real time, where participants log in to an auction site using a browser at a specified...
- 3.5 Other commercial websites Resource
- So far I have detailed e-commerce applications which are connected with very large organisations; to conclude this section it is worth looking at a number of smaller applications, many of which are distinguished...
- 3.6 Search engines Resource
- The web contains a huge amount of material. Finding specific information is a huge problem; even in the early days of the internet this was a problem which threatened to slow the growth of the net. Fortunately...
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| | 4 The facilities of the internet used to support e-commerce and e-business systems
- 4.1 The World Wide Web Resource
- The aim of Section 4 is to describe briefly the main facilities of the Internet that are used to support e-commerce and e-business systems.
- 4.2 FTP Resource
- The acronym FTP stands for the File Transfer Protocol. It provides the facility whereby files can be downloaded into a computer from another computer in the internet. Although there are a number of utilities...
- 4.3 Email Resource
- This is one of the most ubiquitous technologies on the internet and, along with the World Wide Web, is the most used. When you write an email you use a program known as a mailer. When the email is completed...
- 4.4 Newsgroups Resource
- A newsgroup is a collection of internet users who are interested in a particular topic. The topic may be a technical one, for example the LINUX operating system, or a recreational one such as fly fishing....
- 4.5 Mailing lists Resource
- Mailing lists are groups of users who have some interest in common, for example they may all be network professionals. Such a list is used by organisations or individuals to inform the members of topics...
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| | 5 Issues and problems affecting internet, e-commerce and e-business development
- 5.1 Legacy technology Resource
- The aim of Section 5 is to examine some of the issues and problems which affect the devekopment of Internet, e-commerce and e-business applications.
- 5.2 Security and privacy Resource
- The internet is not a particularly secure place. There are two aspects to this: the first is that information is widely published throughout the internet which can be used for criminal and near-criminal...
- 5.3 Programming and abstraction Resource
- In the early 1990s programming an application for the internet was a tough proposition. I remember that I once had an application which required a very simple form of communication with another application...
- 5.4 The speed of development Resource
- E-commerce consultants speak of a web year. This is the time which it takes to bring to implementation a conventional system that would normally take a calendar year to develop. Current estimates are that...
- 5.5 Structure and data Resource
- A problem that is being increasingly experienced by internet companies is the fact that they have to interchange a large amount of data and that such data inherently lacks structure. For example, HTML...
- 5.6 Problems with transactions Resource
- A distributed transaction is a sequence of operations applied to a number of distributed databases which form a single functional step. For example, a transaction which moves an amount of money from a...
- 5.7 Design Resource
- Designing a distributed system can also be a problem, for example the fact that computers in a distributed system are joined by communication media which can stretch over thousands of miles provides an...
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- 6.1 The archityecture of a typical e-commerce system Resource
- Before finishing this unit it is worth looking at the architecture of a typical e-commerce system in order to see some of the technologies. This is followed by details of a real application which I shall...
- 6.2 The application Resource
- The first application I shall describe is that of an online bookseller. Such a book sales system would carry out a number of functions:
- 6.3 The architecture Resource
- The architecture of the system is shown in Figure 4. It consists of a number of components. The most important of these is the web server. This communicates with browsers used by customers.
- 6.4 The Sydney Olympic Games system Resource
- IBM was responsible for the computer systems which were used in the 2000 Olympic Games. There were a number of components to the system, these included:
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| | 7 Internet business models
- 7.1 What is a business model? Resource
- The aim of this section is to look at some of the business models which have been used to drive internet applications. A business model is a high-level description of an application type which contains...
- 7.2 Business models Resource
- This is the most ubiquitous form of commerce on the World Wide Web. It involves a company presenting a catalogue of its wares to internet users and providing facilities whereby such customers can purchase...
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- 8 Further reading Resource
- There are a large number of books that have been written on e-commerce, many of which are of varying quality. I have found three useful. The first is by Kalakota and Whinstone (1997). It is an excellent...
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| | References and Acknowledgements | |
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