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E-commerce:
General background and local issues
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The Program in Distance Phrenology
(PDP) advertises through its web site. It makes sure the major
search engines will link net surfers to their site and it keeps
current, former and potential students up to date with an optional
email notification service that redirects them to the web site
for details on new services, changes in certification guidelines,
etc. They admit students, handle all academic services, offer
courses and certification processes online. They accept credit
card transactions over the web as a means of payment for all
business transactions. They recruit staff via online job search
channels. Some of their employees are salaried and/or given
commissions, others are contract faculty, signing on for a particular
course or curriculum development effort, doing their work remotely
and getting paid via electronic funds transfer.
There is no physical corporate headquarters, the PDP director
has signed a contract with another company to host their virtual
home office, providing all staff, students and employees with
email boxes, fax, telephony, file space, and video and audio
conferencing capability from their home office desktop or notebook
computers. They track their class rosters, certification files
and student administration files via a web browser interface
to a database at the virtual home office server, and students
are able to download courseware, syllabuses, required materials
and assignments over the Internet. What follows is a quick survey
of what would have to be in place to make all this possible:
3.1 Distributed
services and browsers
The Program in Distance Phrenology lives and dies by the web.
The browser is the gateway to any and all of the PDP offerings
outlined above. But the browsers depend on full-function web
servers to host the behind-the-scenes work. Those web servers
have to be linked to databases, mail servers, and telephony
and fax servers. There is a business-to-business aspect to these
distributed services as well since PDP has contracted with a
third party to host their virtual offices. Taken together these
components make up the server side of the equation for distributed
services.
PDP staff count on the fact that their students, staff and employees
have what they need on their desktop or notebook computers already—that
is, 1) a recent browser (not too many releases behind the latest
and greatest), with Javalanguage capability for some of the
more sophisticated interactive services, and 2) an account with
a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) so they have the means
to get online. The directors of PDP must assure themselves that
they are not cutting off significant numbers of potential students
because of unwarranted assumptions about client IT capabilities.
3.2 Security and directory
PDP provides access to valuable goods and services over the
Internet. They are exchanging proprietary and sensitive information
in innumerable electronic messages. Both they and their students
must trust that this information is not falling into the hands
of third parties and that they are really communicating with
each other and not with an online imposter. In particular, the
Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) guidelines
set federal policies governing the privacy of electronic records
for students and their families. All this means the company
needs a solid security infrastructure that manages accounts
for faculty and staff and for current and potential students.
The security service must authenticate users (determines if
they are who they claim to be) when they connect to the servers,
and then authorize those authenticated users to access the resources
(and only the resources) to which they are entitled.
The security system must also provide for encryption of all
sensitive or valuable information being transmitted over the
Internet and for digital signatures to messages so the recipient
can be assured that the message is genuine. The security services
in turn depend on a general directory service to maintain and
make available information about individuals (employees, customers,
business partners and others) and their roles and privileges.
The directory service will also need to support globally accessible
online white and yellow page lookup services and internally
accessible contact information for students.
3.3 Shopping and registering via online catalogs
Students can search the online academic catalog. It doubles
as a timetable, specifying when particular courses are offered
(Courses, for example, that include a videoconference component
require a group of students to take the course at the same time).
If a student has gone through e-admissions, and is eligible
to register, they can make selections from the catalog, accumulating
a“shopping basket” of courses for a given term and
then they can proceed to the“check-out counter” where
their electronic invoice is generated and their online payment
accepted. This is how PDP handles registration online.
3.4 Transactions over the network
Because electronic payments are made by students and dispersed
to faculty, staff
and other business partners, the infrastructure will need to
support secure
transactions. For example, participants in the transactions
must trust that if their
account is debited, the credit will show on PDP’s books
and vice versa. This
requires PDP to have a solid infrastructure for distributed
transaction processing.
However, products that support this key enabling technology
are only recently
beginning to mature.
3.5 Automated workflow
There are a number of multi-step business processes in the PDP
program office.To be a true e-business, PDP needs to automate
these workflow processes so that, for example, an e-document
get routed to the appropriate business officers, getsthe necessary
reviews and approvals, and gets copied to all the relevant parties.
3.6 Audit and archive
Requirements for accreditation, licensing and certification
specify which recordsmust be archived and available for audit.
Concerns over potential litigation alsodictate that there be
a complete electronic record of past business and academictransactions.
An infrastructure to capture and maintain such records must
be inplace.
3.7 Internet standards
None of this would work without the general adherence by all
participants to a common set of standards and protocols. Even
the most basic functions such as searching the online catalog
and participating in an email discussion group rely on TCP/IP
for internet transmission of data, HTTP for web server to browser
links, HTML for web browser content and formatting, DNS for
resolving computer host names into IP addresses and SMTP for
interoperable exchange of email.
In addition to these well-established standards, there is a
second set that would be required in order to provide interoperable
and widely accessible directory and security services of the
kind described above. To give student the ability to search
a faculty directory, an LDAP or X.500 server would have to be
in place. This directory would also likely contain the business
to business contact information and student demographic data
as well. Security needs have been mentioned above. Privacy,
authenticity and integrity are the goals of such Internet-related
standards and protocols as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), IPsec
and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) |
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