Case Studies and the DTI
This month, as the column is titled ‘Web Business’ we thought that we would have a look at a couple of companies that are doing just that. Leasing Network, is a leasing company that specialises in providing financing for the computer industry. They use the web to support their existing network of dealers and are now the first leasing company in the UK to provide not only proposals, but also progress tracking via the web. A dealer can view the status of his customers lease proposals via a browser. Leasing Network already have a Lease Quote generator on their web site www.leasing-network.co.uk which was also a first for the UK back in 1997, and hope to launch this new service beginning of April. The system will work by uploading the progress information from their main computer system once a day to the web site. This is accessed via a system of username and password from a secure area on the web site. Whilst this is not full online transaction processing being read only , it is the first time anything like this has been tried in the UK. The MD, John Stickley is a keen believer in the Internet as a business resource, intends to develop further facilities, as he said to Mark when he interviewed him "The Web in the UK is fast taking hold in the public consciousness and is becoming an integral part of more and more business dealings…..it provides an opportunity for highly cost effective marketing….. you can’t die of ‘firsts’ ".
Many sites have information on them that is of a geographic nature, be it location of dealers, or the site of an event. If this data is also of a changing nature as in the case of events then you need to be able to generate maps based on say the post code of the location. This is something that is getting easier with every release of mapping software, however it is still fraught with difficaulties and quite often expense, from licence fees for use of the maps themselves. However, at least one company seems to have an answer to this. Multi Media Mapping allow you to add their mapping technology to your web site so that you can generate high quality maps from a number of parameters like post code or telephone number. In fact the AA are using them for their Hotels & Restaurants site. Most of the time this service is free, Take a look at www.multimap.com however, like all things check their terms and conditions before you scatter maps all over your sites!
The other day Mark had to rent a laptop for a trip and after a recommendation from Ollie at Computer Connections www.compconnect.co.uk, he went to the Hamilton Rentals site www.hamilton.co.uk , when you follow the links to pricing information the site asks for your name telephone number and email address. Mark duly did this and within a couple of minutes received a phone call from a representative of Hamilton Rentals. Apparently the details ‘pop up’ on his desktop as soon as a user hits the submit button. Simply done via email from a form but the final result is effective, simple, but to the end user quite impressive. Many times an effective feature can often be added to a Web site without too much programming. As we have said before it is better to be focused on the requirements of a web site from a marketing / sales / support viewpoint rather that being too absorbed into what bit of ‘cool’ technology you can implement today. Which brings us to a gripe that we have about many of the sites for the IT industry. There you are with a problem piece of equipment or software, and you need to find the FAQ list or the latest driver. So many sites bury this information well down in their site so that you have to trawl through page after page of marketing information before you get to where you want. Sure, there is a need for these companies to advertise themselves but really the two areas should be separated. Marketing and Sales with all their pretty logos and images, and Support with just a fast plain lists of searchable information so that you can find what you want and get you equipment running. Being told how wonderful a company and their products are is of very little consolation when you are trying to find out why your one does not work!
Big Brother is talking to you!
Business are starting to use the web to find information about day to day issues of running a company, keeping up to day with legislation can be quite a job on it’s own. One site that tries to help out with this and contains lots of useful resources on the web for businesses is the DTI ‘s own www.enterprise-zone.org.uk . This site hosted a live on-line chat with Barbara Roche, the Minister for small firms on the 7th of April. The final result of this brave attempt was unfortunately disappointing. Only half an hour was allocated for the Minister so only a total of 15 questions were answered, and there was no answer – reply – answer type of debate. Questions could be submitted weeks beforehand, so it would have been useful if the answers to these questions were put up at the start of the session so that feed back from businesses who were on-line during the chat-in could be gained. I am not sure whether the Minister was typing herself but there was quite a long delay between answers. If a group of keyboard operators were made available, then perhaps the Minister would have been able to answer more questions in the allotted time. I hope that we will see more of this type of event and obviously lessons will be learnt and improvements in the presentation made, you never know some of the ideas and feed back may even be taken up by the government! For what it’s worth one of Mark’s questions to the Minister was answered and here is the transcript from the web site:
<Begin quote>
Mark Newton asks:
Many
small firms have goods that have a worldwide market, but they are
unable to finance a marketing operation of any size. Many of these
firms are looking to market their goods via the Internet.
To do this sensibly, these companies need to be able to offer secure
credit card transactions using Visa’s SET system or similar.
However it is almost impossible for any company smaller than the
likes of Tesco and co to set up fully secure credit card transactions
over the Internet in the UK. Our cousins in the States find things
much easier. Does the Government have any plans to encourage this
sadly neglected area of commerce, in a country that always has and
must continue to trade abroad.
Response
from Barbara Roche:
I am pleased to tell you that I shall be announcing the government’s
policy on digital signatures and encryption in the next few weeks.
<End of quote>
So our Government has a new policy on digital signatures and encryption? Perhaps it’s a case of ‘watch this space’?
Leaks more leaks
Last month we talked about memory leaks in web servers. These leaks are caused by programs using memory and not releasing it afterwards, so after a period of time the computer will run out of usable memory and require a reboot to sort things out. Now this is a tad annoying on a work station, but it is near fatal on a web server which normally sits quietly in a corner, getting up to all sorts of mischief by it’s self. If this box slows down or fails then the whole world will probably know about it before you. So when we stumbled upon these three reasons for memory leaks in IIS the other day, we though that it was only fair to tell you! Firstly, if the URL’s that access IIS are longer that 512 bytes in length, then a memory leak occurs which is equal to the total size in bytes of the URL. URL’s of this length can be generated by complicated queries or passing variables between pages through the query string or even from simple forms (e.g. www.mycompany.co.uk/firstpage.asp?myvarible=’fred’&yourvariable=’george’…etc). The Second cause of these leaks is if the www service is stopped without stopping all the IIS services, this causes a 256K leak. Stopping services is usually done by an administrator Finally whenever a web is published from Front Page 97 to a web server the recalculate hyperlinks command is issued and, yes you’ve guessed it a memory leak occurs. There are fixes for all but the last one at the moment and are described in detail in the Microsoft Knowledgebase article Q162233. All these memory leaks occur only if Front Page extensions are installed on the web server, perhaps another reason that many ISPs are still hesitant to put these extensions on their web servers.
Here’s a little gotcha for all you who use input boxes on forms with JavaScript validation to make sure that the user types something. If this user’s browser has JavaScript turned off or it does not support it then no validation is done and the user can type what ever they like. So to stop this you need to test for JavaScript support, doing this can be a little tricky if there is no scripting engine in the browser for you to use. Things are best done server-side, whilst there are many ways to do this, the very latest, is BrowserHawk by cyscape, this product was in fact only launched a couple of days before we wrote this article, so there has been not time to try it for real. But it comes from the same people that we have written about before who supply the browsercap.ini file that lets ASP pages detect browser capabilities. Although this new product is not free it is however not expensive either, and will enable very advanced checking of most browser capabilities whilst claiming a much higher accuracy rate than browsercap.ini allows. Check out their site at www.cyscape.com/browserhawk .