Shopping, Shopping
It's been a busy month with e-commerce, with various reports and statements about the state of play of e-commerce in this country and the US.
We have talked before about the slowness in uptake of commercial applications on the Internet from UK companies. Much of this is caused by the previously difficult procedures and technologies associated with securing and setting up a web site to handle credit cards. This task has slowly become easier, so easy in fact that Mark has been setting up an on-line catalogue with full order processing and shopping basket, handling full credit card validation for a small web site, using easy to use off-the shelf solutions. We will be bringing you the first part of the story next month.
We have mentioned more that once that our government's desire to force an encryption standard for internet transactions, which would leave a 'back-door' for the police and intelligence agencies to use to decode the information should they decide to, would be detrimental to the growth of commerce on the internet in this country. It was announced that after the Commons Trade & Industry Select Committee report , the Government has stepped down from introducing this legislation. The select committee chairman Martin O'Neill [Labour, Ochil]: "The Government must have a much more permissive approach if it wants to encourage the growth of e-commerce." This is good news for all of us who are promoting the internet for trade. The playing fields are still far from level but at least it is becoming possible for UK companies to compete with their US cousins for a slice of the e-commerce pie.
As if we needed more proof of the importance of watching this fast developing area of commerce, the large pharmaceutical group SmithKline Beecham's chief executive Jan Leschly said that the e-commerce revolution is turning their way of doing business inside-out. "One third of people going on the web are looking for medical information", says Leschly. This means, says Leschly, "we have to change the way we market our products.
Oh and next time when you have to discuss with a client how much that their e-commerce web site will cost to develop or have to justify your budget for the companies shopping mall with your boss. Just take heart at the figures revealed in a survey by the Garter Group, which came up with the following figures:
An enterprise e-commerce webs site will cost about $1 million
No customers said that they were on budget for their projects
The survey found the price of sites ranged from $350,000 to $2
million
The largest costs were labour-related, and represented about 79 percent of expenses.
On average, it took five months for an e-commerce site to be built, although some took up to a year to launch
The other costs were related to software (10 percent) and hardware (11 percent).
The report identified three classifications of e-commerce sites:
* $300,000 to $1 million to "get on the map." This creates sites that are adequate, but functionally behind most industry participants, according to Gartner Group.
* $1 million to $5 million to "run with the pack." This amount of
spending creates sites that are functionally equivalent to most
industry participants.
* $5 million to $20 million to achieve "market differentiator"
status.
So a company has an e-commerce site all set up and running. How many times have we heard stories about delays in supplying goods, shortfalls, and just not keeping their customers informed about their order or enquiry. The Direct Marketing Association stated in a recent report that "UK companies'fulfilment of web enquiries is poor, with over 40% of information or brochure requests unanswered after three weeks". This is just appalling, how on earth can anyone expect the investment in a web site to pay off if the enquiries that it generates are treated with so little interest within the company. But time and time again we talk to companies who want a web site, but who have not thought about how to handle enquires from it, some companies not even having email.
Having said all this next moth we will begin to show you how to set up shop on the internet for under £ 1000 and be up and running within 6 weeks, obviously this means that you will have to do the hard work yourself and already have a web server that can run pearl scripts, no Active server pages on this one, yes it will even work on Linux !
Index Server Fixed !
The Knowledge Base tells all
Over the last couple of months Mark has been talking to Microsoft about a bug in Index server, we covered this fault in issue 57. Well the other day Andy Dow from Microsoft emailed a new .dll to fix this bug. After copying the file to the system32 directory and rebuilding the index server catalogue, all worked fine, with abstracts being displayed without the JavaScript code showing, thank you Microsoft. The fix will be posted on the Microsoft site once it has undergone further testing, but it seems fine here. The knowledge base article for this is now Q232369, Andy says "The fix will be included in Service Pack 6, but is available in the mean time from technical support (this is just until it has been fully regression tested)".
A colleague contacted us the other day wanting to control Index Server so that it only indexes when told to. What was happening was that a large number of files were being updated on a regular basis and whilst this was update was happening, Index server was trying to index the changes and slowing everything down. There is no easy way of doing this at the moment, the way suggested was to stop the process that does the indexing with a command line of
Net stop cisvc
And start it again with
Net start cisvc
When the file changes have been made, the stopping and starting of this process could be automated and made to happen at set times of the dat by using NTs AT command. Something like:
AT 19:00 /every:m,tu,w,th,f "<path>\ startcisvc.cmd"
AT 06:00 /every:m,tu,w,th,f "<path>\ stopcisvc.cmd"
And now a horror story; Hands up all of you running live web servers with the demonstration files installed? Well if it's Microsoft's IIS web server then there are three small files that you ought to look for and remove. They are
viewcode.asp, codebrws.asp, and showcode.asp
With these files on a web server apparently a hacker can view sensitive or compromising information from that system. This problem affects Versions 3.x of Site Server and 4.x of IIS
Inter-Dream the perfect HTML Design Tool ?
An environment to dream of
Mark had to develop a small section of a site the other day, this site was going to use ASP pages but they were of a complicated design. So what was needed was a good HTML design tool which did not mess with the ASP code, but also some help with colour coding and syntax checking of the ASP would also be useful. The choice for the HTML design tool was easy, Mark choosing Macromedia's excellent Dreamweaver. To get as much help as possible when writing ASP then Microsoft's InterDev was chosen as it hints at the next bit of the command in a similar way to Visual Basic does now and colour codes the script nicely. Now here's the interesting bit, if you open a file in Interdev, we are talking just simple 'file open' here, not 'create me a confusing project with lots of support files that I haven't a clue what they do'. Now open the same file in Dreamweaver and edit the page in, say Dreamweaver, do a ctlr-S to save it (remember it's ASP and to test it you will have to save it first, your preview in a browser options won't work). Now click on your opened copy of Interdev. This says that the file has been altered outside of Inderdev, do you wish to reload it. Answer yes to this and alter some of the ASP code, again do a ctrl-s to save it and return to Dreamweaver. This program now tells you that the page has been edited outside Dreamweaver and do you wish to reload it. So there you have it the best of both worlds. No longer do you have to suffer the design view of Interdev now you can have code colouring and syntax checking of your ASP code and a great design environment. Who said that you can't have your cake and eat it !