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In addition to the above four components, search engines are constantly being created that help users find the Web sites that store desirable information. WAIS (http://www.wais.com), InfoSeek (URL>http://www.infoseek.com), Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com), WebCrawler (http://www.webcrawler.com), Lycos (http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu) and SavvySearch (http://guaraldi.cs.colostate.edu:2000) are often used for Web searches. These search engines organize their own databases, start their own search mechanisms to support queries ranging from simple query statements to complex formations and even natural-language queries, and they return a list of URLs. Without these searching machines, finding a list of desirable URLs from the vast, unstructured, uncoordinated Web resources is time-consuming and could take the users months of point-and-click navigation to assemble.
With its capabilities, the Web has been able to facilitate electronic business transactions. Product promotion, customer support, and electronic publishing are a few examples of functions in which Web technology has been successful. Nevertheless, from a business perspective, four fundamental questions, described below, remain unanswered. These questions have prevented many corporations from carrying out business on the Web.
Despite a lack of legacy data on the Web and immature Web technology for effective transaction processing, an increasing number of corporations are now turning to the Web as their IS solution for addressing business problems within corporations. It is predicted that internal Web or intranet usage will surpass external Internet usage by the year 2000. The key factors for adopting intranets are open platform standards (e.g., HTTP and HTML), ease of installing Web servers and using Web clients, and multimedia capabilities.
The range of intranet applications that can be developed is virtually unlimited. Currently, corporations are deploying intranets as a way to organize their internal communications. Examples of these intranets are:
One main concern of deploying intranet applications on the Web is security. Currently, several measures are being installed, including firewalls. Most firewall products focus on keeping external Internet users from getting into intranet applications. Others ensure that users are authorized to access the information they seek.
The process of integrating the Web and enterprisewide systems or building some intranet applications can be approached from two directions. One involves converting enterprise data into hypermedia pages. The other involves building a link between these two systems. Regardless of which approach is used, the goal remains the same; that is, making enterprise data and the various business applications accessible through Web browsers. The use of Web browsers eliminates concerns about heterogeneous hardware and various operating systems over the Internet and intranets as well.
Building links to tie the Web and enterprise systems into a coherent system is much more feasible than converting to hypermedia pages. This is partially because the linkage programs will not interfere with the normal operations of enterprise systems for supporting day-to-day business activities and management decisions. Both researchers and vendors have been placing their emphasis on developing architectures and tools to support the construction of the linkage programs.
Enterprise systems are characterized by a variety of data structures, including traditional flat files, relational databases, IMS databases, object-oriented databases, and special package-related files (e.g., spreadsheet files, song clips, and photo images). Theoretically, this data can all be converted into hypermedia pages to support applications ranging from information inquiry to transaction processing over the Web.
Although current technology is not mature enough to support certain tasks effectively over the Web (e.g., complex interactive transaction processing), migrating key enterprise data to the Web will certainly give customers speedy query responses for such applications as marketing and electronic cataloging.
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