e business

E-Business: Domain Names - Wrong Faith

Ian McMillan registered the internet domain name TrivialPursuits.net and won the right to continue using it, after a challenge from Horn Abbot, the makers of the board game, failed to stop him using the domain name. The makers of the Trivial Pursuits board game failed to obtain the TrivialPursuits.net domain name from the person who said he registered the name to lament life's loss of individual creativity.

This decision has gone against the long established principle that once a brand is "well known", the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP)1 part of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), would be able to effect the transfer of the name. However, in this case, the panel was unclear about the intentions of the respondent, and his motive for registering the domain name. The panel did not believe that there was enough evidence to support an application for bad faith activity on behalf of the respondent.

Respondent Ian McMillan informed the WIPO panellist that he bought the name with with the intention of creating a website dealing with "the 21st Century's unique trivial pursuits, specifically the fact that most aspects of life now involve a commodity as opposed to individual creativity, from sex to salvation via surgery and sweeteners". Currently, the site is only one page long, and refers to the WIPO case as "a fine example of a quite unnecessary and utterly trivial pursuit," adding that more content will be added, "but at the convenience of my lazy nature."

There was little evidence of bad faith found by the panel, although McMillan does not appear to have intention of using the website.

Comment: Usually in cybersquatting cases where there "is no use of a sign in the course of trade" plus difficulty in establishing trade mark infringement or passing off, the UDRP approach is the recommended recourse as it is far cheaper and sometimes quicker.

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E-Business Cards

Ebusiness cards can hold the same content as a compact disc ROM, but will fit in a wallet. The capacity of an Ebusiness card is approximately 35Mb compared to the 700Mb of a CD ROM. An ebusiness card can be used instead of using a regular business card, or it can be sent via mail as an information sheet. The card can hold a gist of services that the cardholder's business offers, and can also hold a copy of the cardholder's website.

Ebusiness cards connect to online resources such as a website or a videotape, and permit the user to launch an e-mail. E-Business Cards are a new and revolutionary way to allocate or disburse small or large amounts of information, presentation, pictures, archives, forms, video, websites and other types of multimedia. E-Business cards provide the user with a cheap and reproducible marketing tool, and can be used in combination with other marketing tools. When the designing of an E- business card is finished, it can be reproduced in large numbers.

Ebusiness cards are revolutionizing information technology, providing a cheap and hassle free way to give information anywhere around the world at anytime. Another major advantage that these cards provide is that they are cheap compared to normal business cards and do not require the set-up and printing fees like a normal card.

Ebusiness card allow the user to post a hyperlink on the card itself, and this makes it easier for the person who is reading the card to access the cardholders website. This is important because a hyperlink can cut down the searching time required for a person who wants to access the cardholders website.

Other advantages include delivery of resumes, files and pictures, small videos, newsletters and brochures. These cards are multipurpose devices that help in the expansion of business activities in a way that was unfathomable only a decade ago.

Oracle E-Business Suite: XML Publisher

n 2004, Oracle has delivered a new tool for developing reports on Oracle Applications. It was named Oracle XML Publisher and it is available within the technology stack of the E-Business suite (sometimes also called Oracle Financials).

Most of the companies that utilize Oracle Applications as its ERP system have a long backlog list of reports to be constructed. Oracle has delivered this tool for helping organizations on this issue. Using this tool, users can create a template of the reports layouts using a set of familiar desktop tools such as MS Word and Adobe Acrobat or instead of creating, a user can just enter a template, such as a Government PDF form. The data is still handled by the E-Business suite, but now users can design and control how the report outputs will be presented using a familiar desktop application.

The classic approach to create reports was to combine 3 components: Data Logic, Layout and Translation in a single file what makes it very inflexible. Even a simple change on the layout of a report, a new report file has to be generated with all components. With this new product, just a minor change on template file is necessary. The picture below shows how the three components are treated separated by the XML Publisher at the design time, and at runtime they are brought back together by XML Publisher to generate the final formatted output. XML Publisher allows user to choose the output format of the report. The most common formats are PDF, RTF, HTML, Excel, XML, EDI and EFT. This tool also has a delivery service where users can choose what they want to do with the report. Using this service, it is possible to send the output directly to an email address, to a printer, to a fax or to a WebDAV server.

E-business Advice

E-business advice goes a step further than just training people in ecommerce basics and helping them to create Internet and marketing strategies. It is highly customized to suit the requirements of both a new entrant and an existing player in e-business. Professional E-business advice can be broadly categorized into four major areas: starting an e-business, designing and maintaining the website, marketing the e-business, and e-commerce operations.

E-business advice involves solving not only the day to day operational issues in running an e-business, but also correcting strategic business decisions. For example, a reasonably well-researched fact such as, ?almost half the US population will be aged 50 years or more by 2020, and that they will enter a new phase of active living and spending in their retirement age?, tells an e-business owner to make the Web site and marketing campaigns in such a way so as to target these 50+ years of age target groups.

E-business advice also offers pointers to some of the most pained areas of e-business ? measuring return on investments (RoI), and increasing customers while reducing customer acquisition costs. The advice on Internet marketing and branding help the e-businesses plan and execute integrated online campaigns better. Such advice even helps in search engine marketing by advising on better search engine optimizing techniques and paying for sponsored links on some famous search engines. Search engine optimization helps the prospective customers to get to find an e-business owner?s website in the top 10 searches given a few e-business specific keywords. This increases the number of visits to the Web site drastically and creates a positive impact on the revenues of the e-business.

E-business advice also includes areas such as web usability and Internet project management. Advice on Web usability includes advice on the existing IT infrastructure, ease of navigation and getting the right equipment and software for optimal performance of the Web site.

Thus, getting an advice for an e-business is extremely useful not only for new entrants into the business, but also for existing players who are facing operational or strategic issues with their business model.

Oracle Discoverer: A Reporting and Decision Support Tool

Oracle Discoverer is a business intelligence tool to support organizational decisions. It uses a repository called EUL (End User Layer) which is based on information stored and controlled by transactional applications. The main EUL goal is to hide details and complexity of a transactional database, organizing data to reflect the company specific business areas, making all data queries faster and easier.

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS - also known as Oracle Applications and sometimes called Oracle Financials) has a BI module with an EUL mapped from Oracle EBS transactional data, which permits Oracle Discoverer to be used as a decision support tool for information stored into Oracle EBS database.

By using Oracle EBS security schema, which uses responsibilities to control access rights, Oracle Discoverer shows its repository in a user friendly way, using folders for each business area, listing all items that you can select for a query.

When you select an item for a query, all items that don’t have relationship with this first selected item will be disabled for selecting because every relationship and dependencies are mapped through EUL.

All Oracle Discoverer queries can be viewed in a tabular or matrix formats, allowing the definition of data fields (items) at the header of a report. This is used to filter the result set of data to be shown. There are many data format functions and it is possible to change the reports layouts, allowing conditional format of characters fonts and colors for each column of data. Besides this features, you can change columns positions, order and group data dynamically.

Oracle Discoverer can be executed by a local desktop software installation (Oracle Discoverer Desktop Edition) or using a browser via web (Oracle Discoverer Plus). Additionally you can export the reports for Html files, Microsof Excel and other file formats.

Oracle Financial Statement Generator for E-Business Suite

Oracle Financial Statement Generator is an Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS – also known as Oracle Applications and sometimes called Oracle Financials) module for reporting. It enables users to generate financial statements from within the Oracle General Ledger. These reports show basic accounting data that helps investors and other users to understand a firm's financial history and activities. Below there is a list with some of these FSG reports and a brief description of them:

Actual/Budget Income Statement Income Statement to include

Period-to- date and Year-to-date Budget and Actual

Budget Analysis Review Budget Information for each I/S Line Item

Budget/Actual Report PTD Budget vs Actual Report

Company Balance Sheet Balance Sheet - no detail of accounts

Company Income Statement Company Income Statement

Comparative Income Stmt Current & Prior Period Comparative Income Statement

Cumulative Balance Sheet Monthly Cumulative Balance Sheet

Cumulative Monthly Inc. Stmt. Monthly Actual figures in thousands for each month and year to date

DBI Annual Comparison Report displays Current PTD vs Prior Year PTD, Variance and Var %

DBI Report Report designed to review balances for P&L Portal Page

Income Statement – EPS Income Statement with EPS calculations

Income Statement Consolidated Income Statement Consolidated

Income Statement with Variance Income Statement with Variance

Responsibility Report by Dept. Departmental Responsibility Report - Actual, Budget and Variance in Units

Rolling Income Statement Rolling Income Statement

Statement of Cash Flows Statement of Cash Flow

Summary Income Statement Summary Income Statement

Trial Balance Trial Balance with subtotals by type of account

WW Con. IS WIP Worldwide Consolidated Income Statement

WW Consolidated Balance Sheet Worldwide Consolidated Balance Sheet Report

WW Consolidated Expenses Worldwide Consolidated Expense Report

WW Consolidated Income Stmt Worldwide Consolidated Income Statement Report

Oracle E-Business Suite Development 2

• J2EE: is an architecture to define standards to solve enterprise level problems, like persistence, scalability, availability, security, distributed computing, etc. This standard should be followed by application server vendors, so a J2EE application would run on any J2EE application server complaint, like Oracle OC4J (OAS), IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, JBoss, etc. It is not a simple architecture to solve a simple problem. Get ready to study and understand the complexity of enterprise programming (we will deal with this matter on others papers to help you).

• EJB: is a J2EE standard to define components to write business logic at the server side (Session Beans), to define a domain layer to access data (Entity Beans) and to deal with asynchronous and queuing messages (Message Driven Beans). The last EJB standard release (the 3.0), not commonly used yet, became much easier to develop with. The previous one (the 2.0 and 2.1) should be used with a series of design patterns to solve common problems, what make the code not so easy to program and understand. The first one (the 1.0 and 1.1) was useless to enterprise level development; it did not implement even a one to many relationship.

• Oracle ADF: according to Oracle, ADF is an application development framework design to simplify J2EE development and bring productivity and ease of use of Oracle forms to the J2EE platform. ADF with JDeveloper is the best choice for Oracle E-Business Suite, because Oracle made this environment familiar to Oracle Forms, Reports and Designer developers.

Oracle E-Business Suite Development 1

We have already talked about the importance of Java Technologies at “Oracle E-Business Suite Customization: New Directions”. Not only for Oracle Company itself, but also for the Oracle E-Business customers, whose investments must be preserved. Now we present tools and frameworks, you will use if you intend to develop in Java:

• Java Language Itself: is an object oriented language, so if you are not used with this paradigm, we strongly advice you to study this already established paradigm. To develop in Java you will use a lot of standards and libraries, they are known by its name, J2ME, J2SE and J2EE, to portable, standard and enterprise applications respectively;

• JDeveloper: is an integrated development environment (IDE) built in Java for Java development. It is complete considering the development life cycle, so you can model, code, debug, test and deploy. It is prepared for Web, XML, Web Services, SQL, J2EE and Oracle ADF development. Provide built-in features for open sources tools and frameworks, such as Struts, Ant, JUnit and CVS. According to Oracle, JDeveloper is the tool of choice for Forms, Reports and Designer customers because it carries a similar development model.

• Struts: is a java framework considered a de facto standard to build web applications. Struts is a solution to organize what was happing when people used Java Servlets and JSP freely. Struts implements the MVC (Model / View / Controller) pattern, so you might separate business logic (Model) from web application flow of control (Controller) and JSP/html code (View).

Strategic Issues For A Successful E-Commerce

1. INTRODUCTION
Electronic Commerce is for the age of Information Technology what mercantilism, the quest for gold and the conquest of new lands were for the age of discovery. Like the prow of a large fishing boat, it draws towards itself all other interests and elements of society, and it will leave new discoveries and changes in its wake. The vast networking of world through optic fibers, satellites and wireless communication is creating a new global community and a new global market, in which most of the countries should participate. It is strengthening, almost paradoxically, the identity of small groups, isolated communities and minority interests and driving them towards a less costly social and economic activity and widening their opportunities. And most importantly, it is empowering small businesses to compete with multinational corporations and enabling consumers to search the world for exactly what they needed.

E-Commerce basically means using networks (Internet) to carry out all the activities involved in business management and operation: buying and selling of products and services, technology and partner search, dealing with counterparts, choosing the most convenient transportation and insurances, performing bank transactions, paying and billing, communicating with company salesmen, picking up orders, and any other activities necessary for trading.

A company will be able to post a complete catalog of it’s products and services on the Internet, which can be continuously updated to present new or updated products, proving a large virtual showcase for potential clients, a means to communicate with clients and in that way, adjusts it’s offer to their requirements; while at the same time it will get access to virtual markets where it can purchase what it needs.

Through integral systems already under development, one company will connect to other companies located anywhere in the world, to buy and sell, choosing the products and services which best meets its needs from a huge network. And it’s true that this revolution involves us all.

E-Commerce Solutions

With the growth of e-commerce over the past few years, the number of e-business solution providers in the industry has also grown drastically, especially in India. E-commerce can be compared to a 24/7 open shop or a showroom catering to its clients and buyers. Therefore, a lot of maintenance has to go into it. This is where the e-commerce solution providers step in, take things in their hands, spend time and further enhance your business.

Conducting business online may sound very easy as you avoid a lot of unwanted hassles but a lot of skills and innovation is required to keep it going. E-commerce involves doing market research, getting qualified traffic, converting hits to business advantages and using information to generate new e-commerce from existing clients.

E-commerce solution providers in India with their in-depth research and skills will provide you with tactics and strategies to make your business profitable. The first step for them would ideally be to understand your business and requirements. A research will follow to find out the predicted market potential, the best keywords and phrases, competition for keywords, search engine relevancy etc

The next step for an e-business service provider would be to find a way to get the visitor on your website to take steps to benefit your business. This is done by understanding the psyche of the visitor and creating an automated website, attractive and user-friendly for the visitor. Efficient e-commerce solution providers will definitely opt for internet marketing to get more visitors to visit your website. Launching a monthly newsletter for your customers is also a good idea. You can send them updates about the new and the latest that has been added to the portfolio of products on your website.

The launch of your website if required is also taken care of by the e-commerce service providers. Site-management and promotion is also very important. The content, images and the layout of a website has to be continuously improved and worked upon keeping up to date with the market. Overall, your website should be designed to attract the first time visitors. The usability and utility factor should also be kept in mind. This will bring them back to your website whenever they plan to buy anything.

The web of e-commerce solution providers in India is vast. They offer a host of e-commerce solution and consulting services to support guide and help you at each step. Outsourcing e-commerce solutions will help you save time and resources while you can focus on other important business objectives. Some e-commerce solution providers also offer BPO services which can be used for telemarketing and cross-selling to maximize profits.

E-commerce solutions are a big support for businesses today. The demands and the expectations of the end-users are high and so is the level of competition in the industry. E-commerce solution providers help you streamline your process and cover all the gaps that might have gone unseen.