Supporting technology driven business processes through the internet: a practical technical note

Internet, intranet, and extranet technology have been used for the last few years by organisations to improve efficiency and enhance their relationships with partners, customers and employees. The results of this have delivered significant improvements in web page development and telecommunications. These improvements are enabling websites to become "live" and full of regularly updated information, thus no longer being static electronic brochures. For a website to be a real "live" one, it must be fully integrated with a back-office system such as company databases, which will keep updating company data or information, to keep clients and staff constantly informed. By using a real life case study, this paper investigates the various issues relevant to implementing a database/internet, intranet, extranet information system. In particular, the issues of client platform, the business server and the implementation language are outlined and discussed. The database side is not covered by the discussion, as the focus of this paper is the internet side of the system.