Local time: Friday, 05-Dec-2008 12:20:55 EST
Last update at /special/conference/apwww95,Friday, 21-May-2004 09:46:50 EST

Stretching the Web

A case study in implementing a web server and putting it to new uses

Charles Cave
Technical Services Manager
Unidata Australasia
PO Box 395
Lindfield NSW 2070
Australia

cmc@sydney.unidata.oz.au http://www.unidata.com

Abstract
Unidata Inc is a database software company head-quartered in the USA with subsidiaries in Australia, Asia, Europe and South America. The organisation set up a Web server in 1994 primarily for marketing information, and now the server is being put to further use in Customer Support. This paper presents a case study in the implementation of the server, and shows how its use is limited only by the creativity of the design team. Some exciting and innovative uses are presented as well as emphasising the need for an overall design philosophy.
Keywords
Marketing Information, Technical Information, Database Back-ends, Customer Support, Virtual Community, Training Catalogues, Hypertext

Contents

The Challenge
The Initial Web Offering
How the Web was spun
Database Back-ends
The Cost
The Benefits
Stretching the Web to new uses
Issues
The future for Unidata and the Web
References

1. The Challenge
The World Wide Web (abbreviated to "the Web") is now firmly established in the business community – an amazing feat considering its short life of four years. The development of the Web can be grouped in three phases:
1. A means of sharing information (text files) across the Internet using hypertext links.
2. Incorporating colour picture display (GIF images displayed inline) and sound/video capabilities with helper applications.
3. Utilising the power of gateway scripts and database interfaces to offer an interactive, global, client/server information system.
As more companies set up their virtual shop-fronts on the Web, it was important for Unidata Inc to establish a corporate presence on the Web to work with the established Web sites of Hardware vendors and other mainstream database organisations. A well-designed and useful home page is the mark of a technological-savvy leading-edge company.
The most practical use of the Web is disseminating information, both marketing and technical. One of the greatest challenges of a high technology company is to disseminate information (technical or marketing) in a timely and cost-effective manner.
2. The Initial Web Offering
Figure 1 - Unidata Inc Home Page
The initial offering on the Web site was the expected mix of product and company information, press releases and job offerings. Converting the printed marketing materials into Web pages produced many enquires, and a few orders!
The early days were a period of education, experimenting and market research as staff members learnt about implementing a Web site, and converting existing text files into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) - the method of preparing documents for the Web.
3. How the Web was spun
The two major things learnt from the experience to date have been:
€ Control and guidance by the Marketing department
€ Graphic Design experience is essential
Marketing Department

Unidata's Web server is managed by the Marketing department who ensure a consistent company image throughout the Web pages in line with all other corporate communications. This may sound authoritarian, but it is essential that any publicly accessible document, whether electronic or printed, is immediately recognisable by the use of the logo and corporate style.
Witness the use and abuse of fax templates in Word documents when different employees each use their own fax form. As other departments, (particularly technical groups), create Web document, it is important for them to fit in with the corporate style.
Graphic Design Expertise
The head office marketing department has a very talented graphic designer who has worked on a variety of corporate communications, and now, graphical elements and layout of the Web pages. Apple Macintosh computers have been used to create many of the graphics, including Adobe Photoshop.
Converting existing information
Existing text files and documents were converted with a range of freely available utilities, including rtf2html for Word documents and another utility for converting Framemaker document. The expertise of technical staff allowed conversion of text files to HTML with a plethora of tools, ranging from hand coding in the Unix vi editor, emacs macros, one off C and perl programs, and writing CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts.
4. Database Back-ends
Unidata Inc is a database vendor, so it made sense to store elements of information for access via the Web within the UniData RDBMS. The first application was a database of third-party applications. Several customers are interested in Web access to their application databases, and now the back-end software is available to our customers.
Business solutions directory
A huge challenge for any hardware or software vendor is to maintain its catalogue of third-party applications. Collecting, publishing and updating the information consume a lot of time (and paper!), and the printed directories are out of date as soon as they are published.

Figure 2 - Business Solutions Directory
The Business Solutions Directory was converted from a word-processing document into a database, and made accessible through a combination of forms, gateway scripts and programs to search the database. The directory is now accessible world-wide, searchable and up to date. An additional benefit is to store links to the home pages of our resellers.
On-line help

An experiment was conducted to allow searching the on-line help of the latest version of the UniData RDBMS product through a form interface. This is useful for investigating the technical details of the latest version of the product set. Automated What's New Page
A form is used to search back a specified number of days to return a list of documents that have been added or changed in the period.
Visitor registration

Every web site needs a visitor's book! The Web server logs the accesses to individual pages, recording host names, dates and times. Of course, this doesn't say if the browser is a college student in the USA or an MIS manager searching for a database application. The visitors form supports information collecting of in a non-threatening manner.
5. The cost

Costs to Unidata
Software costs have been minimal as the CERN server, and HTML conversion tools are public-domain programs. The Netscape Commerce Server will be purchased in the near future to support encryption, secure transactions and server authentication, at a cost of around $US6,695.
Personnel costs (part-time web master, and content maintainer) are on-going, but the on-going maintenance and development has not required employing additional staff.
Network costs. Unidata's Internet machine is permanently connected, and no additional costs have been incurred by head office.
Costs to the user

People browsing the Web site will be paying their Internet Service Provider for connect time and data costs (AARNet's volume charging policy).
6. The benefits

World-wide presence
The information is available to anyone with access to the Internet via an IP connection and a browser program. Our customers are able to access information, whether they are located in Korea, Japan, New Zealand or here in Australia.
Eliminating printing and shipping costs
Only those pages of interest are printed. The Business Solution Directory in printed form is 470 pages, and weighs nearly one kilogram. Distributing the information in bits (packets of data over the Internet) is far superior to shipping non-renewable paper and plastic, and courier costs.
Usage and demographic statistics
Information from the visitor's form combined with the server log files provides valuable information on areas of interest and potential markets.
Interactive feedback through forms
A user is more likely to complete a few fields on a form and click a button labelled "Submit" as opposed to faxing or posting a printed survey form. A variety of survey forms could be made available on the Web.
Information for potential customers and employees
Browsing the Web pages is a non-threatening way for potential customers and visitors to gather information about the organisation and its products.
Building a Virtual Community
A user group can be created in cyberspace overcoming the barriers of geography, time zones, and travel costs.
Machine independence
Viewing Web pages can be done with Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, NeXt , and (to a degree) character-based terminals. This is achieved through the use of standards:-
• The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) - A Client/Server method of fetching
documents and passing requests and queries to a server
• The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) - Document markup standard providing
a method for creating hypertext links
• Uniform Resource Locaters (URL) - a consistent method of naming Internet resources
7. Stretching the Web to new uses
Figure 3 - Overview of a Web Server
Replacement for Bulletin Board systems
The Web is a cost-effective, viable alternative to Bulletin Board Systems. Head office customer support are implementing various support services on the Web, after dismissing the idea of a BBS-based system. A bulletin board system is technology for the seventies, and restricted by hardware, telephone lines limiting the maximum number of concurrent sessions, system administration, and storage capacity. When the market is the whole world, BBS technology is no longer appropriate.
Up to date corporate profile
The corporate profile can now be presented with colour photographs, sounds and video clips. Current information (including stock prices for publicly listed companies) can be delivered. This profile can be extended by providing photographs of staff members with details of their role in the organisation. Links to personal information pages can make dealing with a company more personal.
Technical Tips documents
Customer Support regularly distributes a desktop-published document of technical tips. The present method of printing and posting these documents is labour-intensive as well as costly. These documents are now available on the Web and accessible through a multiple set of indexes. Hypertext links can be established with other documents, including the hypertext trouble-shooting guide described in a later section.
On-line Training catalogue and registration
The training catalogue was converted into a set of Web pages with the added benefit of a training path diagram where course details can be obtained by clicking on the appropriate course.

Figure 4 - Training Paths
The course schedule has been added to the Web, together with an enrolment form which is sent to our office by electronic mail as a result of the "Mailto" action in the form.

Figure 5 - Enrolment Form
Ordering products and getting demonstration copies
Products have already been sold via the Web as a result of a person reading the product brochures across the Internet.
Configuration Guide
As the range of product offerings increases, it becomes harder for sales and support staff (as well as our resellers) to keep up to date with product versions, dependencies, memory/disk requirements and so on. A configuration guide is being built to interactively choose products, check requirements and dependencies. Forms and hidden fields are the keys to this mechanism. A Web server has no knowledge of a browser's previous requests, so this information is encoded in the forms created by the server in hidden fields.
Product Authorisation automated
Authorisation of products following their installation can also be accomplished through a Web form. The present system requires contacting customer support via phone or fax. The Web server can provide this service 24 hours a day. The issue is to ensure that only valid users can authorise valid software licences. All activity will automatically be routed to customer service.
Price book
This is an interesting use. Do you put pricing information on a Web server, considering pricing varies in different regions? Competitors shouldn't have access to the pricing. One solution would be to make the pricing information available by email to authorised users for local reference. The pricing information could be kept as a local Web page. The configuration guide described previously could be used to build a configuration which could be emailed to Unidata (or one of its resellers) for pricing.
Hypertext Troubleshooting Guide
The Customer Service Manager in head office gave a presentation to a user group meeting on troubleshooting procedures. I am converting this presentation into a set of Web documents to make a hypertext trouble-shooting guide. The beauty of hypertext in this context is that all levels of experience can be addressed as the reader can skip over familiar material and explore new or unfamiliar information.
The aim of the guide is to assist in the installation and usage of the range of products, and give access to a lot of experience available in the organisation. Graphical content (screen shots), sample output and interaction with gateway scripts should make this a useful project. References can be made to on-line help (mentioned earlier), product information (for overview descriptions), technical tips and training course descriptions.
Launch pad for resources
Other Internet resources can be catalogued including home pages for business partners, hardware vendors, customers, mailing lists, USENET news-groups (eg comp.databases, comp.client-server) and ftp archive sites. In addition, Unidata can establish hot links with other related providers as well as getting Unidata's home page listed on other home pages.
Logging of support calls
The NeXt phase of the Web Server is to allow the logging of problem reports, subject to authentication. In addition, customers and resellers can review the status of their submitted calls, and search the database of reported problems.
Multilingual support
Australia is very much part of Asia, yet language is not often considered when designing for the Web. The Australasia region has requirements for Japanese, Korean, Chinese. Already some Spanish pages are available for the South American market.
Unidata's rapid growth in South America has also created demand for Spanish and Portuguese content (Brazil).
Multimedia support
Text and graphics are the most common components of a Web site, and sound and video are the NeXt important components for consideration. Corporate information can be presented in a new manner- a message from the President, the corporate video, or training video clips all have potential. The down side is the very large size (and consequently, long transfer times) of sound and video files.
The temptation to convert practical textual information into flashy multi-media pages must be overcome. Too many Web sites I have visited appear to be showcases for fancy graphics rather than useful content.
8. Issues

Network bandwidth
Sound and video consume a disproportionate amount of network traffic, which is a problem considering the choked bandwidth of AARNet's USA to Australia link.
Viruses
This is a concern if the Web site is used to distribute demonstration or public-domain software.
Security
Interaction through forms will require security validation and authentication. The shortcomings of the existing server in use (the public domain CERN server) will be overcome by installing the Netscape Commerce server described earlier.
Security is a very important issues for Web servers to support financial transactions (eg payments) and transfer of secure information (eg pricing and competitive information) throughout the world. Further developments in RSA data security technology are crucial.
Look versus Content
The biggest issue with Web publishing is over-use of graphics at the expense of quality content. A balance has to be achieved to ensure that graphics are used sparingly to minimise network traffic and at the same time maintaining the reader's interest.
Getting everyone connected
Publishing on the Web is all very well, but if our customers and business partners don't use the Internet, all this information is irrelevant. Connectivity to the Internet is within the technical and financial realms of everybody. It is a matter of education and assistance. Once the benefits can be seen, then usage will increase.
Over-priced Web providers
There is a disparity in pricing between Australian and North American Internet Service Providers for storing Web pages. Why should it cost so much to place your Web pages on an Australia machine ? How can people charge so much money to produce Web pages when all the tools are freely available? I am sure this situation will change as the market becomes more educated.
Web publishing the next paradigm of publishing
Print, radio and television were the big mass-media methods. The Web has now established itself as the fourth method.
9. The future for Unidata and the Web

Future developments in HTML and browsers
The HTML language is constantly evolving, adding more and more functionality to support a greater range of publishing requirements. Support for tables, background images and customised horizontal rules give greater flexibility in formatting and graphic design.
The Web is fun to use, easy to navigate and easy for non-technical people to learn.
Making the transition from a paper-based culture
Distributing information in printed form by post and courier is old-fashioned, expensive, slow and environmentally unfriendly. The paperless office promised by the introduction of computers was a joke. In his book "Being Digital", Nicholas Negroponte writes how we should be shipping bits not atoms. The content (information) is more important than the physical form of paper, ink and shipping materials, not to mention the resources used for transportation
By providing information electronically, relevant portions can be read at the readers convenience, rather than accumulating mountains of paper. Information can be made available much sooner, without unnecessary expenses and delays.
The Web will break down the barriers between "customer" and "vendor", fostering greater interactions. Who knows what other uses can be found for this new technology ?
10. References

[Aronson94]
Aronson, Larry. HTML Manual of Style. Ziff-Davis, 1994.
[Ford95].
Ford, Andrew.Spinning the Web. How to provide Information on the Internet. International Thomson Publishing, 1995. 1995.
[Lemay94]
Lemay, Laura.(1994) Teach Yourself Web Publishing in a Week. SAMS Publishing, 1995.

11. Acknowledgment
Thanks to Jackie Burhans, John Freeland, Greg Grubbs, Nik Kesik and Terry Truman in head office for valuable ideas and contributions.
[Return to Table of Contents]
COPYRIGHT © 1995 by AUUG95 and APWWW95 Charles Sturt University. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ISBN 1 875781 43 9