E-Commerce and
E-Business are recent developments following the wide availablitiy of
inexpensive Personal Computers and the development of the www protocols.
Having been responsible for the design and development of the very first
openly available e-mail service in Western Europe for the EEC Esprit
Projects in 1984, and more recently the definition and roll-out of numerous
client-server and EDI based business connections, also via internet,
I am in an excellent position to provide you with the benefits of my experience.
With XML it becomes not only easier to reach a larger customer base with
e-commerce, the speed at which connections and data structures can be
set-up is no longer comparable to the long planning and co-ordination efforts of
EDIFACT. XML has inherited a great deal from SGML (I was involved in SGML
sales and support as a Product Manager). My E-Commerce involvement has to
date been in 3 areas,
A) Consultant reports
on how traditional EDI systems can either by augmented with or migrated to
web based E-Commerce solutions. Developing and implementing of a migrations
strategy for replacing fax based EDI communications with HTML formatted documents.
B) A survey of available
E-Commerce muster implementations for SMEs. Setting up of an appropriate web site
informing SMEs using working examples as to what can be acheived, as well as very detailed
information as to how this can be implemented.
C) Developing mappings between EDIFACT, SAP idocs and XML
formats using a number of open source mapping/conversion tools.
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