Re: Working towards e-commerce.

[Al Mac <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

There are things that can be done with e-commerce.  I just not know HOW to 
do it, or the pros and cons of different software solutions.

You can have access to a web site, or to part of a web site constrained by 
people having to key in some password.  You issue passwords that are unique 
to each customer.  Any personnel at that customer can use the same password 
that is for that customer.  That gets them to a section of that website 
that is information just for that customer.  Each customer has their own 
area, secured by password.

Let's suppose the identity that is password secured is customer # 123456.
Your query/ftp of info regarding customer # 123456 is sent to web page 
section that has that # some place embedded, for the purpose of making it 
easier to not accidentally show one customer info on a different customer.

This is not automatically correct.  There are lots of opportunities for 
human error.
I believe that when running something that is to be added to the area for a 
particular customer to view, that some internal person should verify you 
not got anything mixed up.
It should be part of the check list.

Right before we do Billing (405 CD), we run a CL which generates Query/400 
which repopulates a work file with info about latest shipments.  Then 
someone on a PC runs some Internet job (I not know how that works, someone 
else programmed it, using language I not know, and the whole thing secured 
against my view), that sends info, selected by customer, to those selected 
customers.

> Our organization is in the process of moving towards e-commerce which I 
> know can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different 
> people.  Ultimately, our goal is to improve communications with our 
> customers.  We can crawl into this by running queries/reports on the 
> AS/400 and then e-mailing them to customers or posting to a website via 
> ftp.  In the latter case, I'm not sure of the best way to limit specific 
> customers to seeing  just their orders.  Any suggestions?
>
> In the longer term, we are exploring LANSA's Smartweb for BPCS.  We are on 
> the ancient version of 3.1 with Nexgen Y2K mods.  Has anybody out there 
> had much experience in using LANSA?  Any comments or suggestions would be 
> greatly appreciated.  TIA.
>
> Jenny

-
Al Macintyre
See Al at http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
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