Re: Working towards e-commerce.

Jenny:

My first impressions ...

The information you are sharing with your customers using query tools 
might be delivered via the Internet using a web site, ftp or email. It is 
also possible that EDI would be an appropriate venue. 

If we were assigned to your account, one of the first things I would look 
at are industry practices and requests for e-Commerce trading partner 
relationships flowing from your customers and vendors.

As far as tools for publishing enterprise content across the Internet ...

The iSeries native tool set is a superb choice for this mission ... In our 
view, ILE languages and CGI programming techniques deliver the best of 
everything ... performance, reliability, maintenance .. the works ... 

We are, by contrast, far from persuaded that "magic box" development tools 
are sufficiently mature to satisfy our customers' mission requirements.

See our essay at 
http://www.imcedi.com/IMC/WEBSITE/Services/Internet/WebTech/webtech.html 
and IBM's cgi developer resource site at http://www-922.ibm.com/en for 
more about this technology choice.

I am currently composing an essay with the tentative title "Why ILE 
instead of Java?" that I hope to publish in a week or so. Java will 
undoubtedly come up in your deliberations, so this article may be 
constructive. I will message the group when I publish.

If you are open to inviting a vendor to help you with these projects, I 
would be delighted to tell you about our products and services. My firm is 
one of the nation's earliest pioneers in eCommerce integration.

Please visit our web site, and contact me off-list if you would like more 
information.

Regards,


John G. Dyer, CDP
Vice President
Information Management Consultants, Inc.
jdyer@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.imcedi.com
812.421.0045 ext. 203