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<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Chapter 31 -- Doing Commerce on an Intranet</TITLE><META></HEAD><BODY TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" LINK="#0000EE" VLINK="#551A8B" ALINK="#CE2910"><H1><FONT SIZE=6 COLOR=#FF0000>Chapter 31</FONT></H1><H1><FONT SIZE=6 COLOR=#FF0000>Doing Commerce on an Intranet</FONT></H1><HR><P><CENTER><B><FONT SIZE=5><A NAME="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</A></FONT></B></CENTER><UL><LI><A HREF="#HowFinancialTransactionsWorkonanIntranet">How Financial Transactions Work on an Intranet</A><LI><A HREF="#DoingBusinesswithCustomersUsinganIntranet">Doing Business with Customers Using an Intranet</A><LI><A HREF="#BusinesstoBusinessTransactionsUsingIntranets">Business-to-Business Transactions Using Intranets</A></UL><HR><P>In much of this book, we've seen how intranets and the Internetcan help streamline the ways that companies do business, and changethe way that people within a corporation communicate. For manycompanies, though, the biggest benefit of an intranet can be counteddirectly on the bottom line-intranets, used in conjunction withthe Internet, help the companies do business with their customers.It allows the companies to better market their goods and services,and to take direct orders right online over the intranet. Andit also allows the companies to order directly from other businessesas well.<P>Today, the amount of business done on the Internet and over intranetsis relatively small. In the coming years, however, that businessis expected to grow to many billions of dollars. The dramaticgrowth of the Internet has been fueled by business and consumers,and it shows no sign of letting up. The Internet may become oneof the primary places that businesses operate-and is expectedto be the place where many billions of dollars of goods and serviceswill be bought and sold every year. Because of that, the abilityto do commerce is a vital part of any intranet.<P>Businesses will use intranets as a way to market and sell theirproducts and services. They will accept electronic payment usingan intranet as well.<P>Increasingly, businesses will use the Internet to market and selltheir products. Many people will buy things while at home andat their place of business instead of at retail stores-and theywill use the Internet to browse through catalogs, and then makepurchases online.<P>There is a major problem that has to be overcome with electroniccommerce over the Internet and intranets, however. The natureof the Internet is that it's an unsecured network. As packetstravel across it, anyone along the way could conceivably examinethose packets. Because of that, there are potential dangers todoing business online-if you pay over the Internet with a creditcard, someone could conceivably snoop at it and steal your creditcard number and other identifying information. That means thatbusinesses that expect to sell goods and services need some secureway to sell them.<P>A number of ways of making money payments across the Internethave sprung up to solve the problem. Probably the one that willbe most used is the Secure Electronic Transaction protocol (SET)-aset of procedures and protocols designed to make financial transactionson the Internet as safe as possible. SET uses encryption technologyto make sure that no one can steal your credit card number; onlythe sender and the receiver can decipher the numbers. See Chapter17 for details on how encryption works. Major credit card companiessuch as VISA, MasterCard, and American Express support SET, asdo software companies such as Microsoft and Netscape. With thatbacking, SET will almost certainly become the standard way forsending secure credit card information over the Internet.<P>There are other schemes for doing business over the Internet andintranets. In some of them, credit cards aren't used. Instead,people get electronic "tokens" that function as cash.Various terms are being used for this new form of money, partlyfrom vendors offering electronic payment services, including NetCash,CyberCash, .eCash, and emoney. Someone purchases a certain amountof electronic money, and then can use it for online transactions,without having to go through credit card verification for eachpurchase. There will be other methods of electronic payments onlineas well.<P>There are people who believe that the Internet may transform theway that people buy goods and services at least to the same extent,and possibly more, as happened with the advent of mail-order catalogs.Almost any company that sells to the general public will certainlywant to use their intranet as a way to help market and sell whatthey produce.<P>Doing this requires that a company use its intranet as well asthe Internet. In general, the intranet is used as a way to marketthe goods and services, and the intranet is used as a way to letpeople actually buy the goods. Today, almost any major companyyou can name markets via the Internet, while few actually sellanything.<P>To market what they produce, companies create Web sites on theInternet, outside of the intranet's firewall. What most companieshave found is that if all they do is create an advertisement ontheir Web site, they'll get very little traffic to their site.Few people want to spend their time reading ads online. Becauseof that, most businesses have found that they need to create compellingcontent, such as entertainment clips, videos, sounds, and newsitems. Once they draw people to their site, they can then markettheir goods and services. Commercial Web sites have also foundthat word of mouth isn't good enough to draw a crowd to theirsites. To ensure that people visit them, they advertise on otherWeb sites. When someone clicks on an ad, they are immediatelysent to the Web site.<P>While a variety of content such as videos and audio clips maydraw people to a site, once people are there, businesses wantthem to learn about their goods, and ideally to order them. Companiesbuild Web-based online catalogs that promote what is for sale.These catalogs can be as simple as text listings of what's available,or as complex as true multimedia catalogs that include sound andanimations. Many companies now have Web sites that include onlinecatalogs, such as L.L. Bean. In addition to catalogs, sites alsomake available a searchable database of their goods and services,so that people can target what they want to buy, and find informationout about it quickly.<P>Bringing customers to the site and showing them what is availableis only the first part of what a company wants to do. More importantis to close the sale over the Internet. That's the difficult part,because many people still worry about performing financial transactionsover the Internet. However, secure ways of commerce are beingdeveloped. At the point where someone actually places the order,they will send information to the intranet. They may not knowthat they've been transferred, but that's where their data eventuallygoes. There are a variety of ways to pay online, although theSET standard will undoubtedly become popular.<P>An intranet comes into play as well after the payment is madeand authorized. Since the customer has entered the informationabout the products being ordered, there's no need for employeesto key in an order. The order can be sent over the intranet viaelectronic mail or via a customized system to the fulfillmentdepartment, where the goods are shipped.<P>Selling directly to consumers is only one way that business canbe done with intranets. Many billions of dollars are also spentevery year on business-to-business transactions, in which businessesorder goods and services from each other. In business-to-businesstransactions, companies can directly communicate with each otherfrom intranet to intranet, sending data and orders between themover the public Internet. Since much of that data is generallyconfidential, there needs to be some way of keeping it from pryingeyes. The answer is to use Very Secure Private Networks (VSPNs),a technology that allows intranets to use the Internet as if itwere a private, secure communications channel. It does this by"tunneling" the private data through the intranet. See<A HREF="ch20.htm" >Chapter 20</A> for more information about VSPNs.<P>For years, a technology called Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)has allowed companies to do direct business with each other electronically.EDI allows businesses to fill out electronic forms and send themto each other, and then have the receiving business act on thoseforms. EDI is being brought to intranets and the Internet as away to speed business-to-business transactions. <P>EDI is not the only way that companies can do business with eachother over intranets, however. Intranets can help companies dobusiness with each other in other ways as well. They can postinformation about what kinds of goods and services they need,and other companies can bid on providing them. They can use itas a way to better communicate with contractors and with businessesthey buy goods from. In fact, intranets can help companies dobusiness with each other in so many ways, that there are manypeople who believe that for many years, the main commercial useof the Internet and intranets will be for business-to-businesstransactions instead of for transactions between consumers andbusinesses.<H2><A NAME="HowFinancialTransactionsWorkonanIntranet"><FONT SIZE=5 COLOR=#FF0000>How Financial Transactions Work on an Intranet</FONT></A></H2><P>?? 快捷鍵說(shuō)明
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