CHAPTER 5

Network Applications

Chapter Outline

5.1 Network Applications 5.2 Web 2.0 5.3 E-Learning and Distance Learning 5.4 Telecommuting

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Describe the four major network applications? BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES: Information

may be collected more rapidly, and distributed to distant locations without having to travel.

BUSINESS RISKS: Information and knowledge accessible through public networks is no longer a source of competitive advantage.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Discuss the various technologies, applications, and websites that fall under the umbrella of Web 2.0. BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES: Businesses

have new web-enabled tools with which to interact with their customers and serve them, which could translate into higher sales.

BUSINESS RISKS: Web 2.0 applications could contribute to a decrease in employee productivity.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Differentiate between e-learning and distance learning. BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES: E-learning

can deliver content that is current and of high quality from any place at any time.

BUSINESS RISKS: Transfer speeds over the Internet must be considered when delivering education over a public network.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Understand the advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting for employers and employees. BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES: Makes it

easier to balance increasing workload and personal or family demands, which in turn might lead to better employee productivity.

BUSINESS RISKS: Difficult to directly control the quality of work; there are also problems associated with information security.

5.1 Network Applications

Discovery Communications Collaboration Web services

Discovery Discovery allows users to browse and

search data sources, in all topic areas, on the Web. Search engines Meta search engines Discovery of material in foreign languages Portals

Commercial portals Affinity portals Mobile portals Corporate portals Industry wide portals

Search Engines and Meta search Engines. A search engine is a computer program that

searches for specific information by keywords and reports the results.

A search engine maintains an index of billions of Web pages. It uses that index to find pages that match a set of user-specified keywords.

Such indexes are created and updated by web crawlers, which are computer programs that browse the Web and create a copy of all visited pages.

People actually use four main search engines for almost all their searches:1) WWW.GOOGLE.COM2) WWW.ASK.COM3) WWW.YAHOO.COM4) WWW.MSN.COM

Meta-search enginesMeta-search engines search several engines at once and

integrate the findings of the various search engines to answer queries posted by users.

Examples are Surf-wax (www.sufwax.com), Meta-crawler

(www.metacrawler.com), Mamma (www.mamma.com), Ungoogle (www.ungoogle.com), KartOO (www.kartoo.com).

Publication of Material in Foreign Languages.Not only is there a huge amount of information on the

Internet, but it is written in many different languages. How, then, do you access this information? The answer is that you use an automatic translation of Web pages. Such translation is available, to and from all major languages, and its quality is improving with time. Some major translation products are Altavista (http://babelfish .altavista.com) and Google (www.google.com/language_tools) as well as products and services available at Trados (www.trados.com).

Portals.Most organizations and their managers encounter information

overload.

Information is scattered across numerous documents, e-mail messages, and databases at different locations and systems. Finding relevant and accurate information is often time consuming and may require access to multiple systems.

One solution to this problem is to use portals.

A portal is a Web-based, personalized gateway to information and knowledge that provides relevant information from different IT systems and the Internet using advanced search and indexing techniques.

We distinguish among four types of portals: commercial,affinity, corporate, and industry wide.

1. Commercial portals offer content for diverse communities, and they are the most popular portals on the Internet. They are intended for broad audiences, and they offer fairly routine content. Examples are Lycos (www.lycos.com) and Microsoft Network (www.msn.com).

2. Affinity portals support communities such as a hobby group or a political party. They offer a single point of entry to an entire community of affiliated interests. For example, your university most likely has an affinity portal for its alumni.

Example: aualum.org , www.techweb.com and www.zdnet.com.

3. Corporate portals offer a personalized, single point of access through a Web browser to critical business information located inside and outside an organization. They are also known as enterprise portals, information portals, or enterprise information portals.

In addition to making it easier to find needed information, corporate portals offer customers and employees self-service opportunities.

4. In addition to single-company portals, there are also industry-wide portals. An example is TruckNet (www.truck.net), which is the portal for the trucking industry and the trucking community, including professional drivers, owner/operators, and trucking companies.

TruckNet provides drivers with personalized Web-based e-mail, access to applications to leading trucking companies in the United States and Canada, and access to the Drivers Roundtable.

The portal also provides a large database of trucking jobs and general information related to the trucking industry.

5. Another type of portal, the mobile portal, is distinguished by its technology. Mobile portals are portals that are accessible from mobile devices. Any of the four portals above can be accessed by mobile devices. These mobile devices are typically wireless.

CommunicationsThe second major category of network

applications is communication. There are many types of communications, including e-mail, call centers, chat rooms, and voice.

Electronic mail (e-mail) Web-based call centers (customer call center) Electronic chat room Voice communications

Electronic Mail: Electronic mail (e-mail) is the largest-volume application running over the Internet. A recent study found that almost 90 percent of companies conduct business transactions via e-mail, and nearly 70 percent confirm that e-mail is tied to their means of generating revenue.

Web-Based Call Centers: Effective personalized customer contact is becoming an important aspect of Web-based customer support. Such service is provided through Web-based call centers, also known as customer care centers. For example, if you need to contact a software vendor for technical support, you will usually be communicating with the vendor’s Web-based call center, using e-mail, a telephone conversation, or a simultaneous voice/Web session.

Electronic Chat Rooms: Electronic chat refers to an arrangement whereby participants exchange conversational messages in real time. A chat room is a virtual meeting place where groups of regulars come to chat(gab)

Chat programs allow you to send messages to people who are connected to the same channel of communication at the same time.

Two major types of chat programs exist: The first type is a Web-based chat program, which allows you to send messages to Internet users by using a Web browser and visiting a Web chat site (e.g., http://chat.yahoo.com)

The second type is an e-mail-based (text-only) program called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). A business can use IRC to interact with customers, provide online experts’ answers to questions.

Voice Communication: When people need to communicate with one another from a distance, they use the telephone more frequently than any other communication device. With Internet telephony, also known as voice-over Internet protocol or VoIP, phone calls are treated as just another kind of data. That is, your analog voice signals are digitized, sectioned into packets, and then sent over the Internet. VoIP significantly reduces your monthly phone bills.

Collaboration Collaboration refers to efforts of two or

more entities (individuals, teams, groups or organizations) who work together to accomplish certain tasks. Work group

refers specifically to two or more individuals who act together to perform some task

Virtual group (team) when group members in different locations are

constitute. Virtual groups conduct virtual meetings; that is,

they “meet” electronically.

o Virtual collaboration (or e-collaboration) refers to the use of digital technologies that

enable organizations or individuals to collaboratively plan, design, develop, manage, and research products, services, and innovative applications.

In this section we consider two of them: workflow technologies and groupware tools.

Workflow Technologies: Workflow is the movement of information as it flows through the sequence of steps that make up an organization’s work procedures. Workflow management makes it possible to pass documents, information, and tasks from one participant to another in a way that is governed by the organization’s rules or procedures.

Groupware: Groupware refers to software products that support groups of people who collaborate to accomplish a common task or goal. Groupware uses networks to connect people, even if the people are in the same room.

Two types of groupware technologies are electronic teleconferencing and real-time collaboration tools.

Electronic Teleconferencing: Teleconferencing is the use of electronic communication that allows two or more people at different locations to hold a simultaneous conference. There are several types of teleconferencing. The oldest and simplest is a telephone conference call, where several people talk to one another from multiple locations. The biggest disadvantage of conference calls is that they do not allow face-to-face communication.

In a videoconference, participants in one location can see participants at other locations. The latest version of videoconferencing, called telepresence, enables participants to seamlessly share data, voice, pictures, graphics, and animation by electronic means.

Real-Time Collaboration Tools.The Internet, intranets, and extranets offer

tremendous potential for people working in groups to interact synchronously and in real time. Real-time collaboration (RTC) tools help companies bridge time and space to make decisions and to collaborate on projects.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a loose collection of information technologies and applications, and of the Web sites that use them.Web 2.0 Information Technologies and Applications

Information technologies and applications used by Web 2.0 sites include XML, AJAX, tagging, blogs, wikis, Really Simple Syndication, podcasting, and videocasting.

AJAX: AJAX is a Web development technique that allows portions of Web pages to reload with fresh data instead of requiring the entire Web page to reload. This process speeds up response time and increases user satisfaction.

Tagging: A tag is a keyword or term that describes a piece of information (e.g., blog, picture ,article, video clip). Users typically choose tags that are meaningful to them.

Blogs and Blogging: A weblog (blog for short) is a personal Web site, open to the public, in which the site creator expresses his or her feelings or opinions. Bloggers—people who create and maintain blogs—write stories, tell news, and provide links to other articles and Web sites that are of interest to them.

Categories of Web 2.0 Sites Social Networking. Aggregators. Mashups

Social networking Web sites allow users to upload their content to the Web, in the form of text (for example, blogs), voice (for example, podcasts), images, and videos (for example, videocasts). Social networking sites provide an easy, interactive way to communicate and collaborate with others on the Web. Well-known social networking sites include:

www.facebook.com, www.youtube.com and http://twitter.com.

Aggregators are Web sites that provide collections of content from the Web.

Well-known aggregator Web sites include : Bloglines (www.bloglines.com): collect blogs and news from all

over the Web and present it in one, consistent, updated format

Mashups: Mashup means to “mix and match” content from other parts of the Web. A mashup is a Web site that takes content from a number of other Web sites and mixes them together to create a new kind of content.

Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture

Web services are applications delivered over the Internet that users can select and combine through almost any device, from personal computers to cell phones.

A service-oriented architecture is an IT architecture that makes it possible to construct business applications using web services.

Four Protocols of Web ServicesA protocol is rule that govern data communication.

Web services are based on four protocols: Extensible Markup Language (XML) Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration

(UDDI)

Extensible Markup Language (XML) makes it easier to exchange data among a variety of applications and to validate and interpret such data.

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a set of rules that define how messages can be exchanged among different network systems and applications through the use of XML.

The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is used to create the XML document that describes the tasks performed by various Web services.

Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI ) allows users to search for needed Web services by creating public or private searchable directories of these services.

5.3. E-Learning and Distance Learning

E-Learning refers to learning supported by the Web.

Distance learning refers to any learning situation in which

teachers and students do not meet face-to-face.

Benefits of E-Learning

Online materials deliver high-quality, current content

Students have the flexibility of learning from any place at any time at their own pace

Learning time generally is shorter, and more people can be trained due to faster training time

Training costs can be reduced

Drawbacks of E-Learning

Instructors may need training to be able to teach electronically

The purchase of additional multimedia equipment may be necessary

Students must be computer literate and may miss the face-to-face interaction with instructors

There are problems with assessing students’ work, as instructors really do not know who completed assignments

5.4 Telecommuting

Telecommuting allows workers to work anytime and anyplace.

Telecommuting Benefits

For Employees Reduced stress, improved family life Employment opportunities for single

parents and persons with disabilities For Employers

Increased productivity Ability to retain skilled employees

Telecommuting Disadvantages For Employees

Feelings of isolation No workplace visibility Potential for slower promotions

For Employers Difficulties in supervising work Potential information security problems Additional training costs

Questions about chapter 51.Differentiate between e-learning and

distance learning?2.Describe the underlying technologies,

applications, and types of Web sites that comprise Web 2.0.?

3. What is telecommuting?4. What are the advantages and

disadvantages of telecommuting from the viewpoint of the employee?

5. Describe virtual universities.?