ebusiness Course Project

To better prepare you to build an eBusiness solution and to know which tools are necessary for each aspect of that solution, we have created an optional course project for you. The course project revolves around a fictitious ebusiness, called SEOTrance. You are asked to imagine yourself as one of its senior IT managers. The course project consists of two multi-step exercises. It asks you to examine two phases of SEOTrance.com's business:

1. its early existence as a Web site and
2. its transition to an enterprise portal.

More specifically, in the first exercise you will be asked to respond to some complaints lodged by customers and by your company's inventory department. In the second exercise, you will consider the requirements for turning SEOTrance.com from a site into a full-fledged enterprise portal.
In each exercise, you will have a choice as to which issues to respond to, and your tutors will evaluate your responses accordingly. If you wish, you may answer every question in the project, but we won't grade you on those. In both exercises, you will have a set of resources to help you respond to the problems in question. These resources include the following kinds of information:

When a new area emerges one of the old questions is,
"Have we seen these issues before, and therefore have we known models or solutions that we can simply take off the shelf?"
No new textbooks need be written, merely updated. One of the major issues when looking at e-business and ecommerce is it the same thing, different location or a truly new discipline worthy of study and understand in its own right. It is the contention here that ecommerce represents the latter of viewpoints and raises new issues to do with how we study business, how we teach it, and the issues that have changed which academically distinguish the discipline and how we research it. In this paper we will talk about 3 particular areas which mark ecommerce out as an area of distinct academic interest with its own set of problems, in addition and complementing concerns of the more traditional business agenda, specifically we will look at the following: changes in the processes involved in ecommerce; new ways of working and management practice; how new technology is changing our conception and process of these tasks and of social norms. Next, you will begin the first part of the course.