By Dr. Database

The Internet
The Internet, which had its nascence in 1961 or so (although not in present form) is a network of electronic highways, much like the Interstates or the earlier-built "US" highways, except of course it now goes all over the world. Any type of car, van or truck or other self-propelled vehicle can use them. Similarly, the Internet can carry e-mail, file transfers, audio and video streams as with RealPlayer, screen-sharing streams as with pcAnywhere, and of course web pages, both encrypted and not, etc.. (An intranet is the same, except it is a private 'highway.') The Internet was designed to be and remains independent of the type of data carried over it, just like a highway. Internet protocols are only designed to make sure data gets from point A to point B. The Internet does not care what the purpose is of the bits and bytes it carries.

The Web
The World Wide Web is much newer, dating from 1991. The WWW is a standard or "protocol" describing document pages. Imagine (or look outside your office at an Interstate to see) one of those big shipping containers-that look like a boxcar that lost its wheels. Besides being big they are all alike, they fit a standard. That standard enables them to be stacked in 3D arrays to fit a ship or freight yard, or one or two at a time on the back of a truck. You can ship many kinds of goods in containers, and many kinds of documents in a web page. But your goods must fit and fill the container, and your document must conform to the protocol for a web page.

A "web browser" is software that can display one of the web documents that fit the web page protocol ("hypertext transport protocol" or "http"). If it's a text or text and graphics page you want, a web page is terrific. And for a catalog of goods for sale, an e-commerce site, a set of web pages is certainly practical. It also works great for 'brochure-ware,' a web site advertising a service business.

Back Office Applications
Still, businesses all have "back offices." They need to do all or some of accounting, estimating, job-costing, personnel and payroll changes, tracking required continuing education, and analyzing orders (both from vendors and to customers) shipped and back ordered, and a horde of other things less romantic and just as essential as the 'front of the store.' And there are advantages to using the Internet as compared with a LAN, especially if a business and all its employees, vendors and customers are not in one building.

Better Ways than Web Pages
Web pages do not cut it for this kind of data. The data are too copious and too complex in their relationships to conform to a web page. A web page cannot handle fifty related tables. Shoehorning it drags the user interface back 15 years, to the days when the back office ran on an IBM mainframe or not at all. It is a wonder people put up with back office applications that use web pages when they do not have to.

There are straight-forward ways of making complex data available over the Internet without suffering the limitations but instead having the complex and powerful user interfaces that desktop data applications have had during the past decade.

There are at least four alternatives, of varying cost and character, (a) 'thick' client with server over the Internet, (b) Microsoft Terminal Server application service (c) Citrix MetaFrame and (d) "X Internet" (a name for a group of varied solutions, including a specialized Internet operating system). They have varying combinations of performance, ease of use and installation, hardware requirement and cost. There are vendors worth searching for to put complex data onto the Internet or an intranet.

The conclusion, however, remains that back office data operations surely belong on the Internet, for easy access and setup, but they need not and should not use web pages nor browsers. There are better, less expensive ways. Want to find out more? Contact Dr. Database toll free at 1-877-934-4766 or by e-mail at DrDatabase@ttgservices.com.

Modified from article in August 2002 issue of the Business Monthly, Columbia, Maryland. Copyright 2002 Philip L. Marcus. All rights reserved.

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