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What is e-business?
Broadly speaking, the term "e-business" refers to using the Internet for doing business.
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Are you doing e-business?
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Is your business doing e-business?Here's a checklist to find out. If you can say yes to any of these, then you are doing e- business.
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We communicate with customers, clients or suppliers via email.
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We send emails to other businesses to order products and services.
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We sell our products or services via our website.
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We use the Web to find information, such as prices, phone numbers, reviews of  products.
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We use the Web for research, such as the latest industry trends.
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We use our website to provide information about our products and services.
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We use our website as a means of managing the information in our business.
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We use the Internet for online banking and paying our bills using BPAY.
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  No level of e-business is necessarily better than any other level. Some businesses don'tneed a website but deal all day with other businesses and customers online via email andan e-marketplace (see the Improving section for more detail). Other businesses have awebsite that helps them sell their products all around the world. It's up to each business todetermine what level of e-business is right for them. The Planning section of the e- business guide helps with this decision-making.
 Difference between e-business and e-commerce
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The term e-commerce has a narrower meaning than e-business.
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It refers to using the Internet to order and pay for products or services. So e-commerce is a sub-set of e-business.
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E-commerce happens when a consumer orders a product from a business and paysfor it either when they receive the product or directly online at the time of ordering.
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It happens when a business pays another business via its website for supplies.
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E-commerce refers specifically to the paying for goods and services, whereas e- business covers the full range of business activities that can happen or be assistedvia email or the Web.1
 
The Internet 
 
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The Internet is a world-wide communications system that connects computers andnetworks of computers to each other. It has sets of technical rules which governhow information is sent and received within the system.
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The Internet (or Net) had its origins in a communications project calledARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) which wasestablished in 1969 by the U.S. Department of Defence. Its aim was to ensure thatthose businesses engaged in defence-related research could share data with eachother securely via a robust communications network. It was devised to ensure thatshould one or more link in the network go down then the network as a wholewould still survive and function. The fact that the network's more famousoffspring, the Internet, does not universally crash, despite constant instances of hacking and unleashing of viruses, is testament to the foresight and ingenuity of its inventors.
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It was not long before researchers and academics outside the defence area beganusing ARPANET to communicate with each other through email and to transfer computer files from one computer to another. This was a great advance on havingto mail or carry disks or computer program cards in order to share programs anddata.
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The Internet itself emerged in the early 1980s when the set of transmission control protocols (TCP) that had been devised for ARPANET were extended to provideusers with more functionality. These were called Internet protocols (IP). The newfunctionality and the set of rules that governed it was, and still is, labelledTCP/IP. This was a significant development and meant that far more businessescould join the world-wide network of computers that constituted the Internet.
The World Wide Web
 
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The World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) is the collective term given to all thedocuments and data residing on the Internet that can be accessed using a browser such as Netscape™ or Internet Explorer™.
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The Web is a sub-set of the Internet. There are other sub-sets in widespread use onthe Internet such as "ftp" (file transfer protocol) and the "irc" - (Internet relaychat) protocol.
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In 1989 a group of scientists, led by Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Laboratoryfor Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland (the CERN team) began working on anew branch of Internet protocols that offered a new way of linking documents,files and addressing on the Internet. Berners-Lee called the project, World WideWeb (the Web). They developed a HyperText Transfer Protocol which is mostlyreferred to by its initials, http - the beginning of every website address. The protocol is a set of rules that enable every document on the Internet to beconnected to every other document via a hyperlink, a link that the author can2
 
 place anywhere in the document. The link may enable a user to jump to another document within the same website or to a totally different document or website.
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A website is a set of interlinked files containing words, images, video and soundand usually links to other websites, all of which have been coded so thatcomputers using http can find the sites and see their content. People withappropriate software, typically "browsers", can interact with whatever activitiesare available, such as selecting images to print or selecting and paying for goodsand services.
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A crucial characteristic of this protocol is that it is "stateless" so that each access, by each user, is entirely independent of prior accesses. As a stateless protocol, httpis perfect for viewing static objects, not changed by a user's interaction.
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With the hypertext transfer protocol established, it was then necessary to constructa computer language for creating documents that used the hyperlink function. Thelanguage devised to create these web documents with their hyperlinks was calledHyperText Markup Language (HTML). The language provides the means bywhich programmers not only can create hyperlinks to other documents but canspecify such things as what text, images, sound and video are displayed on thescreen and their layout, the various font types and sizes to be used and colour schemes
Websites
 A website is a set of interlinked words, images, video and sound, and usually with linksto other websites. Each piece of interlinked content is coded by web developers so that people using a browser, such as Internet Explorer™ or Netscape™, can find the websiteand see its contents, select images to print or select and pay for products and services.Here are some of the defining features of the Web and websites that make it such a powerful tool. A website...
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can be used to inform, promote, market, entertain, educate and train, and buy andsell goods and services
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can contain text, images, animations, diagrams, illustrations, maps, video andsound, all of which can be manipulated, edited, copied, stored and audited at anytime
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is capable of being accessed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, or whenever usersare interested in "visiting" it
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knows no borders - it is global
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can be highly interactive, allowing the user not merely to see or hear information but to interact with it and other users via email, discussion groups and varioustypes of forums
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can be constructed to allow authors to personalise it so that different users seeonly those aspects of the site that they want to see3
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