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Unit- II Technology in E-procurement

2.1 The Internet, Intranet, Extranets and the World Wide Web

2.1.1 Internet

The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that

uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is
a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government
networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical
networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and
services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide
Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.

The origins of the Internet date back to the development of packet switching and research
commissioned by the United States Department of Defense in the 1960s to enable time-
sharing of computers. The primary originator network, the ARPANET, initially served as a
backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1970s. The
funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well
as private funding for other commercial extensions, led to worldwide participation in the
development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The linking
of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s marked the beginning of the
transition to the modern Internet, and generated a sustained exponential growth as
generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network.
Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the
1980s, commercialization incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every
aspect of modern life.

Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail and
newspapers are reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new
services such as email, Internet telephone, Internet television, online music, digital
newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are
adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news
aggregators.

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The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant
messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has grown
exponentially for major retailers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to
extend their "brick and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and
services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet
affect supply chains across entire industries.

The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or

policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. The
overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet
Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a
maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN).

2.1.2 Intranet 

An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication,

collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an
organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to
public networks, such as the Internet, but uses most of the same technology based on
the Internet protocol suite.

A company-wide intranet can constitute an important focal point of internal communication

and collaboration, and provide a single starting point to access internal and external
resources. In its simplest form, an intranet is established with the technologies for local area
networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). Many modern intranets have search
engines, user profiles, blogs, mobile apps with notifications, and events planning within their
infrastructure.

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An intranet is sometimes contrasted to an extranet. While an intranet is generally restricted to

employees of the organization, extranets may also be accessed by customers, suppliers, or
other approved parties. Extranets extend a private network onto the Internet with special
provisions for authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA protocol).

Intranets are also being used as corporate culture-change platforms. For example, large
numbers of employees discussing key issues in an intranet forum application could lead to
new ideas in management, productivity, quality, and other corporate issues.

In large intranets, website traffic is often similar to public website traffic and can be better
understood by using web metrics software to track overall activity. User surveys also improve
intranet website effectiveness.

Because of the scope and variety of content and the number of system interfaces, intranets of
many organizations are much more complex than their respective public websites. Intranets
and their use are growing rapidly. According to the Intranet Design Annual 2007
from Nielsen Norman Group, the number of pages on participants' intranets averaged
200,000 over the years 2001 to 2003 and has grown to an average of 6 million pages over
2005–2007.

2.1.3 Extranet 

An extranet is a controlled private network that allows access to partners, vendors and
suppliers or an authorized set of customers – normally to a subset of the information
accessible from an organization's intranet. An extranet is similar to a DMZ in that it provides
access to needed services for authorized parties, without granting access to an organization's
entire network.

Historically, the term was occasionally also used in the sense of two organizations sharing
their internal networks over a virtual private network (VPN). During the late 1990s and early
2000s, several industries started to use the term 'extranet' to describe centralized repositories
of shared data (and supporting applications) made accessible via the web only to authorized
members of particular work groups - for example, geographically dispersed, multi-company
project teams. Some applications are offered on a software as a service (SaaS) basis.

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For example, in the construction industry, project teams may access a project extranet to
share drawings, photographs and documents, and use online applications to mark-up and
make comments and to manage and report on project-related communications.

2.1.4 World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is the world's

dominant software platform. It is an information space where documents and other web
resources can be accessed through the Internet using a web browser. The Web has changed
people's lives immeasurably. It is the primary tool billions of people worldwide use to
interact on the Internet. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and opened to
the public in 1991.

Web resources may be any type of downloadable media. Web pages are documents

interconnected by hypertext links formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The
HTML syntax displays embedded hyperlinks with URLs, which permits users to navigate to
other web resources. In addition to text, web pages may contain references
to images, video, audio, and software components, which are either displayed or internally
executed in the user's web browser to render pages or streams of multimedia content. Web
applications are web pages that function as application software.

The Web was originally conceived as a document management system. The information in
the Web is transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to be accessed by users
through software applications.

English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while
working at CERN in Switzerland. In 1990, he developed the foundations for the
Web: HTTP, HTML, the WorldWideWeb browser, a server, and the first website in order to
manage documentation. The browser was released outside CERN to other research
institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the general public in August 1991. The Web
was a success at CERN, and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions.
Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created.

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The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used without much distinction. However,
the two terms do not mean the same thing. The Internet is a global system of computer
networks interconnected through telecommunications and optical networking. In contrast, the
World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources, linked by
hyperlinks and URIs. Web resources are accessed using HTTP or HTTPS, which are
application-level Internet protocols that use the Internet's transport protocols.

Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of
the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web
browser then initiates a series of background communication messages to fetch and display
the requested page. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages—and to move from one
web page to another through hyperlinks—came to be known as 'browsing,' 'web surfing'
(after channel surfing), or 'navigating the Web'. Early studies of this new behavior
investigated user patterns in using web browsers. One study, for example, found five user
patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and
targeted navigation.

The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing a page
at the URL http://example.org/home.html. The browser resolves the server name of the URL
(example.org) into an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed Domain Name
System (DNS). This lookup returns an IP address such as 203.0.113.4 or 2001:db8:2e::7334.
The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to
the computer at that address. It requests service from a specific TCP port number that is well
known for the HTTP service so that the receiving host can distinguish an HTTP request from
other network protocols it may be servicing. HTTP normally uses port number 80 and for
HTTPS it normally uses port number 443. The content of the HTTP request can be as simple
as two lines of text:

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2.2 Internet Protocols

2.2.1 What is the Internet Protocol (IP)?

The Internet Protocol (IP) is a protocol, or set of rules, for routing and addressing packets of
data so that they can travel across networks and arrive at the correct destination. Data
traversing the Internet is divided into smaller pieces, called packets. IP information is
attached to each packet, and this information helps routers to send packets to the right place.

Every device or domain that connects to the Internet is assigned an IP address, and as packets
are directed to the IP address attached to them, data arrives where it is needed.

Once the packets arrive at their destination, they are handled differently depending on which
transport protocol is used in combination with IP. The most common transport protocols are
TCP and UDP.

TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol: A suite of computer

communication protocols that connect networks and allows them to communicate with each
other. TCP verifies data transmission between a client and a server. IP moves the data to the
appropriate node on a network. TCP/IP is the primary transmission protocol used on the
Internet.

What is UDP/IP: The User Datagram Protocol, or UDP, is another widely used transport
protocol. It's faster than TCP, but it is also less reliable. UDP does not make sure all packets
are delivered and in order, and it doesn't establish a connection before beginning or
receiving transmissions.

Web page Request and Delivery Protocol

Web page request protocol: An overview of HTTP

HTTP is a protocol for fetching resources such as HTML documents. It is the foundation of

any data exchange on the Web and it is a client-server protocol, which means requests are
initiated by the recipient, usually the Web browser. A complete document is reconstructed
from the different sub-documents fetched, for instance, text, layout description, images,
videos, scripts, and more.

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Designed in the early 1990s, HTTP is an extensible protocol which has evolved over time.
Due to its extensibility, it is used to not only fetch hypertext documents, but also images and
videos or to post content to servers, like with HTML form results. HTTP can also be used to
fetch parts of documents to update Web pages on demand.

Web page Delivery protocols:

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a more sophisticated, connection-oriented protocol

used for reliable delivery of data that is not required to be delivered in real time. TCP can
correct errors in transmission. It can detect packets received out of order and put them back in
the correct order.

A connection-oriented reliable-delivery protocol called transmission control protocol (TCP)

and a connectionless, unreliable-delivery service called user datagram protocol (UDP).

TCP provides an application with an error-free, flow-controlled and sequenced data stream
between two points in the network. This is done by the opening of a virtual connection
between the two stations. This connection is opened before the transaction, and closed at the
end. UDP provides a connectionless environment, where packets, known as datagrams, are
sent as individual blocks of information, without checking.

Electronic Mail Protocols

There are three common protocols used to deliver email over the Internet: the Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Post Office Protocol (POP), and the Internet Message
Access Protocol (IMAP). All three use TCP, and the last two are used for accessing
electronic mailboxes.

The SMTP protocol

It is the most complete of the electronic communication protocols. It is used to forward an

email from server to server. The SMTP protocol centralizes the e-mails sent in a kind of
special envelope, on which it places different tags, such as the name of the access provider,
the name of the recipient and his email address.

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The POP protocol

The POP protocol allows the recovery of emails located on a remote server. It manages the
authentication of the account holder via his login credentials. Also, it offers the possibility to
consult messages in offline mode. The POP protocol downloads emails to the server and
stores them locally.

IMAP protocol

The IMAP protocol allows you to check emails from anywhere. Therefore, it ensures

constant synchronization between your workstation and the server. Thus, your emails are
better managed, sorted and classified.

Markup language

A markup language is a computer language that uses tags to define elements within a

document. (On clothes, tags usually indicate the brand, size of the garment, fabrics used, and
the washing instructions. In Web pages, tags indicate what should be displayed on the screen
when the page loads. Tags are the basic formatting tool used in HTML (hypertext markup
language) and other markup languages, such as XML. For example, to create a table on a
Web page, the <table> tag is used. The data that should be inside the table follows the
<table> tag, and the table is closed with a </table> tag.

If you want something to show up in bold on a Web page, you would use the bold tag. For
example, the HTML:

This site is the <b>best website</b> ever!

would show up as:

This site is the best website ever!).

It is human-readable, meaning markup files contain standard words, rather than typical
programming syntax. While several markup languages exist, the two most popular
are HTML and XML.

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HTML is a markup language used for creating webpages. The contents of each webpage are
defined by HTML tags. Basic page tags, such as <head>, <body>, and <div> define sections
of the page, while tags such as <table>, <form>, <image>, and <a> define elements within
the page. Most elements require a beginning and end tag, with the content placed between the
tags.

XML is used for storing structured data, rather than formatting information on a page. While
HTML documents use predefined tags (like the examples above), XML files use custom tags
to define elements. For example, an XML file that stores information about computer models
may include the following section:

<computer>
  <manufacturer>Dell</manufacturer>
  <model>XPS 17</model>
  <components>
    <ram>6GB</ram>
  </components>
</computer>

XML is called the "Extensible Markup Language" since custom tags can be used to support a
wide range of elements. Each XML file is saved in a standard text format, which makes it
easy for software programs to parse or read the data. Therefore, XML is a common choice for
exporting structured data and for sharing data between multiple programs.

NOTE: Since both HTML and XML files are saved in a plain text format, they can be viewed
in a standard text editor. You can also view the HTML source of an open webpage by
selecting the "View Source" option. This feature is found in the View menu of most Web
browsers.

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Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Businesses have also been engaging in a type of electronic
commerce, known as electronic data interchange, for many years. Electronic data interchange
(EDI) occurs when one business transmits computer-readable data in a standard format to
another business.

In the 1960s, businesses realized that many of the documents they exchanged were related to
the shipping of goods, for example, invoices, purchase orders, and bills of lading. These
documents included the same set of information for almost every transaction. Businesses also
realized that they were spending a good deal of time and money entering this data into their
computers, printing paper forms, and then re-entering the data on the other side of the
transaction. Although the purchase order, invoice, and bill of lading for each transaction
contained much of the same information—such as item numbers, descriptions, prices, and
quantities—each paper form usually had its own unique format for presenting the
information.

By creating a set of standard formats for transmitting the information electronically,

businesses were able to reduce errors, avoid printing and mailing costs, and eliminate the
need to re-enter the data.

Businesses that engage in EDI with each other are called trading partners. The standard
formats used in EDI contain the same information that businesses have always included in
their standard paper invoices, purchase orders, and shipping documents. Firms such as
General Electric, Sears, and Wal-Mart have been pioneers in using EDI to improve their
purchasing processes and their relationships with suppliers.

The U.S. government, which is one of the largest EDI trading partners in the world, was also
instrumental in bringing businesses into EDI.

One problem that EDI pioneers faced was the high cost of implementation. Until the late
1990s, doing EDI meant buying expensive computer hardware and software and then either
establishing direct network connections (using leased telephone lines) to all trading partners
or subscribing to a value-added network. A value-added network (VAN) is an independent
firm that offers connection and transaction-forwarding services to buyers and sellers engaged
in EDI.

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Before the Internet came into existence as we know it today, VANs provided the connections
between most trading partners and were responsible for ensuring the security of the data
transmitted. VANs usually charged a fixed monthly fee plus a per-transaction charge, adding
to the already significant expense of implementing EDI. Many smaller firms could not afford
to participate in EDI and lost important customers to their larger competitors who could
afford EDI.

In the late 1990s, many industry observers believed that the Internet would provide smaller
companies with an alternative to EDI. Many articles in the trade press announced that the
death of EDI was imminent (coming up).

However, EDI was well entrenched in large companies. They had invested large amounts of
money in their EDI systems and had built many of their sales, purchasing, and accounting
systems around EDI.

And the Internet, as an inexpensive communications medium, gave smaller companies a way
to participate in EDI. The companies that operated VANs gradually moved EDI traffic to the
Internet, and new companies developed other ways to help smaller businesses conduct EDI
transactions on the Internet.

These movements of EDI traffic to the Internet have dramatically reduced the cost of
participating in EDI and have made it possible for even the smallest suppliers to do business
with large customers who require its use.

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