Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Electronic shopping
Reexamination Certificate
1998-09-24
2003-07-01
Coggins, Wynn W. (Department: 3625)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Electronic shopping
C379S201060, C379S900000, C709S225000, C707S793000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06587836
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to application software, and more specifically to Web-based system administrative software servicing local and a remote suite of applications in a communications network.
2. Background Art
System administrative software is generally known in the information systems industry. This type of software normally provides functions for adding and deleting users, file system management such as backups and version controls, and user security control. The system administrative functions provided by the known software, however, are usually limited to a specific computer platform or even a specific service product. For example, telecommunications service providers offer many different services which have been developed independently over time, and which operate on different computer platforms. Each of the applications associated with different services usually implements its own system administration functions for the related service product separately from the others. Thus, when a customer needs to order or perform administrative functions in more than one service product, the customer is forced to exit the first application before beginning an operation on the second application. Moreover, when using the second service product, the customer must then reenter some of the same information previously entered while using the first service product. Therefore, it is desirable to have a centralized order entry and system administrative infrastructure for handling common functions and associated data for a number of product services.
In addition, with the existing software, a customer support team interaction is usually necessary to complete the order entry and administrative process. Therefore, it is also desirable to have fully automated system administrative software, which automatically connects to the associated back-end systems and updates the back-end databases as necessary. Furthermore, the fully automated order entry system minimizes human intervention during the fulfillment processing for each order entry requested by a customer, resulting in cost and time savings.
In conventional systems, a connection is made with a large legacy system via a dial-up connection from a customer owned personal computer or workstation. This connection frequently, although not always, emulates a terminal addressable by the legacy systems. The dial-up access requires custom software on the customer workstation to provide dial-up services, communication services, emulation and/or translation services and generally some resident custom form of the legacy application to interface with the midrange or mainframe computer running the legacy system.
There are several problems associated with the approach. First, the aforementioned software is very hardware dependent, requiring multiple versions of software compatible with each of a wide range of workstations customers generally have. Therefore, extensive inventory for distribution becomes necessary. If the customer hardware platform changes through an upgrade, the software licensing issues must be renegotiated. Moreover, installing the software generally requires an intensive effort on the customer and the software support team before any reliable and secure sessions are possible.
Secondly, dial-up, modem, and communications software interact with each other in many ways which are not always predictable to a custom application, requiring extensive trouble shooting and problem solving for an enterprise desiring to make the legacy system available to the customer, particularly where various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards are involved.
Thirdly, although more businesses are turning to the Internet to improve customer service and lower costs by providing Web-based support systems, when an enterprise desires to make more than one system available to the customer, the custom application for one legacy system is not able to connect to a different legacy system, and the customer must generally logoff and logon to switch from one to the other. The delivery technology used by the two legacy systems may be different, requiring different interface standards, and different machine level languages may be used by the two systems, as for example, the 96 character EBCDIC language used by IBM, and the 127 ASCII character language used by contemporary personal computers. Therefore, an integrated and unified Web-based system for providing an access to a number of different legacy systems in one session is desired.
Finally, the security and entitlement features of the various legacy systems may be completely different, and vary from system to system and platform to platform. It is therefore, desired to provide connectivity to enterprise legacy systems over the public Internet, as the Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP protocol, without need to navigate various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards.
The popularity of the public Internet provides a measure of platform independence for the customer, as the customer can run their own Internet Web browser and utilize their own platform connection to the Internet to enable services. This resolves many of the platform hardware and connectivity issues in the customers favor, and leaves the choice of platform and operating system to the customer. Web-based programs can minimize the need for training and support since they utilize existing client software, i.e., a browser, which the user has already installed and already knows how to use. Moreover, there is no longer a need to produce and distribute voluminous hard copies of documentation including software user guides. Further, if the customer later changes that platform, then, as soon as the new platform is Internet enabled, service is restored to the customer. The connectivity and communications software burden is thus resolved in favor of standard and readily available hardware and the browser and software used by the public Internet connection.
An Internet delivered paradigm obviates many of the installation and configuration problems involved with initial setup and configuration of a customer workstation, since the custom application required to interface with the legacy system can be delivered via the pubic Internet and run within a standard Web-browser, reducing application compatibility issues to browser compatibility issues. The Web-based fully automated order entry system simplifies many of the fulfillment issues since the customers need not be provided with additional software and software user guides, other then a web browser.
For the enterprise, the use of off-the-shelf Web browsers by the customer significantly simplifies the enterprise burden by limiting the client development side to screen layout designs and data presentation tools that use a common interface enabled by the Web browser. Software development and support resources are thus available for the delivery of the enterprise legacy services and are not consumed by a need for customer support at the workstation level.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is to provide a Web-based, on-line application system for processing system administrative and order entry functions for an integrated suite of services and products over the Internet. For example, a suite of products and services may include personal communications services such as pagers, cellular phones, and voice mail, traditional wireline services, and Internet access. Other services include Toll Free Number Network and conferencing. Integrating these products and services and providing an online system for order entry and administration over the Internet allow improved flexibility to a customer when managing their telecommunications accounts. For instance, the customer may effect desired changes in their accounts, in real time and instantaneously, by utilizing the system of the present invention. Moreover, the customer may instantaneously order additional services over the Internet via
Ahlberg Axel H.
Becar Allyn P.
Brand Gregory L.
Fenley Douglas B.
Jones Chester L.
Coggins Wynn W.
Garg Yogesh
WorldCom, Inc.
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