ICS 691 News 3(2)

[Philip Johnson <johnson@hawaii.edu>]

ICS 691 News, Week 3, Issue 2

In this issue:
* Mette Office Hours
* Access97 vs. Access2000
* Connection speeds
* VCommerce privacy
* Survey of students
* Viewing uploaded VCommerce info
* Problems downloading Pizza Portal documents

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Mette Office Hours

Mette's office hours are MW 4:30-6pm.

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Access97 vs. Access2000

There are some compatibility problems between Access97 and Access2000, so
for now, you should use Access97 if you are creating a database for use in
VCommerce.

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Connection Speeds

A student writes:
> 1. From where will the customers (students) do their browsing and
> purchasing on the VCommerce site?  Will they have to go to a lab, where a
> high-speed Internet connection is available, or from anywhere?  Connection
> speed will affect the amount of graphical content on our website.
> 

This is a good point.  In general, I cannot predict what kind of connection
a consumer will have. Many of them will connect from ICS labs which have
ethernet connections.  Others may connect from their dorm rooms which will
generally have 56K connections.  I would say that it is safe to assume that
very few will have 28.8 connections, so you could design for a 56K
connection at a minimum.

On a related note, I recommend against designing a site that requires the
user to download and install software or a plug-in before they can view
your content.  I know this is limiting, but I doubt many students will go
through that effort for this purpose. (And they may not be allowed to
download such software in a lab setting.)

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Privacy

> 2. How much privacy will our customers have?  My group was worried that
> you'd be able to determine who bought condoms and how many ^^;  Almost all
> major sites have a privacy policy on their site, so we'd like to have an
> accurate one for ours.

Here's a draft privacy policy for VCommerce:

"VCommerce is designed to respect the privacy of individuals.  You will log
in to VCommerce using a randomly assigned account number and password, and
no one except the VCommerce administrators will know the identity of
individuals associated with these accounts."

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Survey of students

A student writes:
> our group (collegeconsignment.com) is interested in conducting a survey to
> assess college student's buying/selling behavior in regards to used goods.
> Is there a broadcast address for all students that we can use?

No.  But doing a survey is an excellent idea.  The best way is to emulate
the approach taken in Pizza Portal and go out physically onto the campus to
interview students.  

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Viewing uploaded VCommerce info

A student writes:
> I don't know if Mette covered this, but can we actually view what we have
> uploaded.  I went to alicia.ics.hawaii.edu to check to see if the banner
> worked, but that is the password screen for Vcommerce.  Is there a class
> id and password we can use to just view the banners/sites for testing and
> stuff.

Yes. I will send the account and password to everyone in a separate email
following this one. 


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Problems downloading Pizza Portal documents

A student writes:

> Do you have any pointers for troubleshooting the downloading the Word and 
> Excel Pizza Portal documents? When I click on the Word link it
> automatically  opens up the document and the tool bars disappear so I
> can't figure out  anyway to "Save As" or "Save to Disk". I couldn't even
> select any text or  "Select All" and paste it into a blank Word Doc. The
> same occured for the  excel spreadsheets, but I could highlight the cells
> and copy over to blank  sheets.

First, make sure you're downloading the word and not the PDF version.
Second, try to right click on the link and use the "Save target as"
operation to save the file to your local space. 

If this doesn't fix the problem, let me know. I would also like to know if
this is widespread, so if others could send me a quick email letting me
know whether they were successful or unsuccessful, I would appreciate it.