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Finding and viewing data in different ways
is not always
straight forward.
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As a business develops and expands, the demands on its IT systems increase.
New requirements result in changes and additions to systems in order to support this
natural evolution. However, after a time, data structures can become disjoint;
increasingly complex and even ill-defined. This makes it more time consuming and costly
to implement simple changes, especially for one-off or ad hoc tasks. It becomes difficult
to view the data as collated information and see a 'complete picture'.
For example to gather all the information relating to a customer, can require so
much database searching across multiple systems that it is unproductive.
Yet this should be a basic business requirement.
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New requirements equals change
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Change is inevitable and a truly competitive business will respond to new requirements in
order to embrace new challenges. From an IT perspective, this implies some form of rapid
application development (especially in e-commerce), which is unfortunately associated with a
high risk of failure. ConText provides a structure that lessens the risk and enables this
type of development.
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Technical information
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ConText can be supported on a free Tomcat servelet container (server) or Apache webserver.
It is based on the J2EE technology suite - a standard supported by all major application
servers. Therefore ConText will fit in
with your existing server with out the need to support a new one.
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Light-weight & affordable
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ConText can be used to generate information relating to one task or used to view data for
a number of general tasks. Since it can be customised, it can also be used to view collections
of data that support a specific user role or task. ConText is a web-based application that provides a means of collating data so that a specific
task or enquiry can be fulfilled.
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| Single point of access |
For multiple data sources, pulling them together and presenting the
information on web pages. |
| Web-based |
And therefore requires no installation on the users PC,
other than a standard browser. |
| Read-only |
So users cannot manipulate or accidentally change the data which makes it safe for use by anyone.
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| Cost effective |
The overheads for reproducing information on a web-page are small so it becomes realistic to provide someone
with specific information for a one-off job.
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| Latest Java standards |
(J2EE) are used as a means of accessing data so therefore it is industry-compliant
and hence highly portable, e.g. it can be moved from a PC server to a UNIX server without
modification
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| Scalable |
The technology allows the service to be expanded at unit cost i.e. it scales linearly
by adding more hardware or software servers
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