Tapnet Business Plan Essay Research Paper TAPNETCOMBusiness — страница 8

set aside specific times and dates and have enough members available where it would make real-time classes feasible. Once we have the requests from the associations outlining their educational needs, we will contract out with universities, training institutes, and others to create the content. Real-time professors will need the infrastructure put in place to teach the classes, computers, cameras, electronic whiteboards, e-mail accounts, and whatever else is needed. Association members will then be asked to sign up for classes on our website where they will be given login and password for their account. Their account will include demographic information as well as keep track of grades, professional certifications, classes taken, and other information. The association will have

access to this information to keep track of how their members are progressing in any required training. 2.3.4.2 What do the Associations need to do? When Trade Associations sign up with our service, we will offer them the opportunity to request specific training based on their special needs or to view whatever online content we currently offer. Any specialized training will require that they get a certain number of their members to sign up and, consequently, pay. Once a class has either been requested or picked from the available, it will be up to the Association to ensure that their members have the correct technology in place, computers, e-mail, web access, and internet streaming video cameras that they will need to participate. We will be available for technical advice and

testing of their connections, but will not physically install anything. The associations will also have to advertise their new partnership with our web site in their trade magazines, meetings, and newsletters. They will be paying for content beforehand, so it will be on them to get their members to actually sign up for it and “attend” classes. 2.3.4.3 What needs to be put in place? We will need to make a large investment in equipment, software, and people to run it at the outset, but with correct resource management and planning there should not be a huge need for continued large capital expense once the initial infrastructure is in place. The first things that will need to be ordered are servers with enough hard drive capacity, processing power, and bandwidth. These servers

will have to handle the task of streaming many classes at one time to potentially dozens of students as well as single connections to one student at a time when they are view stored classes. Using IPv6’s ability to multicast will save bandwidth at our end and reduce network traffic. The software and hardware will be the heart of our site. It will need to be user friendly, easy to maintain, and powerful enough to handle the behind-the-scenes work that will be needed. Many of the smaller association’s members may not have any or very little computer experience. Making the site visit as easy as possible for these members will be our most important task. If no one shows up for the online education that we will be offering, then the Associations affiliated with our site will not

be happy and will cancel. We will need to buy, install, and maintain easy to use collaboration and education software. This will include pieces such as Microsoft’s NetMeeting software and Blackboard.com’s educational portal software, as well as e-mail, and instant messaging packages. Behind the scenes we will need redundancy for our serves in the form of High Availability (HA) systems from Sun or other vendors. Uptime is the most important part of offering an online service. If you have bad uptime then people will refuse to revisit your site and you will fail. Almost as important as uptime are backups. If one side of your HA system is going to crash, you need to be able to load a correct, up-to-date backup of the environment as soon as possible then synchronize your system

such that users are never affected and notice as little interruption in service as possible. Finally, we will need to have redundant network architecture based on IPv6 with systems in place to alert of us of any potential traffic problems. Additionally, both redundant network connections as well as backup switches, routers and hubs need to be in place to handle any potential network hardware issues. Concurrently we need to be assessing the health of the network at all times to forestall any problems with bandwidth either inside our own system or with our connection to Internet 2. Since we will be in the business of streaming real-time video and audio we can not afford for there to be either latency in the streaming packets or loss of packets due to faulty hardware. 2.3.4.4