Paper catalogs for e-business
EleAIS presents product catalogs on the
Internet and we use the term “product catalog”
in its true and original sense, i.e. we mean paper
product catalogs as e-paper.
EleAIS supports e-paper product catalogs
in these data formats:
Elecat makes paper catalogs smoothly usable
for e-business on your website!
The latest Elecat catalog reader offers
a perfect representation of the printed catalog pages combined
with comprehensive additional functionalities enabling e-business
based on e-paper catalogs. Article numbers on pages are automatically
converted to links pointing to the database product records.
One can use the e-paper catalog pages to
select products by just clicking on an article number and
you can add them to the product basket directly on the catalog
pages.
If you want your paper product catalogs
published on EleAIS we recommend you to have them converted
to the Elecat
CDF format in Flash, because this delivers the best form of
using paper catalogs as e-paper on the Internet. There is
a whole website with all the details
about Elecat.
Product catalogs in HTML
If product catalogs are available in HTML
they can be uploaded and presented by EleAIS. Please note
that several EleFamily products automatically generate HTML
pages from database content of the local Elestore database.
This Elestore database is also used by EleAIS (or generally
rather a copy of). With EleExxel, ElePricelist and EleProductSite
you can automatically generate your own product catalogs from
Elestore content and upload these pages to EleAIS.
Product catalogs in PDF
Most printed catalogs are available in PDF.
Unfortunately, PDF is no good solution for use on the Internet
inside a browser. PDF in an Internet browser is very cumbersome,
very slow and it offers no functionality similar to Elecat
beyond just displaying pages. We therefore strongly recommend
you to have your PDF catalogs converted to Elecat to make
them smoothly usable inside an Internet browser.
Creating “product catalogs”
Several members of the EleFamily software
are specialised in generating product catalogs fully automatically
from the content of Elestore and they also support different
technical formats including especially the generation of files
for printing paper catalogs. All of these software products
are closely coupled with EleAIS.
This results in a frequent re-use of the
content of your local Elestore database. Uploading your data
to the EleAIS Portal becomes a simple and automatic (on your
choice) procedure and it is a side-effect of regularly working
with your valuable product data.
Catalog list
This view presents a list of product catalogs
that are available on EleAIS. From this catalog list you can
select a particular product catalog, which can then be opened,
viewed and used in a separate browser window.
Catalog details
This view presents a few general data items
related to one selected product catalogs. It gives some general
information about the source, status and nature as well as
some general information about the content of the selected
catalog. It depends on the EleAIS operator if they provide
all the possibly available data on a particular product catalog.
Open catalog
Clicking on this tab will open the currently
selected product catalog in a separate browser window. The
content of this browser window depends on the technical data
format of the selected catalog.
EleAIS supports e-paper product catalogs
in three data formats: HTML, PDF, Flash and Elecat CDF (Catalog
Data Format).
My catalogs
This view contains a list of your favourite
and selected product catalogs so that you can quickly refer
to your bookmarked catalogs. You can also add additional catalogs
or remove catalogs provided, of course, that you act as a
registered user. If you're not registered the bookmarked catalogs
will be lost when you close your session (browser connection)
to EleAIS.
On the term “product catalog”
On EleAIS we define “product catalog”
as the electronic version of (typically) a paper product catalog.
EleAIS supports different electronic formats of e-paper (electronic
paper, e-paper).
Some imprecise people in the software industry
tend to use the term “product catalog” also for
what really is a product database and that is in our view
something entirely different. A database is not a catalog
and vice-versa. Here, we really refer to catalog in the classical
sense (i.e. as paper) but, of course, in electronic form.
Paper product catalogs as e-paper since
1993
Our e-paper software Elecat and its CDF
format (Catalog Data Format) are older than Adobe's PDF. They
were first published and generally available in January 1993
(previous name: Lasercat, in Würzburg
in Germany and it was developed in Ilmenau
since 1999). The ideas date back to 1987!
|
