The HP 3000 got a high-performance entry to an $8 billion market when BizNetTech.net put its new WebBookStore application online at Queen’s University earlier this month. The new HP 3000 application, tied to Windows NT Web servers, is integrated with the work the Canadian school’s privately owned Campus Bookstore had done in developing Bookware, an application that integrates point-of-sale terminals with an HP 3000 for selling university textbooks.

WebBookStore integrates the reach of the Internet, secure e-commerce and a vendor extranet with the stability and performance of the HP 3000, said managing partner Joe Geiser of BizNetTech.net. The software gives the bookstore such advanced services as the ability to host a student-to-student used book classified section, tied to book searches. The bookstore’s student volunteer staff does page authoring and content management with WebBookStore’s included tools.

“There are e-services areas for bookstore management, and areas to manage the site and content,” Geiser said. “The bookstore market in North American universities is ripe for an application built around the HP 3000, with the advances of the Internet directly integrated.” BizNetTech.net (215.945.8100) will be demonstrating the application in the Adager booth (811) at HP World.

A faculty intranet in WebBookStore lets instructors adopt books for courses, tracking the history of which books they used last year coupled with survey data from students on satisfaction with the book. Instructors can order sample copies directly from the publishers in the bookstore’s extranet.

Publishers keep their inventory lists up to date in that extranet, communicating changes using spreadsheets uploaded nightly to the WebBookStore. Books can be flagged immediately as out of print.

Cold Fusion works with IMAGE/SQL and the Linkway/ODBC middleware to present data from the 350,000 items in the Queen’s University bookstore. The application sells books with secure credit card transactions, gives students data on buybacks, updates them on available inventory based on point-of-sale data. The bookstore interacts with vendors’ systems.

The Cold Fusion connection lets the application work with CGI scripts, perl scripts, and non-3000 databases. “It’s one of the most open applications there is,” Geiser said. “But we want to put HP gear in these universities — HP 3000s and NetServers.” A low-end Series 918 or 928 will be enough to run a small- to medium-sized bookstore, he added.

Chris Tabor, general manager and the only full time IT staffer for the Campus Bookstore at Queen’s University, said the software gives him what he needs to compete with companies that are pressing university bookstores hard: Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. Bookstores are starting to outsource to such book handlers, but WebBookStore can keep the business on campus.

“We had to look at this as a growth path for us,” Tabor said. “This is letting us embark on Web-to-host services and opening up a lot of communication for our constituents and customers.”

The bookstore is entering the second phase of using the Web, after deploying its own site using the Open Market Web software hosted on their HP 3000. While its first phase was dedicated to saving money through delivering information about costs and availability that bookstore staff once had to do over the phone, phase two is about selling.

Even as the bookstore was ready to commit to a secure Web server and integrate Windows NT, Tabor wanted to protect his investment in HP 3000 stability.

“I’m not going to surrender that easily,” he said. “We’re here in a sea of IBM and Sun systems, and I like to say the HP 3000 is the one that wears the sensible shoes,” Tabor said. “Now we can talk in either of those environments.”

The general manager feels like he’s got cutting-edge capabilities in the bookstore industry. “There’s a lot of brochure-ware sites in Canada’s university bookstores, but we were one of the first to bring out a dynamic site,” he said. Changing pages in his site “is a breeze now” with WebBookStore compared to the first-phase application, he added.

And adding data is easy, too. Tabor described weaving a 300,000-item database in with his own bookstore’s 56,000 items, to let students buy from a single inventory sourced from two different suppliers. “Because of the flexibility of this thing, so long as we can deal with [ODBC], that kind of integration is an option we just didn’t have before.”