Abstract
The evolution and growth of e-commerce has had a major impact in the daily
living for the past few years [28]. It has brought and introduced new ways of trading
and doing business. It enabled customers to negotiate business deals with companies
and come into agreement about the services and goods to be purchased; and even
come to the finalization and conclusion of the deals without ever being in the same
place or meeting during all those negotiations. The e-commerce systems target the
desktop or personal computers (PC s) as the hardware platform for clients. With all
such good features and benefits e-commerce has, there is, to mention the least, one
limitation that it has and that is mobility . People would still want to engage
themselves in business deals whilst mobile.
Mobile commerce or m-commerce appears into the scene to complete the journey
started by e-commerce, thus it is seen as an extension of e-commerce [21]. Many
services have migrated from the traditional e-commerce to m-commerce and that has
allowed customers and clients to have access to their services whilst mobile or in
motion.
The lack of mobility in students services is being seen as a hassle and a problem by
some students as they are forced to be fixed in one point at a time in order to get their
services. The dissertation aims at addressing the service-related problems students
encounter due to the lack of mobility in the University campus. It intends to develop a
prototype called Open Mobile Student Portal that would demonstrate how some of
the student services could be rendered in the mobile environment.
The students could be able to get their balance or fees statements via their cell phones
instead of having to go to the finance department in order to get their balance
statement. Also, some library services could be rendered in the mobile environment so
as to enable students to search for books in the library databases and book such books
using their cell phones.
Professor Sebastiaan von Solms