question : The National Trade Show Services (NTSS) is a service provider that helps business

customers create, promote, organize, and run national and international trade shows.

Business customers contact NTSS for the services they need. Creating a trade show involves the design for the trade show, including professional services ranging from selection of a theme and a slogan to location and duration. Promoting a trade show includes advertisement activities. Organizing a trade show includes all activities before the trade show except creation and promotion. For example, inviting speakers, and registering participants and exhibitors. Running a trade show is the activity of on site registration, setting up the booths, conference rooms for seminars, reception, and distributing trade show materials. The NTSS creates an account for each customer to record service charges, payments received, and maintain the account balances. A trade show can be regarded as an event. For example, the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show took place in the Las Vegas Convention Center during January 710, 2008 and the 2008 MacWorld Conference took place at the Moscone Center, 747 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 during January 1418, 2008. An event has an organizer, which can be a person or an organization. For example, the CES was organized by the Consumer Electronics Association while the MacWorld was organized by Apple, Inc. An event has contact information and possibly a website that provides further information about the event. An event can belong to one or more predefined domains. For example, the CES and MacWorld belong to both Technology and Consumer Electronics. The list of predefined domains can change from time to time because new domains need be added and outdated domains need be removed. A trade show is attended by different types of participants including the event organization staff, the invited and/or selected speakers, exhibitors, and observers. Except the event organization staff and the event organizer, all participants must register to attend a trade showevents. The registration charges a fee, which is different for different trade showevents. The event organization staff creates, prepares, and runs the event. The invited speakers are famous figures in the domain who were invited to give a keynote address at the event. The selected speakers are invited to speak at the event based on the evaluation of their proposals. The proposals are usually reviewed by a committee of reviewers, who are experts in the domain and willing to help. The

status of a proposal includes pending review, accepted, and rejected. The exhibitors come to the trade showto exhibit their products or services. The exhibitors have to pay for the booths depending on the size of the booth (large, medium, or small). Booths are requested and rented for the whole duration of the event. Finally, the observers come to visit the trade show for various purposes.

In Appendix D.2, a National Trade Show Services

(NTSS) business is described. Suppose that currently the NTSS business is conducted manually. The company wants to develop a web-based online system to automate the business. This exercise may be an individual assignment or part of a team project. It requires the student or team to do the following:

a. From the business description, identify and list the most important business activities of the current business. These are the functionalities that the future system must provide. Hint: The number of such activities may differ from student to student. However, the combined functionality identified should cover at least 90% of the current business activities, which includes the most important business functions. b. Identify other necessary functionalities for the online system so the business can run online. For example, the system needs to authenticate users. c. Formulate the functionalities as software requirements.