Sales Automation systems face the complex task of integrating knowledge based systems with the traditional transactional systems running over a number of occasionally connected parties and software systems. The sharing and collaboration between occasionally connected parties and systems participating in the selling/buying of complex products has been difficult to realize within the common system architectures. We identify the fundamental challenges facing common Client/Server, Web, and Distributed Object architectures, and their shortcomings in supporting such collaboration and sharing. We show that agent based architectures can realize the wide area collaboration and workflow, as required by Sales Automation systems, over the Internet.
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