Commerce Server Blog

Trends in Ecommerce customers are changing regularly. In previous decade, customers started coming to the website just to perform transactions and 8-10 years before a new trend has started where customers are coming to website for content and for purchase. Couple of years before customers are coming to the website to see other’s opinions on the product. Based on the ratings and reviews, they are deciding whether to buy the product or not. Now people trend is changing and they want to buy all necessary products in one website. For example, before we used to buy products in retail website and life or car insurance in another website. Now people wants to purchase all their needs in the same website.

Can we able to achieve this trend with the current & available technology. With the introduction of commerce server 2009, YES, we can able to achieve this but with little customization. Lets see some of the challenges currently we are having.

• So far, we have developed single vertical (like retail, finance, insurance, etc) and deployed successfully. How can we create several services under a single commerce instance.
• How can we extend our services to global markets? Can we develop an application which works with global market with customization instead of development?
• Can we achieve it with minimal cost (less development and more customization)?
• How can we create a service which provides service to our partners.

These are not my questions, but CIOs from different companies are breaking their heads to address these challenges and this point of view article is to showcase how can we address these problems.

To address this problem we can leverage new features of CS2009, i.e., commerce server foundation & channels configuration. Let’s check how the proposed logical architecture looks like.

The presentation layer can be a frontend application by which the devices (desktop, laptop, tablet PC, PDA, etc) can access. For each industry vertical, we can have industry specific component or service which does preprocessing to the incoming message. Once preprocessing is done, the message is handed over to ecommerce bus.

We can create multiple channels with device & industry combination. The channel and industry details are passed to service bus with service call. Ecommerce Service bus can be a WCF layer which does all the tasks for all verticals. WCF provides us a framework by which we can develop the services which are interoperable, less complex, supports multiple protocols, etc and also provides to develop service oriented applications (SOA). Currently Commerce server doesn’t support WCF services but we can able to use them with the help of custom entities. All post processing tasks for each channel can be achieved by creating custom operation components and sequencing them through operation sequence configuration setting in channelConfiguration file. 

This is my point of view on generic ecommerce bus for multiple verticals. In future if any new industry or device is added to the business, then the implementation will be pretty simple and easily achievable by creating custom services or components for your industry and for any post processing tasks, creating new operation components and configure them in commerce server.

Commerce server ships four business tools. Business users will use this tool to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. These thick clients are very useful to perform various operations. This tool can be installed on any PC in the enterprise and it will start working by connecting to the commerce server and fetching information through web services. Microsoft also gives partner SDK to their clients so that they can extend the code based on the business requirements.

If you ask, are you happy with what you get? then my answer is NO. I feel the tools should be reshaped with respect to current market technologies. In this section, I am drafting my point of views (PoV) on commerce server business tools.

Single IDE for all tools : Microsoft pushed all language developers on single IDE. As a developer, we know what comfort level we are having with this functionality. In the similar way,

• We should provide a single IDE for all business applications
• Business user can able to open different site data at the same time.
• Single authorization store for all subsystems.
• Allowing users to change connecting mode (either web services or local mode).

Integration with Outlook :  Instead of hardcore win forms, can we think of providing commerce server data access using Microsoft Office. If Microsoft Dynamics can able to provide outlook functionality to their users, why not we ? At least we should think of replacing customer and order manager tool with outlook.

Web Application: Few weeks back, few people started creating catalog manager that works in codeplex. This is good initiative but I feel this will not be of much use. Our business users are very soft people and they need more comfort while accessing the application. If they feel the application is not so user friendly, they start changing their mindsets and start using back Microsoft Excel. Instead of plain ASP.NET application, if we can develop Rich Internet Application using Silverlight then this will bring more mileage to usability aspect.

Microsoft Groove: I know very few ecommerce enterprises are using Groove. We can starting thinking using Groove as it has very good capability of working with XML forms and any small change to the forms can easily deployable in all desktops. This will give more flexibility to extend ecommerce business applications based on business needs.

If Microsoft feels to go with windows application for their next releases then I feel they can either think of using WPF application. Hope to see any one of my PoV will be implemented by Commerce 7.

For past few months I am working on how to enable people on commerce server 2009. Commerce server 2007 training is a challenge. It is vast and at the minimum we require 4 days to train the resource. I have done many trainings and in this four days we can enable to resource but if the resource want to be more than novice, then he has to keep his/her efforts on the things that are not covered in the training. With the introduction of commerce server foundation and usage of MOSS & BizTalk server in CS2009, it became more difficult to enable resource. From the given limitations, I came up with the training structure that makes resource enable in CS2009. I have piloted this on 18 resources and successfully able to deliver the training. If you feel the trainees are not competent, better to squeeze training and make 50-60% theory sessions and rest of time on lab practices. Reach me if you need any further assistance.

On 15th April, Microsoft has released new Template Pack for Commerce server 2009 which contains a fully-featured contemporary shopping Web site that offers a new, contemporary presentation skin on the Default Site (for WSS and MOSS frontend only) for both desktop viewing and mobile devices. It offers a production quality site design, in a default green and gray color scheme, that you can quickly and easily customize to suit the needs of your organization. It also supports rendering on mobile devices, specifically Windows Mobile and iPhone devices. It can be deployed in both Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS).

You can download CS2009 template from below url.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2df25ab7-f38d-439e-9391-ef8f025e8064&displaylang=en

What to see look & feel of  new templates, check below url. 
http://www.itcreme.com/2009/05/13/sharepoint-commerce-server-2009-a-new-sharepoint-commerce-site-is-out/

Today Microsoft has released Inline product property edition for commerce server 2009. This add-on product is used for product administration purposes for business users. This silver light control (hosted in ASP.NET web part) helps business people to update product information on their ecommerce web sites directly. So, this will work on SharePoint site with commerce server installed.

It also includes Inline Product Property Editor Extensibility Kit that has of the Silverlight Web Part source code. Developers can use the source code to customize or extend the capabilities of the Inline Product Property Editor by using Microsoft Silverlight, and the Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation.

You can download the add-on from Microsoft site and the url is
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fce87672-90cf-4ead-b100-6bbc24d96f66&displaylang=en