Commerce Server Blog

The Commerce Server Product Unit is holding (x2) Partner Academy Live (PAL) webinars in July:

Session: WCS05PAL- Positioning Commerce Server 2009 to Key Business Decision Makers
Presented by: Steven Bergman
Date: Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Time: 8:00-9:00am Pacific Time (UTC – 8 )
Level:  100
Description: Even in these challenging economic times, leading enterprises are continuing to make investments in e-commerce.  This session will offer insight into positioning Commerce Server to various Business Decision Makers (BDM’s), such as those in Sales, Marketing, and Merchandizing.  We will highlight key Commerce Server 2009 value propositions that address your customer BDM’s e-commerce objectives in today’s economic climate

Register Today!  Note: you must ‘Sign In’ with your Microsoft Partner ID account.

Session: WCS06PAL-"Example From Zero" Working With the Commerce Server 2009 Template Pack (Contemporary Site)
Presented by: Scott Cairney
Date: Thursday, July 23, 2009
Time: 8:00-9:00am Pacific Time (UTC – 8 )
Level: 300
Description: Commerce Server 2009 helps set a new benchmark for simplicity – it comes with a new, production-ready, out-of-the-box, contemporary Web site that allows businesses to get their stores live and merchandise moving more quickly. Learn how you can use Commerce Server’s next-generation e-commerce solution to deploy and configure an e-commerce website. 
You will learn how to:

-   Deploy the Contemporary site using SharePoint Commerce Services
-   Customize the Contemporary Site
-   Use the Inline Product Property Editor (IPPE)
-   BizTalk integration with Excel

Register Today!  Note: you must ‘Sign In’ with your Microsoft Partner ID account.

Handling inventory is a tricky stuff in retail industry. Business development team are very agile and comes up with innovative ideas of making sale of the goods from the store. Sometimes they give discounts to attract people and sometimes they sell goods in bundles. These bundles are either physically grouped or logically grouped. Physical grouping means packing couple of items in to one item and giving a SKU to it and logical grouping means the bundled product doesn’t exist physically but it is grouped with the individual items with their separate SKU. It would be good to provide both functionality to the customer.

How do we implement logical grouping?

Pretty simple – Let’s see it with an example. We would like to give a LCD monitor, wireless key board and wireless mouse with the purchase of desktop. I have created a product named “Desktop of the week” and add LCD monitor, wireless key board and wireless mouse as related items with the identify text “Product Group”. May be we can have a property for the product to distinguish whether it is regular product or packed product.

Excellent! The configuration is done in catalog manager. How do we capture the inventory of the grouped product as the inventory for LCD monitor, wireless key board and wireless mouse can be different. Now it’s time to implement our custom logic. We have to iterate each item to check whether the inventory is available for a particular item by calling commerce sever inventory pipeline component (other option is add the item to the dummy basket and run basket pipeline). If any of the item is out of stock then we will quality the bundled product as out of stock else we can accept to add that bundled product to the basket. Here is the flow chart which helps to get this logic.

The journey to reach next generation ecommerce platform is on its way. Last week, Microsoft has released its new CTP on next release of CS2009 – “R2”and invites all CS evangelists, customers & users to install this pre-release of the next version of Commerce Server 2009 “R2” into a non-production environment to learn how Commerce Server 2009 “R2” provides an improved business management experience, enhanced cross-channel enablement with 3-tier development and deployment support, and a more streamlined deployment experience.

You can download it from Microsoft site and the url is

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dfaca6d6-6e1a-4067-8857-61ff1300bf6b&displaylang=en

What’s new in R2

• API: It has ability to update products and categories via the Commerce Foundation Services API. Authorization is not available in the CTP, thus any caller can update products or categories currently.
• Business Administration Toolbar: Displayed on the NTLM site, the Silverlight 3-based administrative toolbar provides a point of extensibility that allows developers to create custom Silverlight "plug-ins" to be run from the toolbar. The toolbar supports multiple tabs for ease of organizing tools.
• Cross Sell/Up Sell Relationship Manager: It can be used to manage cross sell and up sell relationships for a product or category. Launched from the Business Administration Toolbar (active when on a category or product page), the user can select products and/or categories to be displayed as cross sell or up-sell items.
• Commerce Foundation Services: The ability to run Commerce Foundation Services as a service and thus make requests to Commerce Server in a distributed server environment. There are new configuration sections and elements to support this as described in the core documentation. Note that distributed Commerce Server is not supported out-of-the-box in the default contemporary site in this release.
• Security Note: In a distributed Commerce Server environment, the ability to define secured access to Commerce Server assets via the Commerce Foundation Services will be required. Commerce Foundation Services security is not yet available in this CTP release but is planned for upcoming releases.
• Router Service: This service can be configured to forward messages from a browser client to the Commerce Foundation Services operating in a distributed environment. The Routing Service implements a security boundary in Commerce Server applications where Commerce Server assets are installed in an enterprise behind security firewalls and not in Internet facing servers. The Routing Service exposes a service endpoint to handle client Commerce Server requests, and is also documented in the Commerce Server core documentation.
• New default contemporary site: The out-of-the-box Default Site in Commerce Server 2009 is replaced with the default contemporary site. This updated default contemporary site gives you a more streamlined and appealing out-of-the-box shopping site to work from.
• Business Tools Extensibility Kit: Formerly known as the Partner SDK, the Business Tools Extensibility Kit includes the source code for the Business Management Applications.

Stay tuned to this site to get more information about upcoming releases.

In VS2005, whenever you double click on pipeline configuration file (PCF), visual studio used to open pipeline editor. Sometimes you may face issue in opening if you open PCF in VS2008, you might see binary data as shown below.

Follow this simple step to get it opened in pipeline editor.

1. Open visual studio and open the project where pipelines exists (i.e., web application).
2. Right click on the PCF and click “Open with”.
3. A dialog will appear. Click add button.
4. In program name – give "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Commerce Server 2007\pipeeditor.exe" and in friendly name give “Microsoft Commerce Server Pipeline Editor” and press OK button.
   

From now onwards, if you want to open the PCF file. Click on the PCF file –> Open with –> select “Microsoft Commerce Server Pipeline Editor” .

The other option is to add pipeline as external tool.

• Open Visual studio. click on tools and click on “External tools”.
• Make you to give the settings as given in the image below and make sure you have $(ItemPath) in Arguments.
  

After doing changes, if you want to open the PCF file. Click on the PCF file –> Click on tools –> select “Microsoft Commerce Server Pipeline Editor” .