Commerce Server Blog

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.