Posts Tagged ‘ecommerce’
August 12, 2008 | 
Author Gartner has released a report on July 18, 2008 under the title “Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce ” by analyst Gene Alvarez – delivers valuable information about the eCommerce market.
Garter states that the consumerization of online technologies is creating a demand for rich Internet experiences with user-generated content. Today’s buyers desire Web sites to speed up the process of finding a product, enable comparisons of products, provide tools to help buyers understand the product, and have community-based information to help them to make the final buying decisions — all with knowledge of “who” they’re serving across multiple points of interaction.
Source: Gartner.com
The article talked about Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 and tells that it will enable customers to create full-featured Web business applications and extend their business across networks, while allowing the integration of e-commerce solutions within the customer’s existing infrastructure.
As per this article, Microsoft Commerce server SP2 has a strong set of e-commerce capabilities such as
- Shopping cart management
- Taxation
- Personalization
- Transaction Management
- Settlement
- Product visualization
- Multi-channel Integration with Kiosk, mobile devices, POS systems, interactive TV & gaming
- Web 2.0 capabilities such as social commerce.
- Community aspects – product reviews
- Rich interactive applications
- Drag and Drop in web applications
- Compare pages,
- Single page checkout
- Integration with Microsoft live search.
Thanks to Gartner for creating such a comprehensive article. You can read entire article at Gartner site
http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol4/article1/article1.html
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Posted in commerce server 2007 | 
Tags: commerce server, Commerce Server SP2, ecommerce, ecommerce vendor comparision, ecommerce vendors, Mojave | 
2 Comments »
To open to customer and order manager tool, you should install SSL certificate on web server and SSL secure channel should be enable in profile and order virtual directories. You can use SelfSSL tool to create SSL certificate. SelfSSL.exe is part IIS 6.0 resource kit tools and you can download it from Microsoft site.
If you don’t want to install SSL, then there is a trick to do that.
- Open “CustomerAndOrdersManager.exe.config” file located in “C:Program FilesMicrosoft Commerce Server 2007Business User Applications” folder.
- Go to Configuration -> ApplicationSettlings -> Microsoft.CommerceServer.UI.CustomerAndOrdersManager.Properties.Settings -> AllowHTTP setting.
- Change value from “False” to “True”.
- Now your “Customer & Order manager” tool will not ask for HTTPS to connect to profile and order subsystem.
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Posted in commerce server 2007 | Tags: commerce server, Commerce Server SP2, ecommerce, ecommerce vendor comparision, ecommerce vendors, Mojave | 2 Comments »
When an attempt was made to upgrade a commerce server 2002 site to commerce server 2007 site using upgrade wizard, we got following error.
exception log – ‘C:Documents and Settingsad96357Local SettingsTemp4ExceptionOrders.log’, processing mode – ‘Standard’.
12:38:15: : Error: Exception thrown during Analyze phase of ‘Transactions’ component:
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8004E024): COM+ activation failed because the activation could not be completed in the specified amount of time. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004E024)
at System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHRInternal(Int32 errorCode, IntPtr errorInfo)
at System.EnterpriseServices.Thunk.Proxy.CoCreateObject(Type serverType, Boolean bQuerySCInfo, Boolean& bIsAnotherProcess, String& uri)
at Microsoft.CommerceServer.Migration.Orders.OrdersComponent.Microsoft.CommerceServer.Migration.ICSMigrationComponent.Analyze()
at Microsoft.CommerceServer.Internal.CS2007Upgrade.AnalyzePage.Analyze(ResourceContainer resContainer)
The solution for the above issue is to ensure the account running the wizard has appropriate permissions in transaction DB.
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Posted in commerce server 2007 | Tags: commerce server, Commerce Server SP2, ecommerce, ecommerce vendor comparision, ecommerce vendors, Mojave | 2 Comments »
When an attempt was made to upgrade a commerce server 2002 site to commerce server 2007 site using upgrade wizard, we got following error.
exception log – ‘C:Documents and Settingsad96357Local SettingsTemp4ExceptionOrders.log’, processing mode – ‘Standard’.
12:38:15: : Error: Exception thrown during Analyze phase of ‘Transactions’ component:
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8004E024): COM+ activation failed because the activation could not be completed in the specified amount of time. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004E024)
at System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHRInternal(Int32 errorCode, IntPtr errorInfo)
at System.EnterpriseServices.Thunk.Proxy.CoCreateObject(Type serverType, Boolean bQuerySCInfo, Boolean& bIsAnotherProcess, String& uri)
at Microsoft.CommerceServer.Migration.Orders.OrdersComponent.Microsoft.CommerceServer.Migration.ICSMigrationComponent.Analyze()
at Microsoft.CommerceServer.Internal.CS2007Upgrade.AnalyzePage.Analyze(ResourceContainer resContainer)
The solution for the above issue is to ensure the account running the wizard has appropriate permissions in transaction DB.
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Posted in commerce server 2007 | Tags: commerce server, Commerce Server SP2, ecommerce, ecommerce vendor comparision, ecommerce vendors, Mojave | 2 Comments »
For past couple of years, I have worked on couple of ecommerce projects where the ecommerce front end was developed using ASP.NET and flash and integrates with commerce server 2007 through API/web services. I have delivered nice look and feel portals with good usability features. Most of the people don’t know about integration of flash & commerce server to create nice and good looking ecommerce applications. From my perspective, the main disadvantage with this approach is designer dependency. As a programmer, I have limited visibility till commerce server and involvement into flash UI design is nil or very little. The graphic designers don’t have much knowledge on technical aspects and they don’t understand what information they need to make the site work. It is developer responsibility to analyze the data, think on all abilities (scalability, performance, extensibility, etc) before the development/design work starts.
One year before, Microsoft has come up with Silverlight (v1.1 alpha). I personally feel this software as flash competitor. The advantage of Silverlight is the frontend code is created in XAML and the code behind using C#.NET. This makes me (as a developer) very happy as I have total control on UI code. At the maximum, I will reach graphic designer for look and feel and rendering graphics, animations are within my control.
Recently I has developed a small ecommerce application using Silverlight 1.1 (alpha). It’s a nightmare to build end to end application where Silverlight doesn’t support many of the core development features (like controls, grids, UI panels, etc) and in the month of March Microsoft has released new version of Silverlight 2.0 (beta). This software was far better than older version as it provides user controls to build applications similar to ASP.NET. To my surprise, when I decided to migrate current application to new version, I found there are lot of architecture changes and finally end up in creating the code from the scratch.
Some of the key problems I still feel from Silverlight are
1. Web service calls are asynchronous. This makes the application run slower.
2. All the features of WPF are not supported by Silverlight.
3. Silverlight 2.0 guide states the support of WCF but it is nightmare to implement.
4. The Silverlight controls are heavy and take time to download on client browsers.
5. Error happened in web services cannot be catch at Silverlight component.
One thing we should keep in mind that Silverlight 2.0 software is still in beta and I see in next two years it will overcome flash and provide all features supported by WPF. If you have any questions/suggestions, kindly raise them through comments section.
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Posted in commerce server 2007 | Tags: commerce server, Commerce Server SP2, ecommerce, ecommerce vendor comparision, ecommerce vendors, Mojave | 2 Comments »
