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Windows Server Products - Commerce Server

[By: Alex Robertson]

If your e-business is successful–and that is the plan–you will eventually want to step up to a more sophisticated solution. Your resources may even be worth investing in a more advanced product from the get-go. But before you jump into one of these midrange products, you should think about what you need from an e-commerce solution and what your organization can bring to the table. For these e-commerce servers, you'll need access to programming expertise, time, and money. If these requirements aren't a problem, you'll be rewarded with an extremely powerful site.

A midrange solution can provide more scalable Web sites that can handle more customers and give your store a more customized look and feel. We review three midrange products that support everything from small to very large online operations that want more than a one-size-fits-all approach to e-commerce. Each product, however, takes a vastly different approach and offers unique strengths.

The wizards and tools in these programs help you get started, but don't expect to get a store up without a programmer or consultant around. In fact, you'll probably need to hire Web developers to create the store and be around in case something goes wrong.

Once your store is up and running, you won't need to call your developer as often as in the past. These packages provide powerful, Web-based administrative tools that let managers maintain product catalogs and order information without programming skills.

Certainly, midrange solutions cost more and are more work. But in the long run, your organization will have a powerful store with robust functionality. Each of these three products lets you create an e-commerce solution that will grow as your business does, automating many aspects of your business.

Formerly Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition, Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 offers a compelling e-commerce solution for the Windows platform. This new version, which is currently in beta, greatly simplifies installation and administration overhead, letting managers control virtually every aspect of their sites without relying on programmers to do the dirty work.

In the past, Microsoft provided all the tools for successful e-commerce but required you to apply all the proper service packs to install and configure the tools–a very time-consuming process. So we were pleased to find that Commerce Server 2000 has a truly streamlined and integrated install.

In the older Site Server, Microsoft employed a wizard that generated a default store, along with a separate set of pages for administrative tasks. Now, Commerce Server 2000 offers a new, more powerful method. Rather than run a wizard, Commerce Server 2000 bundles sample retail stores in single package up (PUP) files.

PUP files represent an important step forward in managing Microsoft-based electronic stores, because they let you collect everything in your store–from SQL data and ASP pages to images and COM+ components needed to run a site. First, this is a nifty way to distribute model stores. Second, it lets you package up an entire store and redeploy it on a new Windows server along with all the necessary components. Any administrator who has faced the intricacies of COM+ and Microsoft Transaction Services (MTS) will recognize this new feature as groundbreaking.

To create a simple custom store, we added a theme and tweaked some of the HTML and ASP scripts. By default, the working store was entirely functional, with a shopping basket and access to order tracking. The only missing feature, as with all the products reviewed here, was the ability to work with your bank to set up credit card processing; you'll need a merchant account for that. Out of the box, the credit card processing does a checksum for a valid credit card.

Commerce Server 2000 has what is easily the most sophisticated administration tool in this roundup, a DHTML-based browser application called Business Desk. Commerce Server positively sailed through our testing script. Adding new products, editing shipping tables, changing tax options, and otherwise administering our site were all very simple. You can even manage auctions and view bids.

Business Desk's reporting capabilities are notable as well, with more than 20 canned reports on all types of traffic and site analysis. Because Commerce Server 2000 relies on OLAP Services in SQL Server 2000, you get a built-in data warehouse for your site free, along with all the analytical power for analyzing traffic and customer behavior.

One of the most immediately useful features in Business Desk is the Campaigns tool. This lets you create promotions for particular products and build targeted direct-mail campaigns for selected customers based on any criteria–all without writing a line of code. You could, for example, target shoppers who spent over $100 in the past six months.

For developers, Microsoft uses Visual InterDev 6.0 (part of Visual Studio) along with VBScript or JavaScript on the server side to generate Web pages dynamically. Visual InterDev is a powerful developer tool that provides a visual environment for designing pages.

Besides creating or modifying ASP scripts, Commerce Server 2000 also exposes the innards of e-commerce business rules through its Commerce Pipeline Editor. Using this convenient visual model, developers can attach script code to any section of the pipe, representing steps in an online transaction. Using Commerce Pipeline, you can integrate your electronic store with your inventory and accounting systems. With the forthcoming BizTalk Server 2000, Microsoft will extend Commerce Server 2000's ability to communicate with other vendors in your supply chain. This will involve advanced XML support and message-based processing for business-to-business scenarios. Commerce Server 2000 offers a more manageable solution on its own, however, ideally suited for selling to consumers.

This release offers a rich B2C solution that is quite easy to get started. And in case you want to move into the B2B realm eventually, you have plenty of room to grow. To keep your store running, you'll need some Windows administrative expertise on hand, but for the business side, managers will be impressed by Commerce Server 2000's broad toolset and customizability.