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Microsoft Commerce Server 2000

Developing a Web site with an e-commerce component can be a daunting task. You need to juggle hosting requirements, marketing collateral, product catalogs, and buying analysis tools. Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 ($12,999 direct), the update for Site Server 3.0 Enterprise, has just made that resource-intensive task a whole lot easier.

Microsoft has simplified the process of building an e-commerce site by integrating its Internet applications into one strategy: .NET. Everything plugged in easily. We installed Commerce Server 2000 running on the Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system. This brings the Internet Information Server 5.0 Web server software into the picture from the beginning.

Commerce Server 2000 uses SQL Server for storage and reporting. The requirements specify either SQL 7 with OLAP Services or SQL 2000 with Analysis Server installed. We found that it was infinitely easier to install SQL 2000. Whereas SQL7 requires going through all the SQL and OLAP service packs, as well as the SQL and OLAP clients needed for the connection from Commerce Server, SQL 2000 rolls all of these steps into one operation. This reduces the out-of-box setup to simply installing SQL 2000, then Commerce Server. The entire process took less than 5 hours, which included installing and configuring Windows 2000.

Commerce Server, together with SQL Server, handles large-scale product management and marketing requirements. Many of these features are enabled by the integration of SQL Server's OLAP analytic capabilities. Warehousing of site data allows for the automation of targeted advertising, featured products, and e-mail promotions.

In addition, the Business Desk application allows access to features and functions of the site based upon a person's role within the site management organization. For example, a product manager may have access to product catalogs, orders, and reports, while a marketing manager may have access to user trend information to drive marketing campaigns or sell advertising space.

OLAP Services lets the Recommendation Engine make trend-based suggestions on how to move products. Commerce Server can also drive online auctions. The reporting tools of these products have many templates to assist in analyzing site data. Importing the site logs into the data warehouse, which took just a few minutes with the help of online documentation, produced a collection of dynamic and static reports that could be viewed online or e-mailed out. These reports use pivot tables, so that something as difficult as targeting customers for campaigns can be automated directly by the marketing manager.

Solution templates and third-party tools help you put up a professional site quickly. We tested with an application layer server running IIS 5.0 and Commerce Server 2000 installed on a DMZ network, and a data storage layer running SQL 2000 and Analysis Server inside a protected network. We also installed the retail B2C solution from Microsoft's public Web site, which was simply a matter of opening the Commerce Server Manager and loading a new solution from a template. The entire process took only a few minutes.

One factor that makes Commerce Server easier for administrators to install and maintain is that its manager utility is an MMC plug-in. This means that you can have the administration for Commerce Server, IIS, SQL 2000, Windows 2000, and the event logs all located inside one console application. Once the solution is installed, users need have only the Commerce Server Business Desk Web application, which is installed on the Web server to manage the solution. A tutorial is provided for either B2C or B2B solutions so that users can create their catalogs and campaigns quickly. The documentation states that a site can be brought up in less than two days. In our testing, it took approximately 5 hours to install the software and one full day to set up the user accounts, rates, and catalogs.

From the standpoint of site development, we liked the template customization within the Visual Studio development environment. We opened a test retail site in Visual Interdev and edited some of the pages to provide hooks to custom data, backgrounds, and styles. You can edit site content in most content editors that can handle IIS- and ASP-based content. This provides continuity for environments in which some of Commerce Server's features are already implemented within a legacy product.