Commerce Server Licensing Clarification

I get asked this a lot of the differences between Commerce Server Standard and Enterprise. The resources on the web actually cause a few questions to be raised

 

Commerce Server 2009 Feature (32-bit and 64-bit)	Benefit	Standard	Enterprise
Functionality
Commerce Server Applications per Commerce site	Specific “applications” within Commerce Server can be created for better performance handling.	1	Unlimited
Number of Commerce Server Sites per Server	Specific “sites” within Commerce Server can be created for better performance handling.	10	Unlimited (Bound only by hardware or IIS limits)

 

The questioning usually comes around what is an “application” and what is a “site”.

Based on the MSDN site:

A) Commerce Server Application : A Commerce Server application is a logical representation of an application in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS); it appears in both the Commerce Server Manager and IIS console trees. In the IIS console tree, an application is either at the root directory level of the Web site or at a subdirectory level of the Web site. Web services do not count as Commerce Server applications for license purposes.

B) Commerce Server Site: A Commerce Server site includes a collection of site resources and ASP.NET-based applications that use these resources through the Commerce Server object model. With a Commerce Server site, you can administer the applications in the site as a group. Note that a Commerce Server site does not map to the concept of a Web site in IIS.

Based on these definitions, Standard Edition can have one of “A” and you can have 10 of “B” that leverages off that one “A”.

 

Technorati Tags: Commerce Server 2009,Licensing

Commerce Server 2009 Contemporary Site – How to add a new Credit Card

The current Commerce Server 2009 VPC on Connect has a good example of a shopping site on MOSS. The sample site comes with 2 credit cards.

The following shows how to add an additional credit card. I chose to add an American Express card.

1) add the credit card in the Customer and Orders Manager. To do this, go to Start >> All Programs >> Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 >> Customer and Orders Manager

2) Select Payment Methods

 

3) Right click and select New Payment method

 

4) Enter in the credit card details in the Name/Description box. Note that the Pipeline Name: is creditcard

Note the GroupID : 0e640fbd-8058-41b1-8405-c731cebf2c80

5) Click Save and Close. Next go to the Virtual directory and edit  “C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\82\web.config”

6) Find the CreditCards section and add the entry for American Express with the GUID from above

 

 

7) Login to the Contemporary site and go to the My Account and select My Credit Cards. select Add a new credit card and you will see the new American Express card.

 

Technorati Tags: Commerce Server 2009,Contemporary Site

Neat Translation Service

In the world of eCommerce and Integration there are typically a lot of requirements for translations. The support of double byte characters in the Windows Code set pretty much guarantee a truly international solution when using Windows Server products such as Commerce Server and BizTalk.

The fun thing was when I heard about this service that would be available soon during a TechEd 2009. Check this web site, I noticed a cool “plug in” into Windows Live Messenger.

This is the following icon:

Note that I have yet to play around with the widget.

To use this bot, simply add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and invite him/her to your conversations.

After adding the bot into a 3 way conversation (or more) you can set your source and destination languages via numerics as the screenshots show.

The instructions for those that do not read french, are choose source and destination language

Probably have to take my word for it, but the translation is pretty good…

The interface is as follows:

 

A translation is (kinda ironic here…)

1. TBot lang – show the pair of active languages
2. TBot change – choose the languages for translation
3. TBot stop – stop translations
4. TBot start – being translations again
5. TBot set – set the working language
6. Tobot ? – Show this list of commands

 

Kinda fun and the translations are pretty accurate so far. I would say enough to get by.

 

p.s.

After translating the list, I set the working language to English and here is the list:

 

 

Technorati Tags: Commerce Server,BizTalk Server,Translations,Bing

Now that you built it, how do you keep it running and measure it ?

I had a great discussion with fellow MVP’er and genius Kent Weare. The topic of discussion spawned from a very simple question:

“Internally, we are starting to measure our critical system’s uptime availability.  These “critical” systems would include applications like Exchange, SAP, BizTalk , our Work order management system and the network of course.  Are there any standards that your organizations follow? ”

I would say the majority of standards are represented in one way our another via the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) which also has it ties with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

 

Those 2 links provide a heck of a lot of reading but at the end of the day, all these are, are simple guidelines. The trick is to figure out how to apply it to your business.

 

Here are some general guidelines:

 

1. Determine SLA’s from the business for each class of applications (i.e. email, DB, integration)
• Meeting SLA’s are the criteria for what constitutes uptime/downtime
• Get consensus if maintenance windows constitute downtime
2. Find out from the business what level of uptime is required for each
3. Determine a weighting factor for each required class (i.e. DB is weighted at 80 points, Integration is 15 points, light DB is 5 points)
• weighting factors can help determine overall uptime, if light DB is 5 points, even if it is down for 50% of the time, the division can still have a 99% + uptime record.
4. Get current volumes and end to end architecture for present and present + 6 months
5. Estimate cost of up time in 1 based on points 2-4
6. Be prepared to redo points 1-5 based on freak out from number in 5 :)
7. Typical organizations begin with uptimes around 98.9% to 99.9% as a starting point (and NO, 98.9 does not constitute 2 9’s ;) )

 

Things to remember

1. This model has to be reviewed with every single project and at a minimum every 3 months due to growth and bursts in regular business
2. Remember to follow the entire length of the transaction to determine uptime
• these may include 3rd party providers unless specifically noted
• these do include network, power generators etc. as they can tie into a DR plan (Disaster Recovery)
3. Factor in year to year growth
• Servers spec’d out 2 years ago may not be sufficient to handle the current load if your cluster fails due to organic growth

Technorati Tags: MOF,ITIL,Uptime

August CTP of Commerce Server 2009 “R2” available

 

Just a quick fyi that the August CTP of Commerce Server 2009 R2 is not available on connect.

Features include:

• Complete 3-tier/n-tier functionality – which enables Commerce Server to be used outside of the normal Web page/Web server context from any type of Rich Interactive Application (RIA), such as Silverlight, Air, or a native mobility solution such as a native iPhone client
• A robust claims-based authentication mechanism to allow this to be securely used over the Internet – even for shopping scenarios
• Visual merchandising toolbar functionality – including much richer catalog editing, cross-sell/up-sell, and image management – all implemented in Silverlight 3
• Numerous improvements to the out-of-box site

 

Technorati Tags: Commerce Server 2009 R2,Commerce Server

Funny but true errors in MSDN

Just found this little blurb in MSDN: “Integration with the Catalog System. The Catalog System provides the same features and functionality as the Catalog System. For example, you can search inventory catalogs, import inventory catalogs, and export inventory catalogs.”

 

I am really glad that the catalog system provides the same features as the catalog system… ;)

Upgrading BizTalk 2006 R2 to 2009

Found this interesting blog via Twitter.

I could not fully understand the reason for failure or the conditions for failure in this very very condensed blog. From what I gather, here is the contention point:

 

1) project was done in both BizTalk 2006 R2 and Visual Studio 2005.

2) Upgrade was to both BizTalk 2009 and Visual Studio 2008

 

It seems that the btoj files are not updated correctly and it requires multiple manual tweaks to get these BizTalk projects to be upgradable and recognized by VS 2008.