Microsoft Commerce Solutions

Whether your target customer is an individual consumer or another business, providing your product or service over the Internet can give your organization unprecedented availability and reach. And with MICROSOFT COMMERCE SOLUTIONS, you’ll learn how to achieve these Net gains by planning and deploying an electronic commerce system built with Microsoft technologies. Based on the real-world experiences of a Microsoft Solutions Provider Partner, this pragmatic, solutions-driven guide focuses on matching business requirements with technological capabilities—offering ready examples and proven expertise to guide you as you build your own commerce applications for the Web. Coverage includes:• Understanding the unique business and technology challenges of doing business on the Web• Establishing a robust, scalable, and secure e-commerce infrastructure• Building a Web storefront using Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition and related services in Microsoft Windows NT®/2000• Creating and automating custom server-side components that exploit Microsoft Transaction Server and Microsoft’s COM/DCOM architecture• Developing an effective user interface with current and emerging Internet standards such as HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, DHTML, client side scripts, and XML• Balancing design considerations, such as browser compatibility, with business objectives• Integrating workflow and incorporating streaming multimediaAn electronic version of this book is available on the companion CD.

Microsoft Commerce Solutions explains Microsoft's vision for the architecture of custom applications developed with its tools. This architecture allows programmers to attach a variety of processing algorithms--and user interfaces--to a common database. The book provides conceptual information before giving some details on the technologies used to implement it in various situations.

Chief among these technologies is Microsoft Site Server 3, the capabilities of which (along with Site Server Commerce Edition and Microsoft Transaction Server) receive much attention in these pages. Readers get a rundown on how to operate the servers in a variety of situations. One particularly useful example walks readers through the creation of a Web storefront with a minimal amount of coding, while another sets up a sophisticated system for displaying banner ads on Web pages.

In addition to outlining what the server software can do, the various contributors get into the mechanics of writing server-side scripts in the form of Active Server Pages (ASP) with embedded JavaScript, JScript, and VBScript. The authors include enough explanatory and illustrative material on each language that even novice programmers will feel comfortable.

The publisher ought to put more effort into copyediting future editions, though--Microsoft Commerce Solutions has too many spelling and grammar goofs. But if you're looking for a comprehensive introduction to the technologies Microsoft has for processing and publishing information, this book's for you. --David Wall