Backup and Restore Having good backups – and tested restore processes – is an important element of any mission-critical systems deployment. Commerce Server and SharePoint, like any other Microsoft server product built under the Common Engineering Criteria specification launched in 2005-2006, has been designed to work with backup and restore solutions that leverage the Volume... Continue Reading →

Building Boxes Configuring Commerce Server securely requires one to be an expert in the entire Microsoft technology stack that supports the underlying product, such as Windows Server, SharePoint, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, etc. Further complicating matters, each version of the technology utilized typically has considerably different steps required to successfully configure a box. And the... Continue Reading →

There are many potential flavors and permutations of configuring Commerce Server to run in multiple environments. For the purposes of this discussion, it is assumed that the following actual environments will be utilized for the sake of bounding the problem: 1. Live Web Site – This is where customers access the site to purchase merchandize... Continue Reading →

Overview Typical of small to medium businesses with their own dedicated e-commerce presence, the Single Environment Web Farm provides a separation of functions for performance and redundancy’s sake to the maximum extent possible within a single physical environment. For most small to medium businesses with a few hundred to a few thousand orders per day,... Continue Reading →

The Standalone Server The Standalone Server has a very simple topology – that of a single box. It is intended that all software be installed on this box. Typically secure configuration is a non-concern in this type of scenario, as it is typically intended for some sort of demonstration or development (as opposed to production... Continue Reading →

There are currently two versions of Microsoft Commerce Server available – Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Some of the key differences between the two can be summarized as follows: Function Standard Edition Enterprise Edition Notes Processor Sockets Up to 2 Unlimited Standard Edition cannot be installed – and will not function on machines with more... Continue Reading →

In the Commerce Server product documentation, several baseline deployment configurations are covered in extreme detail. In practicality, this is only of partial use – as these configurations are extremely generic and do not map back to particular real world problems and scenarios. Looking at Commerce Server at a high-level – several real-world deployment scenarios immediately... Continue Reading →

Deploying any mission critical system is an extremely non-trivial task. Dollars and cents are at stake. Almost any deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 or 2009 (hereafter CS2009) can fit this bill. Inherently, e-commerce is about collecting money. If a system is not available, money cannot be collected. That is the direct cost of downtime.... Continue Reading →

As announced on the official Commerce Server team blog yesterday – see http://tinyurl.com/yljcfwf for details or just follow http://blogs.msdn.com/commerce/  – SharePoint 2010 support will be coming to Commerce Server 2009 this summer. This is obviously a very hot topic – as I have seen a lot of folks trying to get this to work today... Continue Reading →

A few questions have come up about how can you do negative discounts. (For the record, a negative discount would increase a price. e.g. - If you qualify, raise the price of Item X by 10%.) The net is that Commerce Server doesn't really support this. The better ways to accomplish this are: Set all... Continue Reading →