Professional Commerce Server 2000

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Editorial Review:

Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 provides a COM-based framework and suite of tools that can help you build and manage effective web sites - in particular e-commerce solutions - on the Windows 2000 platform. It supports catalog management, user profiling, content targeting, and business analytics, as well as providing a component-based 'pipeline' framework to simplify the implementation of linear business logic.

This book explores the most important areas of the Commerce Server 2000 product, taking you through from product installation, and configuring and customizing the ready-made e-commerce solution sites, to low-level application of the component framework, integration with third party components and external systems, and site migration from Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition.

Commerce Server 2000 is Microsoft's solution for building powerful e-commerce applications on the Web. This product is the successor to the pioneering Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition product, and it enhances its architecture in several key areas, including user profile management and site analysis. Professional Commerce Server 2000 Programming from Wrox Press is an excellent guide to this powerhouse new product.

One of Commerce Server's strengths is its balance between "out of the box" Web store solutions that build easily with wizards and its extensible architecture that allows programmers to extend and customize sites any way they like. This guide steps the reader through the creation of the basic retail store but quickly gets down to the business of customization. Halfway through the book, the reader will have a good feel for setting up user profile and authentication; customizing the store catalog; configuring promotions, tax tables, and shipping rates; and setting up the order processing pipelines to meet an organization's needs. Plenty of sample code--all of which is downloadable from the publisher's Web site--is included to illustrate customization techniques.

Advanced topics such as content targeting and BizDesk integration are covered in great depth, making this guide a veritable Commerce Server bible you'll turn to time and time again. The book's authors address the sticky issue of migrating Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition stores to Commerce Server--a Herculean task that programmers will have to think about long and hard before attempting--with two separate chapters that focus on moving the Membership Directory and stores respectively.

Commerce Server 2000 is one of the most powerful e-commerce solution tools available. This well-organized guide is perhaps the most powerful documentation you will find for the product. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered:

• User profiling and authentication
• Catalog customization
• Business analytics
• Pipeline implementation
• Campaigns and content selection
• Content and promotion targeting
• Sitelets
• Third-party tax and shipping components
• BizDesk integration
• Internationalization
• Migrating Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition membership directories and stores
• Installation
• COM and schema reference

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 3.0 / 5.0

Ridden with too many errors:

For 16 authors (programmers??) to make so many typos, mistakes, ommissions, is unacceptable. I even sent email to the authors who cared to provide addresses and none responded.

The authors must have been confused or took so much for granted. The problems I found with the book are too many. For example: Code snippets fail, poor steps (making the book a very tidious read.). The steps are embedded in lengthy theories, making them impossible to follow. Focus is lost and references are poor. For example, on... more info

Book is just OKfor beginers, Nothing great:

This book hasn nothing to rate is as Professional. The book does not give you any thing that is not there in the MS docuentation. It can only be used by person who wants to use the GUI tools provides with Comerce Server. There is no effort made by authors to actually explore the full capacity of Comerce Server objects to leverage the functioanilty. Overall, i don't think it is worth spending $(...) on this book.

Good Book.:

This is a good point to start developing applications based on Commerce Server. Don't think it's an absolutely complete solution to CS2K issues, but it covers all the topics and it's useful. Better than Help files and CS2K Resource Kit.

Sloppy:

I am only on Chapter 2 and have found at least 5 typographical errors in the text AND the code listings. It is real frustrating to spend so much time trying to understand a topic only to realize that what really was preventing you from understanding was the bugs in the code. You would think that maybe the book is also trying to teach debugging. If Wrox keeps coming out with books that are so poorly edited I will have to look elsewhere for my needs.