Creating an Online Store

Building a comprehensive, powerful, and cost-effective Web site so your business can conduct commerce over the Internet requires careful planning and foresight. But before you set out to build an e-commerce solution, you need to ask yourself four questions: How do you engage the customer? How do you transact the business at hand? How can you analyze your e-commerce site? How do you build your e-commerce site? Knowing the answers to these questions will help ensure that your customers keep coming back to your site. This article assumes you’ve already planned and designed your e-commerce solution and focuses on how to implement your e-commerce site. You need to know which tools to use to build your site, which tools to use to set up and customize transactions on the site, and which tools to use to enrich the user’s experience (e.g., through personalization and promotions) while at the site.

This article shows you how to use Microsoft’s Windows NT 4.0 and Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 to host an e-commerce Web site, and how to use Microsoft’s Site Server, Commerce Edition (SSCE) 3.0 to create an online store. Features in all three products will provide you with out-of-the-box capabilities to implement integrated security, transaction processing, and dynamic content on your e-commerce site with little, if any, programming.

System Requirements
The first step in implementing an e-commerce Web site is identifying your system requirements. Your hardware requirements will vary based on the volume of traffic you expect your site to receive. To help you select the appropriate hardware for your site, you can obtain capacity planning guidelines by downloading Microsoft’s white paper, "Capacity and Performance Analysis," from Microsoft’s Web site. At a minimum, you need a server with a 100MHz Pentium processor and 64MB of RAM. For test and evaluation purposes, I recommend using at least a 233MHz Pentium, Pentium Pro, or higher processor with 128MB of RAM. For an actual production system, you might want to start with 256MB of RAM and load Microsoft SQL Server on a separate system.

After you identify your hardware requirements, you can prepare to load the necessary software. You’ll need to install NT Server 4.0; the NT Option Pack, which includes NT Service Pack 3 (SP3), IIS 4.0, and Internet Explorer (IE) 4.01; SQL Server 6.5; and SSCE 3.0.

Infrastructure Installation and Configuration
NT Server 4.0 is at the heart of this e-commerce solution, and you need to install it first as either a standalone server or as a Primary Domain Controller (PDC). To take advantage of NT’s security on your e-commerce Web site, you’ll want to convert the server’s partitions to NTFS. Don’t install IIS 2.0 when you install NT Server 4.0, because you’ll install IIS 4.0 later. Next, use the NT Option Pack CD-ROM to apply SP3 and install IE 4.01. Finally, install the NT Option Pack, which includes IIS 4.0, Microsoft Index Server, and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS).

The next step in creating your e-commerce Web site is to install SSCE 3.0, which is a two-step process. You must first install the base Site Server product and then install the Commerce Edition. After you install the base Site Server product, you need to make a slight detour.

Before you install the e-commerce-enabled SSCE components, you need to set up a database for your store data. SSCE supports any Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-compliant database, but I’ll show you how to incorporate SQL Server 6.5 into your solution. Start by installing SQL Server, applying SQL Server Service Pack 4 (SP4), and copying a new executable, sqlserver.exe, to your server. If you’re running SQL Server Enterprise Edition, you can’t use SP4. Instead, you need to go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/sql/transfer/sql318i.exe to download a hotfix for Intel or go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/sql/transfer/sql318a.exe to install a hotfix for Alpha. Configure SQL Server with at least two databases: one for the SSCE sample site data and another for the Ad Server component’s sample site data. You can find step-by-step instructions for setting up SQL Server for use with SSCE in Microsoft’s Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition Evaluation Guide, which you can download from http://microsoft.com/siteserver/commerce/30/gen/evalguidedocument.htm. Last, but not least, you can install SSCE 3.0.

When you install SSCE 3.0, the software sets up several sample stores. Each one demonstrates a different set of features available in SSCE. You might want to use one of these sample stores as a template for your e-commerce solution. For example, you can use the MS Press bookstore sample store as the basis for an online store or the MS Market as the starting point for a corporate procurement system. Your other choice is to use the built-in Site Builder Wizard to create an online store application from scratch.

Building an E-Commerce Site
Now that you’ve finished installing all the software you need for your e-commerce solution, you’re ready to create your online store. You can use two SSCE tools, the Site Foundation Wizard and the Site Builder Wizard, to build your site, and another SSCE tool, the Pipeline Editor, to customize site components.

The first step is to create a database for your store. With SQL Server 6.5, you must create a database device and then create the database. You must also set up two user accounts in SQL Server: one for the site manager and one for visitors to the site. If you’re integrating NT’s security with SQL Server, you can just map NT accounts to SQL Server. Finally, you need to use the ODBC Data Source Administrator applet in Control Panel to create a Data Source Name (DSN) for the database.

Site Foundation Wizard. After you set up the database for your store, you need to run the Site Foundation Wizard to build the store infrastructure. From the Start menu, select Programs, Microsoft Site Server, Administration, Site Server Administration (HTML), Commerce. Select Server Administration in the left frame, and click Create, as Screen 1 shows. You’ll want to create your new store in the default Web site so that you can use Microsoft FrontPage or Visual InterDev to edit the store contents. Next, use the wizard to select a short name and a display name for the site. The short name must be unique; check the list of reserved names to ensure it’s not already in use. You use the short name to set up the database tables and the physical and virtual directories. The display name is the label that appears on the site’s pages. Next, accept the default physical directory, select the DSN that you previously created, and enter sa with a blank password for the database login and password, as Screen 2 shows. (If you are setting up a production system, make sure you use a password for the sa account.) Select the NT domain and user account you want to use for your store, and you’re done. Using information you supply from the previous steps, the Site Foundation Wizard creates an IIS virtual directory, a physical directory structure, a SiteManager Web page, and an NT local group for your site operators’ accounts. Finally, the wizard will display a URL that points to the SitManager page. In turn, the SiteManager page provides a link to the Site Builder Wizard that you use next to configure your store.

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