Net.Commerce's user administration and security are flexible and adequate, although support for SNMP--scheduled for the next release--will be a useful addition. Users can be assigned into buyer groups, which can be used to personalize content (for instance, determining what portion of the product catalog a given user is allowed to access).

Net.Commerce would benefit greatly from a more integrated development environment, and more powerful debugging features. It also might benefit from greater differentiation between the business logic and the presentation logic, especially with regard to administration--for example, we'd prefer a clear functional division between what's maintained by a business manager and what's maintained by a systems administrator.

That said, all the raw functionality you could want is available under Net.Commerce's hood, and all the code, functions and APIs are thoroughly documented. In addition, a large number of tutorials and samples are included throughout the product, and having full access to the database schema is invaluable. For instance, unlike Site Server, Net.Commerce does not have any built-in cross-sell or up-sell functionality, but we were able to add it into our sample site within a couple of hours, which makes us wonder why IBM didn't include cross-sell code in the samples somewhere.

Microsoft Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition
Microsoft entered the e-commerce arena in late 1996 with Merchant Server 1.0, which had started life as a package called Eshop. This was primarily a B2C solution, and it remained so through the next iteration, called Site Server 2.0, Enterprise Edition. It wasn't until Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition arrived in April of this year that Microsoft provided a workable B2B solution. We found this product to be a powerful, flexible, full-featured toolkit for developing custom e-commerce sites, but one that would benefit from additional development tools.

Microsoft sees Site Server as part of an e-commerce "platform," not as a complete, shrink-wrapped solution, which makes it suitable for high-end apps. Its implementation requires a sophisticated developer, but the resulting app will be custom-fit for the business, and extensible, if necessary. It won't come cheap, though, due to the level of customization and amount of development time you're likely to need.

Site Server, Commerce Edition runs under Windows NT only. Developers will likely adopt Visual Interdev 6.0 as their primary development tool (even though Site Server, Commerce Edition integration with Visual Interdev could be stronger) and serve Active Server Pages from Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0, the only Web server supported. We tested the product using SQL Server 6.5 as a back-end database, but version 3.0 interoperates with any ODBC-compliant database through ADO.

At the core of Site Server, Commerce Edition is a well-designed "pipeline architecture," essentially an object-based conceptual framework for representing and stepping through particular business processes. For example, we used the Order Processing Pipeline to gather product information and item prices; calculate the order subtotal, shipping and tax; arrange for credit-card or other payment; and submit the entire transaction to the database (Site Server, Commerce Edition is well-integrated with Microsoft Transaction Server for transaction management). Each of the discrete components within the pipeline can be replaced or modified for additional functionality, and additional components are available. In a similar fashion, the Commerce Interchange Pipeline enables applications to exchange business data with other applications in purchasing/procurement or value-chain trading scenarios. Components in this pipeline include digital signatures, encryption/decryption, data mapping and transport. The transport supports SMTP, HTTP, DCOM and EDI VANs, and data formats like XML and EDI structures; COM data objects are available.

The product's Pipeline Editor would benefit from the addition of a step-through debugger, an improvement Microsoft says is planned for a future release. We also would have liked a way to turn off pipeline caching during design time. We experienced a bug in a pipeline, fixed it and then reran the application, but the bug reappeared, because Site Server, Commerce Edition continued to use the cached version of the pipeline.