I wanted to talk about an interesting product that the Znode team has been dilligently working on for the past several months. This product is a e-commerce middleware that uses the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in Microsoft .NET 3.0. This product will enable rapid integration between Znode Storefront and virtually any back-office or 3rd party system using a highly scalable, enterprise ready architecture.

The Znode Middleware Service will allow access to key storefront functionality such as Order Management, Inventory, Catalog, Content Management and more using a highly structured API that can be easily extended to your specific requirements.

The Middleware services can be hosted on load balanced web servers for scalability - this will reduce the resource requirements on the web servers hosting the storefront UI. WCF has the advantage of being able to expose the services using different types of standards including SOAP, .NET Binary, ATOM, or any future specification. These services also implement security using best practices and allow for a wide range of configurations.

The Znode Middleware Service is expected to be released in early September 2008. Stay tuned!

Customers who applied the Vista SP1 started getting a memory exception during compile. We have issued an emergency patch that fixes this issue.

Please click on this link to download the patch: http://kb.znode.com/node/138

A number of customers have asked when we will begin supporting Visual Studio 2008. Though we dont "officially" support VS 2008 yet, we have verified that Znode Storefront can be safely migrated to Visual Studio 2008.

Note that Visual Studio 2008 allows you to target multiple .NET Frameworks (2.0, 3.0 and 3.5). We recommend that you set all projects to target a .NET 2.0 build till we officially test Znode Storefront on .NET 3.5

Click the link below to download instructions on converting your Znode Storefront project to Visual Studio 2008

We have released a HotFix for Znode Storefront version 4.4 that fixes several issues. One of these issues is an intermittent exception thrown in the Application Start event. Please click the link below to read the details of this update and download the patch.

http://kb.znode.com/KB4401

First of all, let me wish a very Happy New Year 2008 to all our customers, partners and vendors!

After weeks of endless testing (and lots of caffeine), the Znode team finally released the next major version (4.4) of Znode Storefront today. This release will be available through the znode.com website as well as all our channel partners worldwide.

As I had mentioned in previous blogs, this release includes a highly versatile promotions and pricing engine that will beat the socks out of any storefront out there! Using this framework, you will be able to handle complex promotion scenarios easily.

Another interesting enhancement is the ability to handle "Digital Assets". For example if you were to sell software or MP3 files and include licenses for use with each sale, you can use Znode Storefront for that.

We also inched closer to full fledged internationalization by adding support for multiple currencies. This is closely tied to the ASP.NET locale settings and is quite extensible.

There are also several other infrastructure enhancements like enhanced exception handling, enhanced diagnostics, integration testing support and more..

Please feel free to check out the Release Notes to see all the features that have been added in this release.

We are currently overhauling the pricing model used in Znode (expected to be released in Jan '08). I thought I would let our readers know about this in advance so we can solicit some feedback. The goal is to create an "enterprise class" promotions engine that can satisfy complex requirements.

For instance here is an example of a promotional campaign: A manufacturer wants to offer 20% off on all T-Shirts during Fall. Shipping is free on orders over $50. If dealers login, they get an additional $5 off on each product. Customers can also use an additional coupon to get an additional 5% discount. If customers order more than 100 T-Shirts they get a different base price on the shirts over which all the above promotions are applied.

Sounds complex? Well, with our new promotions architecture, the above scenario can be implemented easily.

Here are some of the changes we will be implementing:

(a) The Product table will contain 3 pricing columns - RetailPrice, SalePrice and WholesalePrice. If the sale price exists then it will be used to override the retail price. The wholesale price will be used if the current user profile is marked for wholesale pricing.

(b) The SKU table will contain corresponding pricing columns - RetailPriceOverride, SalePriceOverride, WholeSalePriceOverride. These values will override the product table values (if specified). This will allow manufacturers to have a different price override based on product variations (such as "color")

(c) A new ProductTier table is being introduced to add Tiered Pricing. This will allow you to add different pricing levels to a product depending on the quantity ordered.

(d) A new Promotions table is being introduced to manage site wide promotions. This will allow you to address the following promotions:
-- Apply $ or % off to the entire order
-- Apply $ or % off to a specific product
-- Apply $ or % off to shipping
-- Require coupon codes to be entered to avail promotions

Ok I cant really believe that it is Thanksgiving already! It seems it was just yesterday when we had the last one. Well, things have been extremely hectic here at Znode. But I am not complaining - it has been a great year.

On this occasion I would like to thank all our customers and partners in helping us build a great product. We take great pride and joy in what we do but we wont be here if it wasn't for our customers!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Znode Storefront uses the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership Provider for authentication. This enables you to abstract the authentication layer by writing your own membership provider. For example: To connect to an Active Directory store you would just need to write your own membership provider.

Here's a nice introduction to the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership, Role and Profile service:
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/120705-1.aspx

This is the section in the web.config file that configures the membership provider in Znode Storefront:

You may have noticed that it sometimes takes a while for a new ASP.NET session to start up. This is because if there are no users on a website, the ASP.NET worker process gets recycled. ASP.NET application will remain active only as long as there are active ASP.NET sessions. The next time a user visits your website, ASP.NET compiles your application again. This can cause a delay of 10-20 seconds (or more depending on system resources) for your website to come up.

We are happy to announce the launch of the new developer portal for Znode Storefront developers and system integrators. We have been getting a large number of interesting queries from our customers on general e-commerce related issues. We thought this blog would be a good place to share our experience so developers can benefit from it.

We also plan to share useful tips that can help developers build a scalable and successful solution for their clients. We are really excited about this! We welcome your feedback to improve this forum.