| Ravi Shankar 2006-02-11, 2:48 am |
| Hi Steve,
The integration you propose is definitely doable in the CS2002 & BTS2004
scenario and if you look at the Retail2002 site you'll encounter the
Retail2002B2b site which is built specifically for the purposes of aiding
integration with the Back-end and partners.
There is not much available in terms of back-end inventory integration other
than a whitepaper from Microsoft at () which recommend tweaking around with
catalog tables to incorporate inventory levels.
In my expirience this above method would only work with a centralized
distribution architecture. Before working with Inventory there are a few
points that you'd need to keep in mind such as
1. When is the material actually considered allocated to the order (on
placement of order or only when it is picklisted -> this operation is
something that is typically handled at the ERP backend) This will decide on
where the inventory needs to be deducted.
2. How are order modifications & cancellations handled because both impact
inventory.
In terms of creating an integration scenario that would not cause too much
grief when migrating to CS2006 & BTS2006 you should definitely go the XML
route to provide loose coupling and run into grief if eith product changes
undelying schemas.
You could look at writing pipeline components for MSCS which call a
webservice on the ERP to get inventory statuses. These components when
incorporated into the basket pipline would provide customer with information
on product availablity.
--
Ravi Shankar
"sshier" wrote:
[vbcol=seagreen]
> Thanks Gentlemen. The delayed ship date for CS2006 is a big problem for us.
> We might have to go back to the idea of using CS2002 and upgrade later to
> 2006 or we will use the vendor's e-commerce solution (not nearly as feature
> rich as CS2006).
> How much more difficult will it be to use CS2002 and BizTalk2004 for this
> integration? We might also use CS2002 and BizTalk2006 if that gives us any
> advantage and an Apirl RTM for BT2006 is highly likely. Does using BT2006
> give us much advantage over BT2004?
>
> As far as the insertion into SQL, the vendor will write a sproc for us to do
> the insert which they will maintain. This will essentially insulate us from
> their internals and keep us from having to deal with business logic issues.
>
>
> Steve
> --
> Steve Shier
>
>
> "Jeff Lynch" wrote:
>
|