I've started at an organisation that is moving towards Sitecore CMS and Microsoft CRM for various reasons. They have an extremely old "shop" website which they are looking at replacing this with a COTS product.
Does anyone have experience with an e-commence product which works well with either SiteCore or CRM. (I don't have a lot of experience on the e-commence side, so I don't know who the big players in the industry are...)
Sorry if this is off-topic, I did check that http://webapps.stackexchange.com and http://programmers.stackexchange.com and this seemed like the most logical place this question.
Active Commerce has also been developing an OOTB eCommerce solution based on the Sitecore eCommerce module: http://www.activecommerce.com/
It has some pretty slick out of the box product catalog stuff when I was shown their demo, and the UI customization is easy to do.
Sitecore has an E-commerce module. I recommend you start there. http://sdn.sitecore.net/Products/SEFE.aspx
We used Insite Commerce for one of client's eCommerce Project. Found it pretty seamless*. Insite also has tight integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP. Insite for Sitecore module comes for free with Sitecore but I must mention that there is absolutely no support available from Insite unless you pay them.
*If you plan to go this route, I'd recommend taking Insite training to better understand their commerce engine.
Related
I posed this question to my lecturer, but I would also like a variety of answers in order to better understand this conundrum of mine. Here is the original message with names omitted.
Hi **,
Thank you for your intro lecture today, I look forward to the work involved in the coming weeks.
I am however, rather confused regarding the terms CMS, API and Framework. The internet isn't providing much help either because these terms get thrown a lot and often for the very same thing!
A have a bit of background in LAMP web development, and I will provide a hypothetical scenario, where hopefully you can tell me where these terms would fit in.
I am using LAMP (Linux web server with Apache, MySQL and PHP).
I am developing a website whereby the public can watch movies (umm... ignore the legal issues, purely hypothetical and for educational purposes of course!)
I create my MySQL database using phpMyAdmin, and tables will involve 'users', 'categories', 'content' etc.
I now create an 'admin control panel (CP)' which I will refer to as the back-end. Authorised users, depending on their access levels (as determined by their account in the 'users' table) can add/edit/delete various things. These changes are reflected on what I call the front-end.
The front-end is the public facing website, whereby the public visit this website to watch films of their choice.
The back-end (i.e. the Admin CP) controls/regulates the content of users and pretty much everything. Over time, the developers could add more features to this for more functionality. E.g. a comments. Alternatively, a developer could use the Facebook comments API to include into every 'film' page on the front-end, this makes it a lot easier.
Now back to the main question at hand, is this a web CMS? Where would an API fit into this? Is this a framework?
Note: I'm not using anything like WordPress or Joomla etc., it's all custom coded by myself. Using PHP and HTML5, CSS3, maybe a bit of jQuery too, and of course SQL statements via PHP to interact with the MySQL database.
I appreciate your help in this confusion of mine.
Thanks,
EDIT: I have commented my thoughts based on Justin's input. If I'm on the right track let me know, cheers.
Thanks for the post.
The three terms you have stated are used quite often around the web, and they are always changing. First you have a CMS, CMS stands for Content Management System, like above you have stated Wordpress and Joomla. That is where someone has already created the software to create a site/blog without having to mess with PHP, MySQL, and Apache. You are merely doing anything on the front-end, just simply posting your content, and making it live. The software does all of the back-end work for you.
API, simply put. Open-source "plug-in" which allows the user to integrate a service or application into their site or application for use.
Framework, Like Bootstrap, created by Twitter. A Web Framework is an easy way to develop a site on the front-end. It gives the learning amateur a chance at developing the front-end while learning great concepts along the way.
We've just decided to purchase Google Apps for Business for a couple of users and are now running pilot for migration.
We have a certain issue, which we would like to see if it can be solved with Google Apps Script.
Suppose that the following situation applies:
At this moment we're in a domain and we have certain user templates set-up in documents such as a document for faxing and a document for memo's. These templates have application-logic behind them so the template gets filled in values for the users name, and branch office, ...
What we would like to do is replicate this behaviour in Google Drive, but I'm not sure what the best way is to implement such a feature.
Do we create a spreadsheet and in the script editor we write the full template from scratch? Or is it possible to have a template on the google apps account which we then can transform on open?
I hope I'm a bit clear of what we would like to achieve, but in case I'm not; do feel free to ask me more questions.
I hope to hear from you all!
Kind Regards
Your question relates more to a global appreciation of Google Apps than a script question... I'm not sure I should be answering here...
As a personal opinion I guess documents would be the best tool to get what you want. You'll have to create a couple of templates with personalization fields that a script would fill in with the 'logged user' data.
The document and doclist api are quite powerful and could also classify the created docs in folders and manage how they are eventually shared among users.
Depending on your abilities in javascript coding it can be anything between quite easy and really hard to build up ... :-)
I need to create an e-commerce website. I am thinking if I can use Joomla and VirtueMart to finish it. I have never used VirtueMart before. I am just worrying about if this solution is great. VirtueMart is a shopping cart… is it easy to link it with payment gateway from different banks? Is it secure? Thank you for any suggestions. Many thanks
Virtuemart is probably one of the biggest shopping carts available for Joomla. It's one of the most comprehensive to my knowledge and I believe that it will accept payment gateway from different banks. How easy that is to setup is a subjective question... it would depend on your level of comfort with those things. In my experience Virtuemart is very full figured, secure and is a great ecommerce platform. Since they've released it for 1.7 it should in theory work with 2.5 (the LTS release). Their support has always been highly reviewed and the user community is large as well.
I've used it before in the past with great success but the sites were much more simple and didn't include working with multiple banks - just paypal support.
Anyhow, I hope this information helps!
I've got a contract to build an e-commerce site. It doesn't make much sense to build it from scratch (rebuild the wheel).
There's plenty of Open Source platforms such as osCommerce or Magnetocommerce. There's also some commercial platforms (I don't mind a small outlay if it's worth id)
Does anyone have any experience building upon an ecommerce platform like these ?
I've used osCommerce and its ok. But CreLoaded is much, much better. CreLoaded is based on osCommerce, but with all the best of the best add-ins pre-installed.
What can make osCommerce and CreLoaded really stand out as a top of the range products are two things:
Templates
Optional add-ins.
Templates
There are 256 templates for CreLoaded at template monster. Costing only $140 which is cheap, considering the quality and quantity of the graphics.
Optional add-ins.
Add-ins are hard to implement as you have to patch the code manually.
However, the saving grace is that there is CreLoaded. This is oscommerce with all the best Add-ins pre-installed.
Erol
I also purchased Erol v4 for my blank media store. The site looks ok, but its just dreadful. Written in Microsoft Access. Total rubbish. BTW, i've since closed the shop so please don't purchase anything!
I looked at a LOT of commerce packages! And CreLoaded is the one to go for in my own opinion.
I would go for WooCommerce on Wordpress. You get great support with a lot of free functionalities. Also a lot of wordpress themes are Woocommerce ready so you have a wide ocean of options for themes and plugins
You might be interested by answers to What’s the best free and opensource PHP ecommerce solution? (and why?), at least it provide answers for one platform.
A similar question has been asked: MSDN subscriptions on the cheap?, but I am not interested in the solutions provided:
I am not developing a product for sale, I am starting up a consulting company, so Empower is not an option.
I have visited the links to MS regarding MSDN subscriptions and they do not point to a way to get an inexpensive copy.
I am not interested in suggestions that I become a MVP. Frankly, I'm desiring to focus on developing my company, not jumping through MS's hoops.
There are really only a few options available
Buy it at standard price
Become a Microsoft Certified Partner, and get a good discount (Actually much simpler than you would think, I did it in under 2 weeks for my business)
Find a MVP buddy that is willing to share a free giveaway
But in all reality, these are the ONLY legal options. You might also try calling Microsoft, you never know what might happen, they have many special programs that are not necessarily publicly advertised.
What you want is the Action Pack: https://partner.microsoft.com/US/40016455.
(Note, as an employee of Microsoft, I apologize that you have to LOG OUT of your LiveID to see this page if that LiveID is not already attached to a Registered Partner.)
You don't have to be certified to get access to this, just registered (there are three levels of partnership: 1. Registered, 2. Certified, 3. Gold Certified). You do have to pass a fairly simple assessment test, though.
See the pdf referenced at https://partner.microsoft.com/US/40082823 for an overview of the process.
One last thing - if you are a student (I suspect the OP is not), you can get many Microsoft tools free from http://www.dreamspark.com.
Surely your consultancy will need a website in ASP.NET and perhaps your clients would like a widget that talks directly to a web service on your site? There's your product.
Also, look into "Value added Services" amongst the Empower documentation.
I'm on the Empower program - there really aren't any barriers to entry, as such.
I used to go directly through MS, but nowadays, I always order mine through Xtras.net - they have good multi-year discounts and you manage the subscription online through Microsoft's site as normal.
Does Empower require that the 'main' use is developing a product?
You can always develop a product as well - doesn't have to be very sucessfull, perhaps something to display the time in a window?