Leading commerce servers offer decent enough capabilities, but setup can be quite a chore.

If you're planning to enter the world of electronic commerce, gird your loins: creating a functionally rich and sophisticated commerce site is going to demand a lot of time and skill.

Forget about the ease with which you brought your basic Web servers online. Expect the installation, configuration, building and maintenance of a full-featured commerce server to be as big a task as any other companywide IT program.

The three leading products - IBM's Net.Commerce, Microsoft Corp.'s Site Server and Lotus Development Corp.'s Domino.Merchant - do just about everything required to conduct commerce over the Internet, but with varying degrees of success.

These products are marked by their complexity. While offering products for sale, handling transactions and collecting payment are all elaborate processes, installation times of three or more hours and capacity requirements of up to 600M bytes indicate a more demanding class of software than that which runs on your typical intranet server.

Of the three products, Microsoft's Site Server has the most polish. It has the best documentation, is the easiest to install and generally is well-architected.

IBM's Net.Commerce comes next. The documentation is poor, but the product is well-engineered.

Lotus' Domino.Merchant scores the lowest. It suffers from weak documentation and a steep learning curve, and demands a commitment to the complexity of the underlying Domino server and Lotus Notes that neither of the other products requires.

We did not include Netscape Communications Corp. in this review because it no longer offers a specific commerce server. It has replaced its Commerce Server with the Enterprise Server and a collection of third-party e-commerce add-ons.

Site Server

Microsoft's Site Server Enterprise Edition requires a phenomenal 600M bytes of disk space in addition to the space required for the site content. It can use any database compliant with Microsoft's Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and comes with Microsoft SQL Server 6.5. Setup is straightforward but lengthy - it took four hours to install and test the server software and add-on components.

Microsoft's Active Server Page technology, scripting in several languages and ActiveX Controls underlie the Site Server architecture. The commerce server also supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Version 3.0.

The system comes with four example shops that provide good foundations for building your own shops. The examples range from simple to complex.

Microsoft's browser-configurable Order Processing Pipeline (OPP) drives the purchasing process. OPP requires users to complete a 14-stage process that specifies how orders should be handled in the store.

Microsoft provides more than 50 ActiveX Control components that can be dropped into the OPP to handle the data flow. Or, you can write your own components for order handling.

The well-documented, extensible and feature-rich Site Server is impressive. It sets the standard for commerce servers.

Net.Commerce

Installing IBM's Net.Commerce is fairly easy, although the documentation is clumsy and incomplete. For example, explanations of error messages are often completely unhelpful. They're the typical IBM cryptic messages accompanied by codes that aren't referenced anywhere in the documentation.

It takes about three hours to install Net.Commerce, as long as you don't make any mistakes or have an unusual configuration. At first, I could not get the system to run properly. After many frustrating hours of reinstalling, I discovered with the help of an IBM expert that my logon didn't have a password.

After installation, the browser is used for configuration and management. Alas, another gotcha strikes: Netscape Navigator 3.X browser supports IBM's SSL 3.0 implementation, but many other browsers don't.

Net.Commerce supports DB2 and ODBC databases and, as an alternative to its Internet Commerce Secure Server, Netscape's Enterprise Server 2.01. It also can work with CyberCash for transaction processing, Taxware International, Inc.'s taxation software and the CommercePoint payment system.

As part of the package, IBM offers Site Manager, Store Manager and Template Designer utilities. With them, you can add, remove and manage a store or a collection of stores, customize the look and feel of stores, and edit HTML page templates. Net.Commerce also supports Java servlets - Java applications that act as Web server back-end applications.

Net.Commerce comes with several demonstration stores, which are invaluable learning tools. The system is flexible and customization is relatively easy. For extended functionality, the product offers the Internet Connection API, which allows control over every step in the ordering process.

Net.Commerce is a powerful product, but it could be considerably easier to use if IBM provided the documentation a commerce site manager needs.

Domino.Merchant

Lotus' Domino.Merchant commerce server is based on the Notes Domino server. Alongside Notes client support, the Domino server provides all of the usual Web server features, such as HTTP 1.1 and SSL. However, rather than just supplying documents from a disk store, Domino retrieves them from a Notes database. Domino.Connect, a new product, retrieves data from a number of databases, including SAP North America, Inc.'s R3, CICS, DB2 and those compliant with ODBC.

Installation, a mere three hours if you know what you're doing, turns nightmarish if you're not intimately familiar with Notes and Domino.

You'll need to do a lot of reading and research to become competent in modifying and managing a Notes and Domino.Merchant installation. While the Domino documentation is voluminous, the Domino.Merchant documentation is far too brief.

This points up the issue that Domino.Merchant isn't suitable for organizations that aren't committed to Notes. Lotus' view of how groupware should operate and how data should be handled significantly differs from other vendor models.

The process of building Web commerce content is part of Notes. You can apply an approval process to ensure that Web content is approved before it becomes publicly visible. This is done through standard Notes features and can be modified to be as simple or as complex as you require.

Once Domino.Merchant is installed, you can start adding content. You can import an existing site and modify it to use the Domino.Merchant facilities or build the site directly through the Site-Creator system, which is based on the wizard-like Domino.Action.

Unlike the other products, Domino. Merchant doesn't include any demonstration stores, which makes it difficult to learn how to control and build your own shop. Another deficiency is that reporting and usage analysis are limited to data that can be generated through the Notes client.

Domino.Merchant supports SSL 3.0 and works with the CyberCash payment system and Taxware's taxation support software.

It's worth noting that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 won't communicate with Domino.Merchant's SSL service when you configure the products with self-signed certificates. The browser only recognizes certificates from commercial certification authorities. This means that a public implementation of Domino.Merchant must have a commercial certificate to function properly.

Lotus pitches Domino.Merchant for small to medium-size businesses, but given its complexity, few such companies could make the system really pay off.

FILLING THE SHOPPING CART

Commerce servers generally are based on standard Web servers extended with back-end scripts for presenting catalogs and the purchasing process.

An SQL database is needed for handling product information and purchasing transactions. It can, but does not have to, run on the commerce server.

Many commerce servers support anonymous and personalized shopping. For the former, users identify themselves at the point of purchase. Personalized shoppers, on the other hand, must register ahead of time.

Most companies running commerce servers prefer that users register so they can analyze behavior, but it's advisable to support both modes. Some cases, however, require personalization. Forexample, you'd want users getting access to stock market data, confidential details or product releases to register.

Order handling can be complex, particularly when customization is required. The order process starts with a shopping cart, which is essentially a database of the user's selections.

An important feature of virtual shopping carts is to be able to set the time after which a user's shopping cart "expires." This is needed, as users might lose their connection or their interest and go away.

If users have registered or logged on, you might want to allow them to wander away and come back to their shopping carts on return. But when the user is unknown, it is important to purge expired shopping carts so dead data doesn't accumulate.

Other potential commerce server features include discussion forum support, voting utilities so that users can rate products, and questionnaire services.

Finally, there's the issue of security. If a commerce server is going to handle any financial transactions, it is vital that the server be protected. Either Secure Sockets Layer or Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol support is required to keep transactions private.

Note that relying on secure transaction protocols and a well-engineered server is not enough. The commerce server should be behind a firewall.