A whole new take on Sitecore Commerce is hot off the presses and I had an opportunity to dig into it briefly this week. Taking from the release notes and the documentation, which is actually fairly extensive:
This is Sitecore’s new re-envisioned Commerce product.
“Release number 8.2.1 has been assigned to reflect the compatibility with release 8.2 of the Sitecore Experience Platform (Sitecore XP). However, Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1 is not an update to previous Commerce 8.2 releases, but is an entirely new Commerce product and release.”
I worked on a few Sitecore Commerce implementations a while back, but it had been over a year since I ran a proof-of-concept or even completed the installation. My background with the permutations of “Commerce” on Windows goes back over 15 years, starting with the Microsoft Site Server product and the initial craze around XSLT rendering HTML output from content engines . . . I remember a horrendous e-commerce project designed with a Commerce Server beta and the “elegance” of XML was a complete productivity killer. It’s a poor worker who blames their tools, right? 🙂 I digress…
Anyway, the last real work I did with Sitecore Commerce was in 2015 and I recall the installation/configuration process being arduous, with both Web and Desktop elements, lots of security hoops to jump through, COM everywhere, and even registry edits for good measure.
This new 8.2.1 Release installation process is certainly an improvement over what is now considered “Legacy” Sitecore Commerce . . . but standing up a baseline installation to kick the tires will still likely occupy a solid day of your time. The documentation is good, but not 100% bulletproof because there are so many moving parts. I know I ended up needing to install some new .Net elements for ASP.NET Core . . . and I needed to install an old .Net framework SDK to get another piece of the puzzle to run on the IIS server. I took notes on what extra steps I needed to perform, but I was using a fairly old Rackspace server image so not particularly applicable to everyone. A few examples from my notes, however:
- Re-install the Default Web Site to IIS (our scripted Sitecore installation cleans out the Default Web Site in IIS, so I needed to add it back in to satisfy an assumption one of the various installers made)
- Configure IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility to satisfy a requirement for the Commerce Server installation
It’s these sorts of nuances that I recall from previous run-ins with the Commerce platform Sitecore inherited and now fully owns. In some respects, not all that much has changed.
On the bright side, however, there are clean new SPEAK applications for working with Commerce data:
To get this far, however, you really have to earn it. There are eight Sitecore “packages” that must be installed, for example, once you get the base Commerce Server + Sitecore + Commerce Core running . . . oh, and they need to be installed in a specific order that is NOT alphabetical, either:
On the bright side, there is a lot more documentation than I’ve seen before on this set of products. I worked with Sitecore Commerce at a time when there was essentially no real current information about the product, so maybe I’m satisfied too easily with what is now available . . . but I really found this an area Sitecore has improved upon.
Based on this documentation, I was able to pull out some of Sitecore’s diagrams of the product and compile this single visual of the Sitecore Commerce platform as I understand it for version 8.2.1:
The above is just consolidated from a variety of pictures and notes contained throughout the official documentation from Sitecore on the subject, but one of the ways I digest a system is by diagramming and scribbling notes as I go through a project. Maybe others will find it useful, too.
Sitecore Architecture 