Resources, Sites, Applications, and Web Servers

A Commerce Server installation has four main groups of components:

Resources. An entity that provides functionality to the applications in a Commerce Server site. A resource has one or more COM objects, which are used on the Web pages of an application to access the functionality of the resource. A resource can have global properties or site-level properties, but not both.
Sites. A collection of ASP-based applications that use Commerce Server Component Object Model (COM) objects, or a collection of ASP .NET-based applications that use Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) or Base Class Library (BCL) objects. The applications use and modify resources. A site provides a means of administering the applications in the site as a group.
Applications. A Web site. It is a logical representation of an application in Internet Information Services (IIS); it appears in both the Commerce Server Manager and IIS console trees. In the IIS console, an application is either at the home directory level of the Web site or at a subdirectory level of the Web site.
Web Servers. In Commerce Server, a Web server is a physical server computer running Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0; it inherits properties from the IIS Web site. Commerce Server supports Web servers that are not running IIS and do not include Commerce Server components.

You configure and manage these components by using Commerce Server Manager, a tool hosted by Microsoft Management Console (MMC).

The following figure shows the Commerce Server Manager console and identifies each group of Commerce Server components.

A figure that shows the Commerce Server Manager console and identifies its parts.

Additional resources