Feature Summary for International Solutions

Article
11/12/2009

You build an international solution with Commerce Server 2002 by:

Modifying your existing site code.
Creating a new site, designed to be international from the start.
By using the Commerce Server 2002 Starter Site as a starting point.

You can download the Starter Site from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=37800.
Configuring site resources and establishing business processes.

In all these cases, the Sitelets in the Commerce Server 2002 SDK provides examples and guidance for you to base your work on.

The Sitelets in the SDK provide examples of how to modify site code. For information about the Commerce Server 2002 Sitelets, see ASP.NET Samples.

The following table summarizes many aspects of developing an international solution. The table is grouped by Commerce Server systems, and describes the various features that are affected by international issues.

System	Feature	Summary information
Product Catalog	Multilingual catalogs	You can share a common product catalog that has information in multiple languages by adding multilingual properties for every language you support on your site. For example, you can define a multilingual property for a product description. The Display Name field for this property would contain "Description" in English, and, in German, "Beschreibung" (which means "Description" in German).
	Multicurrency catalogs	You can define a base currency per catalog. To price products in other currencies apply a pricing rule or add extra currency properties. Note The MONEY data type that is used for currency supports only four decimal places.
Profiling	Site terms	You need to create unique site terms for each language you support. For example, if you create a site term for "Favorite Sport" in English, you must also create a site term "Deporte Favorito" in Spanish, if you are supporting Spanish on your Web site. This information is found in the Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit in the section about the "Sweet Forgiveness" sample international site implementation. The online documentation is at: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=5595.
	Profile Properties	You can create multilingual profile properties by adding custom attributes to property definitions. For example, if you have a "City" property for your English address profile, you could create a custom attribute with the following values: Name: City_Fr Display Name: Ville (City in French) Description: Votre ville (Your city in French) Value: Paris The Profiling System supports Unicode for its data store.
Business Analytics	Data Warehouse	You can create a single Commerce Server Data Warehouse that imports data from multiple language-specific applications. For example, you can import transaction data from a French application and a Japanese application into a single Commerce Server Data Warehouse. In order to create a single site that supports international users by using multiple code page settings (for example, both Western European and Japanese), you must set your log file code page and URL encoding settings to UTF-8. Windows 2000 only supports ANSI code pages when logging. UTF-8 requires Windows Server 2003. See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=6728 for more information. Note Setting this value to UTF-8 will result in unpredictable behavior in browsers that do not support UTF-8.
	Analysis	You can generate reports that summarize data from multiple languages and currencies. For example, if you have a site with multiple language-specific applications you can generate the Top Requested Pages report, which is supplied with Commerce Server, to summarize the most popular pages across all language groups. The language settings for the user's browser will affect the appearance of the data in the report. Note Commerce Server provides no pre-defined reports that summarize data on a per language basis.
	Predictor	All applications in a multilingual site can share a common Predictor resource.
Targeting	Ads	You must create separate advertising content for each language.
	Discounts	You must create separate discounts for each language.
	Direct Mail	You must create separate Direct Mail campaigns for each language.
Business Process Pipelines	Order Processing	It is possible that the converted line items displayed on the site do not match the total cost billed to the user because exchange rates change over time. Prices must be marked as approximate when displayed. Commerce Server 2002 assumes that the prices for each item in the cart are in the same currency. The Commerce Server discounts feature is not designed to handle multiple currencies. If you want to use ads and discounts in multiple languages, you must recreate each ad/discount in the appropriate language.

Feature Summary for International Solutions

See Also

Additional resources