(c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved http://www.thenetreporter.com =====================================

"E-commerce"

A word pervading our society, making headlines around world, and causing stock market to rise and fall with startling ease.

It seems every business news story centers on some technology company’s "DOT-com" or "DOT-bomb"!

With all positive and negative hoopla, business owners of any size company can throw up their hands and feel "E" world has left them behind.

Every business owner, salesperson, or professional asked one of two questions in past year, either "Am I using e- commerce correctly?" or "How do I effectively get involved in e-commerce?"

You can buy hundreds of books and pay thousands in consulting fees to analyze and debate answer to first question.

To answer to second question just follow these 12 steps.

Step 1 - Buy a domain name (your own DOT-com). Go to www.NetworkSolutions.com and research names. Can a customer easily spell and remember it?

Step 2 - Write down your online goals and prepare a time and money budget.

How soon do you want your e-commerce site up and running?

How much will you spend?

How many hours will you devote to site and when?

Step 3 - Surf web to find other sites you like and dislike. Learn from others’ successes and mistakes by taking best of what their sites offer and adapting it for your own use.

Step 4 - Design your site on paper. Define elements, look, feel, colors etc.

Step 5 - Hire a professional to set up graphics and navigation, but with intention of you or your staff maintaining site’s day to day operations, communication and updates.

eStore Advantage for Microsoft Business Solutions - Great Plains leverages Microsoft eConnect to provide seamless integration into Great Plains back office. Here are some of highlights of eStore Advantage, and how it extends eConnect’s EAI interface to provide a complete end-to-end solution.

Reduced Deployment Time: Microsoft eConnect is a powerful tool for Great Plains back office integrations. Although it provides a robust XML interface, system integrators still need to be familiar with MBS Great Plains table structures and field names. eStore Advantage simplifies Microsoft eConnect’s XML document interface by providing an easy to use business object layer. Application developers don’t have to know about Great Plains or eConnect, they just utilize provided objects to implement their business logic. All underlying integration issues are handled by eStore Advantage, thus reducing deployment time and learning curve associated with eConnect implementations.

Connected / Disconnected Modes: The eStore Advantage framework is designed to operate in both disconnected and connected environments. In disconnected mode information is exchanged through Nodus Web Service hosted at back office, in cases where web service is down or not available, messages are queued at front office till communication is restored. In connected mode all data follows to back office without being queued, however web service can still be deployed if deemed necessary.

XML-based Architecture: Designed for easy maintenance and durability eStore Advantage Business Objects utilize XML for serialization, queuing and data transport between front and back office environments. It not only offers existing storefronts, web solutions, and custom applications ability to integrate with back office environment, but also provides developers a powerful infrastructure for their electronic commerce and enterprise applications. Customers don’t have to worry about different eConnect intrinsic XML documents types and field names. They have flexibility to define their own fields, and customize how they are mapped to eConnect documents. In addition they have ability to access custom tables defined within Great Plains or an external database.