2. OBI-enablement for Net.Commerce

Lots of e-Commerce buying and selling solutions are running today, and lots of commercial merchant servers are available today. These systems already provide many of the basic functionality required by B2B e-Commerce, e.g. catalog, shopping cart and purchase order composition support. There is no reason to construct OBI-style solutions from scratch.

This paper describes an OBI extension to IBM's leading merchant server Net.Commerce so as to make it capable of serving as an OBI-enabled selling (merchant) server, as well as an OBI-enabled buying server. Our extension is designed as add-on components that can be installed after the base Net.Commerce system is up and running. Our effort should shed some light to how to make an existing e-Commerce solution OBI-ready. We focus on the OBI Selling Server (OBI/SELL) in the rest of the paper, and then a summary of the OBI Buying Server (OBI/BUY).

Net.Commerce, like many of the existing merchant servers, mainly serves the B2C paradigm. It already provides many of the services required for B2B e-Commerce. Such features include:

  • Web server with basic security features
  • User ID and password based user management
  • A catalog facility for universally presenting all the goods and services a merchant is to offer
  • Shopping cart support for purchase order composition
  • A browsing and searching facility to assist users finding goods and services they want
  • Purchase order fulfillment support for goods and services delivery
  • Payment module integration for the actual billing

However, a number of new features need to be added and some of the ones above need to be enhanced to support B2B e-Commerce.

In our enhancement to Net.Commerce, the OBI/SELL provides the OBI functionality needed for a merchant to participate as a selling organization in OBI transactions, while the OBI/BUY provides the OBI functionality needed for an organization to participate as a buying organization in OBI transactions.

The OBI selling server, OBI/SELL, must support the following capabilities (in addition to those already provided by Net.Commerce):

  • Digital certificate based requisitioner processing
  • Web-based secure and reliable message exchange ( both Purchase Order Request, POR, and Official Purchase Order, PO) with OBI/BUY
  • Trading partner relationship management
  • Net.Commerce shopping cart and OBI object ( both PO's and POR's) conversion, which also include OBI/EDI message encoding and decoding

The OBI selling server, An OBI/BUY, must support the following capabilities (in addition to those already provided by Net.Commerce):

  • Secure and reliable message exchange with OBI/SELL
  • Trading partner relationship management
  • Net.Commerce shopping cart and OBI objects ( both POR's and PO's) conversion
  • Plug-in into buying organization's approval and back-end processes

Although the capability list for both the OBI/SELL and OBI/BUY look very similar, they are functionally different, which requires slightly different design and implementation. This will be made clear through the rest of this document.


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