Getting started with the Organization profile-Collection of common programming errors

Paul,

The “UpmRoleProvider” I wrote is not part of the Commerce Server runtime (yet?) but I think it’s essential for any B2B scenario where you may want to grant access to different site functionality to different groups of users within an Organization. The source code zip file on my blog seems to be corrupted right now but if you ping me, I’ll email you the file.

The first thing I do with the Organization and User Object profiles in a B2B scenario is to create a one-to-many relationship so that “users” belong to “organizations”. This is done by embedding the Organization profile into the User Object profile. There is an entire section in the online docs which explains how to extend the profile system (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa545660.aspx) and Nihit Kaul has a blog post which covers this very well also (http://blogs.msdn.com/nihitk/archive/2006/08/08/ViewingCustomUserProfileInUI.aspx). I also tend to store several other custom properties in the Organization profile that may be needed later for order processing, such as the customer number, terms and conditions, etc. I also use the Organization profile to store the organizations catalogset information since in most B2B scenarios, everyone in an organization “sees” the same catalog information.

In the next few weeks I’ll be posting more details on how to use the profiles subsystem in B2B scenarios but if you can’t wait, ping me and we can start a conversation offline.

Jeff LynchMVP Windows Server System – Commerce Server

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeff.lynch

jtlynch@[nospam]houston.rr.com