E-shop of Digital Music Built in Windows Media Player 11

Aplana experts have developed software built in Windows Media Player 11 and an e-shop enabling to sell and buy songs and albums for an Australian company specializing on sale of music content.

Users can choose a song or an album, buy and download them on a real-time basis after registration in the system due to extended functionality of Windows Media Player 11.

Developers have introduced several groups of customers: those, who prefer to pay for each song separately and those, who prefer to subscribe for services on a monthly or yearly basis. Before making a purchase, all users have a possibility to listen to a full song and get information on data output. Electronic payments are performed by plastic cards.

E-commerce space was built on basis of Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. The choice of this platform was due to short period of project realization as well as high requirements to its functionality, scalability and performance.

Synchronization between shop and providers of assortment, conditions and price data is performed by BizTalk Server according to schedule. The choice of this integration solution is due to several internal and external reasons regarding the system in development. The external reasons consist in necessity to integrate the system with several media content providers that provide media files in different file formats. As for internal reasons, BizTalk is used for data synchronization between servers and sorting out metadata of delivery visualization as the system is spread over several servers with different functionality.

Features of technical realization
Commerce Server system of catalogs was used to store actual information about goods. It allows managing the content on a real-time basis and automating sales recording as well as enhancing the performance of application when loaded due to in-built caching engine.

Standard sales management system of Commerce Server has been extended and refined, that allows implementing of digital content sales and a new payment system as a subscription for a specified period.

A new marketing system has been implemented in the e-shop for sales promotion increase in demand for the product. This system allows managing discounts on different groups of goods, advertising campaigns and internet advertisement on a real-time basis.

Integration of e-shop with SecurePay, Australian payment system and customer's content system has been accomplished at the level of Commerce Server Business Processing Pipeline system. It has significantly enhanced the security and performance of application.
 
Sorting out and adjustment of metadata from different sources has been performed by means of SQL Server Integration Services technology. Prime sorting Excel files, loading in a common database and their formatting to a common XML-format have significantly simplified delivery metadata operations and minimized exposure to mistakes.

Coordination of delivery processing was performed by means of BizTalk Server's functional part, Orchestrations emulating business process. Therefore not only technical experts but also analysts can understand working of system. That's why costs of maintenance have reduced due to time reduction for search and fault repair and ensured the further development of the system.

Real-time visualization of automated processes by means of Business Activity Monitoring Portal allowed creating of infrastructure for gathering, processing and visualization of information about current and accomplished processes in the system. It made it possible to control average time for current delivery processing, get information about system capacity and processing errors on a real-time basis.

Aplana Co is the 2d in the world that has worked out this type of software after Microsoft which was developed similar e-shop for MTV music channel (www.urge.com).

This e-shop was presented on a special conference in Australia where Microsoft introduced its Windows Vista and Windows Media Player 11 to Australian market.

Server solutions: Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Commerce Server 2007, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006.
Technologies: .NET 2.0, ASP.NET, ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0, COM, Macromedia Flash.
Development tools and languages: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Adobe/Macromedia Flash 8, С#, C++.
Project duration: 6 months.