Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Adding to the challenge was the company's high volume of shipments approximately 2,000 books a day and the hundreds of transactions required.
Most people imagine only the visible part of writing Web sites.
But the visible part accounts for only 30 to 40 percent of the process. The back-end infrastructure, the applications behind the Web site, take much more work to develop. One of the reasons there aren't many successful online commerce sites is that it's very complicated to set all this stuff up. Its Web servers all run Microsoft Windows NT Server operating system and Microsoft SQL Server , and desktops run the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system and Microsoft Office applications. At the back end, several Microsoft SQL Servers, a Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft Access databases process and route data through the system and allow users to run queries and generate reports.