Mass deployment is the biggest piece of how to be able to deploy, at scale, across entire organizations. It is imperative to ensure the seamless operation of secure devices and gain operational efficiencies – not to mention the reduction of the service costs related to maintenance and software updates.
The minimization of costs that occur is critical: there is a complexity to any type of installation at scale. Getting that across the system center gives you a variety of monitoring capabilities through service updates, deployments, and so on.
Mass deployment is great during rollouts, service updates, and patch deployments – and tools like SCCM, Intune as well as 3rd party tools, will help to perform one. For this particular topic, we will focus on SCCM.
Store Commerce Architecutre
Touching architecture a little, there are two formal versions of store commerce:
- The standard – is similar to the modern point of sale in the app version. This is the one that is supported offline, 100% managed locally with a local hardware station;
- Additionally, through iOS and Android, there is the hybrid version that functions much more towards the cloud – where it is simply a shell in regards to the app. The cloud point of sale forms is getting pulled in instead of them being local to the modern point of sale. With store commerce in the hybrid mode, it still has a local hardware station though.
Benefits of Store Commerce App
There is a series of benefits that come out of the Store Commerce app. The first one is performance, which is 2x faster than MPOS (however, in certain cases), as well as significant improvements in Logon (Add to Cart and other performance-critical scenarios). It sometimes does as twice fast as a modern point of sale.
The second one is a seamless update experience – because we are moving to an independent deployment model where it’s Microsoft versus extensions as separate installers – it gives ease of focus as the Dynamics development team is able to dive in and push hard mass deployment. Also, different deployment topologies are supported to manage and add updates.
Lastly, technology upgrade and industry-standard dev experience. All new windows technology, reliability, webview2 are used to render the app and provide modern runtime, enabling to evolve faster with new capabilities.
Store Commerce App Migration – Plan
Touching base on the migration plan, we want all data synchronized before performing and installing the update, so there is nothing in an offline database – it all should be synced with HQ. You need to get all the data out. This gets us up to real steps of modifying the device at headquarters. Then, you can switch from a modern point of sale to store commerce on the device.
Moving to big steps, they are:
- Uninstall modern point of sale;
- Download the store Commerce app;
- Install the store Commerce app;
- Activate the app.
Terminology and Pre-Requisites
Terminology
The system center, which is also called as a Short Pump, is an administrative tool that enables the organization to manage and safeguard devices and software within their environments. SCCm takes care of the hardware inventory and distributes software and patches.
When you install your configuration manager for the first time, site will be the first configuration manager. The first configuration site is the foundation from which you will manage the devices and the user in your enterprise. The first site must be either a central administration site or a stand-on primal site – you can decide how you want to do it.
The next one is distribution point – it is a configuration manager server role where packages are stored for later distribution. Whenever a client needs to download a new application, or a package, he needs to contact the distribution point on that site.
Boundaries – they are used to make the client select the closest server from where the contents to be transferred.
Collections – they help you to organize the resources and imaginable unit. You can create collection to match your client management needs and to perform operation on a multiple resources at the same time.
Pre-Requisites
Let’s also touch pre-requisites that need to be done before you start doing your SCCM moving from server to a client:
- All machines to be in Domain;
- SCCM setup and configuration;
- IIS installation;
- Dynamics 365 system requirements are fulfilled;
- Dynamics 365 hardware requirements are fulfilled;
- HQ configuration completed.