Ulmer Online Shop 1.0

The Ulmer Online Shop 1.0 was produced by the Norbert Gruber GmbH. Andreas Pircher was hired by the Norbert Gruber GmbH in 1997 for this project and worked approximately three years for the consultancy situated in Dornbirn. Mainly on the Ulmer Online Shop. He implemented the project with the support of Norbert Gruber, Berno Pfanner, Mauro Monderna and Gerd Greussing.

 

In the first version the orders were printed on a printer that stood beside the web server. Several times a day an employee of the Ulmer GmbH picked up the printed orders and distributed them to the desktops of the corresponding account executives.

 

Some time later we developed the first interface to the ERP-System of the Ulmer GmbH. It was like a ping-pong game between the web server and the old main frame system. The web server created text files and made them available over its ftp service. After that, a Unix script was started on the host via rsh.exe. This script gained the provided text files, processed them and uploaded another text file - containing the response. Soon this technology was used to implement the display of customer specific prices and the current availability of items.

 

Already at that time implemented - and still a highlight - were the 120.000 items in the shop. Every day fresh imported from the ERP System with List prices, additional text and online catalogues.