There is a ton of buzz in the industry at the moment focused on enabling interaction between retailers and customers through the medium of a consumer’s mobile device.  While a fair amount of debate still rages with regard to exactly which types of interactions will be most compelling (some retailers have had some successes), many retailers and technology providers are attempting to develop technical standards for mobile device content/experience delivery in the meantime.

A growing number of small software providers have developed applications that seek to enable retailers to “integrate” their existing Web deployments to a version deployed on a mobile device.  These tend to focus on a re-factoring of the presentation layer, while adding another, separate application architecture (usually pretty thin) that seeks to deliver product and product detail pages in a manner that would be conducive to mobile Web browsing.  This type of approach is interesting in that it delivers a pretty compelling time-to-market.  Where it falls down potentially is in the ability to coordinate multi-channel strategies into a cohesive set of services delivered regardless of user interface.

As the mobile device channel matures however we will begin to see retailers and others seek to make mobile device content delivery part of mainstream technology strategy.  Instead of a separate application to support just the mobile Web experience we will see retailers develop “device intelligence”.  This capability will allow retailers to render content and experiences in a manner appropriate for the device, without sacrificing core integration and without creating yet another application environment that will need care and feeding.

Microsoft has taken a major step in the journey to support device intelligence with the Commerce Server 2009 Template Pack.  The Template Pack introduces a new “skin” that will support both standard desktop browsers as well as mobile devices (Windows Mobile and iPhone).  So instead of a completely separate application for mobile Microsoft is enabling a mobile skin on top of the standard Web deployment, that leverages the same services and capabilities of a Web experience. 

The Template Pack is available for download here:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=147778