With VME's ongoing upgrade of IntelliStore onto newer Microsoft .Net technologies, the improvements in design and technology have allowed us to greatly increase the rate of new functionality offered into our systems, whilst at the same time allowing us to offer functionality that was previously impossible to achieve.

For the enterprise, IntelliStore v2 works on a pretty tried and tested communications model.  Each till communicates with its back office server, and each back office server communicates with a central head office server. This model works pretty well, but lacks the ability for the tills to communicate with their head office directly in order to get centralized, real-time information. Information had to be trickled from head office to back office, then onto the tills. A reliable model, but it is certainly not without its limitations.

With the advent of always on broadband connections between stores and head office (MPLS, DSL, etc), and the investment into the moving the IntelliStore POS kernel onto Microsoft .Net technologies, one of the many new options open to us was the Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This powerful library has allowed us to build direct, real-time communication with head office, opening the door for a plethora of functionality previously unavailable in IntelliStore.