Product Overview
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As part of the Microsoft Windows Server System™, Commerce Server 2002 is an extensible solution that enables organizations to rapidly deploy personalized portals. Commerce Server 2002 provides a powerful set of capabilities for non-transaction-based sites including user profiling, content targeting, multi-language, and advanced business analytics. Commerce Server 2002 features also extend to transaction-based sites with capabilities for catalog management, order processing, and merchandising. Organizations can leverage all or some of the Commerce Server 2002 features depending on their portal needs. This overview highlights the high-level capabilities of Commerce Server 2002.
Commerce Server 2002 is available in four editions: Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, Developer Edition, and Evaluation Edition. To determine which edition best suits your business needs, review "Editions of Commerce Server 2002."
Commerce Server 2002 delivers optimal flexibility and speed for building or extending powerful Web services, thus enabling portal solutions more quickly and with fewer lines of code than ever before. Tight integration with Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET enables developers to take advantage of the Commerce Server 2002 prebuilt business components and tools that support both COM/ASP and Microsoft ASP.NET development. For more information, see "Next-Generation Development Experience."
Business Analytics System
Empower your organization to discern customer trends and market opportunities. Used as a stand-alone system or with other Commerce Server capabilities, the Business Analytics System provides business intelligence and data mining from multiple information sources, including click stream usage, visitor browse history, campaign effectiveness, and purchasing patterns.
| Features | |
Business Data Warehouse | Get a 360-degree view of your online business with this highly scalable, extensible data warehouse that incorporates all site data—including click-stream usage, purchase and browse history, product catalog data, campaigns, and user profiles—into a centralized repository for sophisticated data mining and report-driven analyses. |
Data Warehouse Management Tools | Easy-to-use tools that simplify the creation and configuration of the Data Warehouse and the scheduling and management of data import and transformation processes. |
Data Warehouse Configurator | Easily create and configure a new Commerce Server Data Warehouse with this new tool. |
Data Warehouse Data Transformation Services Tasks | Automatically schedule Data Warehouse processing, such as Web log imports, through scripted Data Transformation Services (DTS) tasks. |
Data Warehouse Import Wizard | Quickly and easily import data into the Data Warehouse. |
Cookie-Less User Tracking | Enables tracking and reporting against users who choose not to allow cookies. |
Multicurrency Support | Incorporates user preferences for currency to enable currency-specific reporting. |
Business Data Mining | Identify hidden trends and new customer segments and predict customer affinity through built-in powerful data mining. |
Predictor | Analyze user behavior to predict purchasing and browsing affinity, demographic characteristics, and advertising relevance to deliver real-time recommendations and more effective personalization and merchandising. |
Segment Viewer | Enables business users to view identified data segments to gain insight into hidden behavioral patterns and trends. |
Affinity Lists | Helps create smarter campaigns by identifying customers who are most interested in specific products. |
Business Analysis Reporting | Give business managers insight into the health of the business through dynamic, OLAP-based reports—providing more than 100 critical business metrics out-of-the-box—to support smarter business decisions for maximum online business results. |
Dynamic and Drill-Through Reports | Dynamic reporting provides real-time reporting against the Data Warehouse and support for Microsoft Office Web Controls provides data drill-through capabilities for detailed data analysis. |
Closed Loop Reporting | All Analysis Report data can be easily exported into the List Manager, enabling business managers to respond quickly to analysis with targeted campaigns, user profile updates or other actions. |
Profiling System
The Commerce Server 2002 Profiling System is the foundation for powerful personalization and intelligence across your online business—including customer-centric business intelligence, customer-specific pricing and business processing, targeted merchandising and advertising campaigns, and customer-specific catalogs.
| Features | |
Scalable Customer and Trading Partner Management | Highly scalable user information management supports tens of millions of registered or anonymous users, organizational grouping and profiling, and the ability to let your customers and trading partners manage some or all of their own profile data. |
Dynamic Profiling | Enables your business managers to create new profile attributes for maximum personalization flexibility and effectiveness. |
Flexible User Authentication | Supports multiple user authentication modes, delegated administration for trading partners, and single sign-on across multiple Commerce Server 2002 sites. |
Profile Data Aggregation | Aggregates profile data from multiple underlying LDAP v3 and OLEDB data sources to leverage existing technology investments and business processes and to enable richer profiling capabilities. |
Enterprise Integration | Supports the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interface for multi-platform access, provides tools for easy import and export of profile schemas in XML, and interoperates with Microsoft Outlook® Web Access for maximum interoperability with your existing environment. |
Microsoft .NET Passport Integration | Provides users with easier authentication as well as faster and more convenient order processing. |
Microsoft .NET Alerts | Enables instant notification to customers' desktops, mobile devices, and e-mail message inboxes based on their profile preferences. |
Targeting System
Improve the effectiveness of your portal by delivering targeted content to visitors based on their profile. Increase the return on commerce portals through targeted cross-selling and campaigns across your customer base.
| Features | |
Content Selection Framework | Sophisticated and extensible content scoring framework for managing complex content selection decisions to deliver the most relevant content to users based on their user profile and their current context in the business process. |
Multilingual Merchandising Campaigns | Flexible campaign management enables business managers to create, analyze, and manage personalized and targeted discounts, direct marketing, cross-sell, up-sell, and advertising campaigns. All campaigns can be offered in multiple languages and targeted to specific locales for maximum effectiveness. |
Advanced Discounting | Supports multiple item-level, order-level, and shipping discounting; discount combinations and even order-level discount distribution among basket items. |
Real-Time Predictive Merchandising | Commerce Server Predictor enables powerful cross-selling, cross-browsing, and targeted advertising based on individual customer browsing and buying patterns and historical trends across your overall customer population. |
Rules-Based Expressions | Enables merchandising managers to easily create explicit business rules for targeting content-based user profiles, user click-stream analysis, or a variety of other site and business conditions. |
List Manager | Easily create and manage custom or system-driven user lists that can be used for content targeting, user profile updating, or direct marketing. |
Scalable Direct Mail Campaigns | Deliver highly scalable, personalized e-mail messages to large groups of recipients quickly and easily. Direct e-mail message campaigns track message delivery and reads/clicks to enable analysis of campaign effectiveness. |
User Management Console: Business Desk
Empower your business managers to respond quickly to changing customer and business needs through a centralized intuitive console for managing customer and partner profiles, personalization rules, product catalogs and pricing, merchandising and advertising campaigns, and business analysis.
| Features | |
Analysis Reporting | Review, run, and manipulate reports and review segmentation models for powerful business insight. |
Security Permissions | Assign access permissions for your business users to enable role-based security to any level of granularity—based on module, field, or task—to protect the integrity of your online business. |
Campaigns | Design rules-based targeting expressions and sophisticated merchandising campaigns quickly and easily. Marketing managers can create targeted complex discount promotions, manage in-house or customer advertising campaigns, and deliver broadly reaching, personalized direct e-mail messages. |
Catalogs | Easily create and manage your online catalogs without any specialized database knowledge. Business users can easily import and aggregate supplier catalogs, export catalogs for syndication, create user-specific or locale-specific catalogs, and manage catalog content including multilingual product details, searchable items, and pricing. |
Orders | Manage orphaned baskets, create and publish order status codes, and manage shipping methods and tax rates used for order processing. |
Profiles | Enable personalization and targeted merchandising by managing profile information for users and organizations. |
Catalog Management System
Easily create, manage, aggregate and syndicate catalogs, implement customer or locale-specific catalogs with custom pricing, and make it convenient for customers to find what they need through sophisticated search capabilities.
| Features | |
Global Catalogs | Reach an international clientele with locale-specific product information, including pricing in multiple currencies and displaying product details in multiple languages. Product managers have control over which product fields are represented in multiple languages and can easily enable language-specific search and deliver locale-specific merchandising campaigns. |
Virtual Catalogs | Virtual catalogs provide optimal flexibility to aggregate catalogs from multiple suppliers, to create customer-specific or locale-specific catalogs, and to deliver custom pricing to the product level. |
Supplier Catalog Aggregation | The Commerce Server 2002 advanced catalog management capabilities take the complexity out of catalog aggregation, making it faster and easier to import and aggregate supplier catalogs so your customers always have the latest product information. |
Custom Catalog Syndication | Easily create market-specific or customer-specific catalogs that span products from multiple vendors and offer custom pricing. These catalogs can be viewed by your customers directly from your site or can be exported for distribution. |
Streamlined XML Catalog Import/Export | Commerce Server 2002 reduces the time, cost, and complexity of the catalog interchange process by supporting incremental exports, XML validation prior to import, catalog deletions, XML import/export streams, and multilanguage exports. Integration with Microsoft BizTalk® Server and support for XML-based catalog data facilitates standards-based integration with internal systems, customers, and trading partners. |
Sophisticated Catalog Search | Integrated product catalog search provides maximum convenience for your customers and partners to find what they need quickly, increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately online revenues. |
Catalog Creation and Management | Product managers use the Business Desk to design and manage their catalogs, product content, pricing, and catalog import and export with customers and trading partners. |
Business Processing Pipelines System
Tailor the workflow involved in transactional and merchandising processes conducted on your site. Prebuilt pipeline components enable you to quickly configure new processes.
| Features | |
Features | Manages flexible order processing, including high-precision currency conversion, multiple shipment handling, and complex discounting. |
Prebuilt Pipelines | Commerce Server 2002 delivers a series of extensible, prebuilt Pipelines that manage the order process, direct mail campaigns, and content selection scoring for advertising, discounts, and related sells. |
Pipeline Editor | Easily create, manage, and extend Pipelines to map to your specific business processes. |
XML-Based Order Integration | Purchase orders can be stored as XML for easy integration with internal or trading partner systems. |
Extensibility | Pipelines are modular by design to enable the greatest customizability. Build your own custom extensions or choose from industry-leading third-party software vendors who provide certified components for a variety of value-added capabilities. |
Mission-Critical Abilities
Commerce Server 2002 delivers the high-performance, scalability, and proven reliability required by even the most demanding mission-critical solutions. In addition, you can use its powerful, easy-to-use management tools to minimize maintenance and cost of ownership. For details, see the following table.
| Features | |
Scale-out Architectures | Full support for the load-balanced server farm environment enables maximum scalability and reliability. |
Scale-up Architectures | Certified for Microsoft Windows® Datacenter Server, which enables scaling up to 32 CPUs per server. |
Cluster Service Support | All key services in Commerce Server 2002 are enabled for Windows Clustering and were tested extensively at enterprise scale and loads to ensure they operate and recover under all common failure conditions. |
Superior Recoverability | Enable quick disaster recovery by ensuring that all long-running tasks, such as Direct Mailer and Data Warehouse Data Transformation Services (DTS) Tasks, can be restarted. |
Certified for Windows Datacenter Server | Scale up to 32 CPUs per server. |
Event Logging | Enable higher availability and management with support for Microsoft Windows® NT Event Log reporting. |
Commerce Server Administration Tools | Use these powerful and extensible tools to simplify configuration, deployment, and management of your online business. |
Commerce Server Manager | Easily configure and manage Commerce Server–based applications through a single, integrated interface. |
Commerce Server Site Packager | Package the Commerce Server site, file system, resources from the Administration database, and Microsoft SQL Server™ databases into a single file so that they can be transferred to another server running Commerce Server. |
Performance Monitoring | Provide administrators with increased systems health monitoring with these Windows monitoring tools such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and System Monitor. |
Single Sign-on Support | Save your users time and ensure continued Web site and application security through single sign-on support. |
Data Encryption | Protect users' data with one-way hashing and asymmetric data encryption. |
Multiple Authentication Modes | Support a variety of authentication modes, including Windows Authentication, Cookie or Cookie-less authentication, and custom authentication schemes. |
Refined User Authentication | Ensure that only authorized users have access to management tools by using the Business Desk Permissions module. This module provides granular role-based access down to the field and task level. |