Commerce Server 2002 features at a glance

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 catalogue data, campaigns, and user profiles-into a centralised repository for sophisticated data mining and report-driven analyses.

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.

Easily create and configure a new Commerce Server Data Warehouse with this new tool.

Automatically schedule Data Warehouse processing, such as web log imports, through scripted Data Transformation Services (DTS) tasks.

Quickly and easily import data into the Data Warehouse.

Enables tracking and reporting against users who choose not to allow cookies.

Incorporates user preferences for currency to enable currency-specific reporting.

Identify hidden trends and new customer segments and predict customer affinity through built-in powerful data mining.

Analyse user behaviour to predict purchasing and browsing affinity, demographic characteristics and advertising relevance to deliver real-time recommendations and more effective personalisation and merchandising.

Enables business users to view identified data segments to gain insight into hidden behavioural patterns and trends.

Helps create smarter campaigns by identifying customers who are most interested in specific products.

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 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.

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.

Highly scalable user information management supports tens of millions of registered or anonymous users, organisational grouping and profiling and the ability to let your customers and trading partners manage some or all of their own profile data.

Enables your business managers to create new profile attributes for maximum personalisation flexibility and effectiveness.

Supports multiple user authentication modes, delegated administration for trading partners, and single sign-on across multiple Commerce Server 2002 sites.

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.

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.

Provides users with easier authentication as well as faster and more convenient order processing.

Enables instant notification to customers' desktops, mobile devices, and e-mail message inboxes based on their profile preferences.

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.

Flexible campaign management enables business managers to create, analyse, and manage personalised and targeted discounts, direct marketing, cross-sell, up-sell, and advertising campaigns. All campaigns can be offered in multiple languages and targeted to specific localities for maximum effectiveness.

Supports multiple item-level, order-level, and shipping discounting; discount combinations and even order-level discount distribution among basket items.

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.

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.

Easily create and manage custom or system-driven user lists that can be used for content targeting, user profile updating, or direct marketing.

Deliver highly scalable, personalised 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.

Reach an international clientele with location 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 location specific merchandising campaigns.

Virtual catalogues provide optimal flexibility to aggregate catalogues from multiple suppliers, to create customer-specific or location specific catalogues, and to deliver custom pricing to the product level.

The Commerce Server 2002 advanced catalogue management capabilities take the complexity out of catalogue aggregation, making it faster and easier to import and aggregate supplier catalogues so your customers always have the latest product information.

Easily create market-specific or customer-specific catalogues that span products from multiple vendors and offer custom pricing. These catalogues can be viewed by your customers directly from your site or can be exported for distribution.

Commerce Server 2002 reduces the time, cost, and complexity of the catalogue interchange process by supporting incremental exports, XML validation prior to import, catalogue deletions, XML import/export streams, and multi-language exports. Integration with Microsoft BizTalk® Server and support for XML-based catalogue data facilitates standards-based integration with internal systems, customers and trading partners.

Integrated product catalogue search provides maximum convenience for your customers and partners to find what they need quickly, increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately online revenues.

Product Managers use the Business Desk to design and manage their catalogues, product content, pricing, and catalogue import and export with customers and trading partners.

Manages flexible order processing, including high-precision currency conversion, multiple shipment handling and complex discounting.

Commerce Server 2002 delivers a series of extensible, pre-built Pipelines that manage the order process, direct mail campaigns, and content selection scoring for advertising, discounts and related sells.

Easily create, manage, and extend Pipelines to map to your specific business processes.

Purchase orders can be stored as XML for easy integration with internal or trading partner systems.

Pipelines are modular by design to enable the greatest customisability. 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.

Review, run, and manipulate reports and review segmentation models for powerful business insight.

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.

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 broad reaching, personalised direct e-mail messages.

Easily create and manage your on-line catalogues without any specialised database knowledge. Business users can easily import and aggregate supplier catalogues, export catalogues for syndication, create user-specific or locale-specific catalogues, and manage catalogue content including multi-lingual product details, searchable items and pricing.

Manage orphaned baskets, create and publish order status codes, and manage shipping methods and tax rates used for order processing.

Enable personalisation and targeted merchandising by managing profile information for users and organisations.

Full support for the load-balanced server farm environment enables maximum scalability and reliability.

Certified for Microsoft Windows® Datacenter Server, which enables scaling up to 32 CPUs per server.

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.

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.

Scale up to 32 CPUs per server.

Enable higher availability and management with support for Microsoft Windows NT Event Log reporting.

Use these powerful and extensible tools to simplify configuration, deployment and management of your online business.

Easily configure and manage Commerce Server-based applications through a single, integrated interface.

Package the Commerce Server site, file system and resources from the Administration database, and Microsoft SQL Server™ databases into a single file so they can be transferred to another server running Commerce Server.

Provide administrators with increased systems health monitoring with these Windows monitoring tools such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and System Monitor.

Save your users time and ensure continued website and application security through single sign-on support.

Protect users' data with one-way hashing and asymmetric data encryption.

Support a variety of authentication modes, including Windows Authentication, Cookie or Cookie-less authentication and custom authentication schemes.

Ensure that only authorised 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.