Commerce Server 2002 Feature Pack has been released
The Commerce Server 2002 Feature Pack has been released and can be downloaded from here. The Feature Pack introduces a significant architectural change in the Marketing and Catalog systems by introducing the web services model, role based security complementing the web services model and performant Winforms UI for Maketing and Catalog system. More importantly the Feature Pack represents a strong sense of commitment by the Product team to fully embrace the .NET platform and deliver on a feature rich, scalable, easily extensible and secure Web services model to add value to your businesses. So what does the Feature Pack add to the catalog system.
- A catalog web service which exposes all the design time and runtime operations that can be performed in the catalog system.
- A flexible role based security model based on Windows Authorization manager which defines which users can perform which opearations based on their role. The security has been built in the catalog system.
- An improved and performant Winforms UI which provides for the catalog management functionality.
- The ability to rank child products, child categories belonging to a category and product variants. This feature allows you to control how child categories, child products and variants can be displayed on your runtime site.
- Performance improvements for base catalog and virtual catalogs. Significant performance improvements in rebuilding virtual catalog operation.
- Secure, performant and reliable client side import which allows you to import xml files from your client machine.
- The ability to export catalogs to xml files on your client machines.
- We also added support for built in display names for products. CS2002 supported built in displaynames for categories only.
- A CatalogMigration tool which will allow you to upgrade your existing product catalog systems to FP1.
- An object oriented and fully managed programming model which will allow you to manage the catalog system using the web services.It is strongly recommended that you use this programming model instead of directly accessing the web services. This programming model is fully documented in the SDK. One thing you should note when you use this SDK is that it is just a preview and future versions might introduce breaking changes to this programming model.
See this article written by Andy Xu for additions to the Marketing system in the Feature Pack. The Feature Pack is just the beginning of an exciting release.
Comments
- Anonymous
May 27, 2004
Hi Vinayak,
Are there some modifications of the catalog system limitations (5M products per catalog, 10000 products per category, etc...)? I am very interested about the number of products per category: in my case, I have ~50/60000 products per category.
Without using the FP1, did these limitations exist if I don't use the Bizdesk? What about if I don't use the FP1 UI Webform (for example, batch administration)?
Regards. - Anonymous
May 27, 2004
[...] in my case, I have ~50/60000 products per category and 700000 products in my catalog (CDs classified by supplier (EMI, SONY, etc...)). [...] - Anonymous
May 27, 2004
Chris,
The 10000 products per category limitation was more for Bizdesk and not the cataog system per se. As I had mentioned in this post we had made some performance improvements for base catalogs and virtual catalogs which should handle large catalogs. We also tested the new UIs to ensure that they can handle large catalogs (more than one million products) and have added an intelligent caching model in the UI.Even if you don't use the Feature pack UIs the catalog system should be able to handle your requirements. If you see any issues(performance or otherwise) let us know and we will help you.