Commerce Server 2002 Feature Pack has been released

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        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.