NEW ORLEANS, April 9, 2002 — Today at the Microsoft Tech
·Ed 2002 conference, Microsoft Corp. launched the latest version of its award-winning .NET Enterprise Server Microsoft® Commerce Server 2002. The new version adds enhanced global online business support and a next-generation developer experience, which delivers .NET capabilities for e-business to the Visual Studio®
.NET environment. RadioShack Canada Ltd., an early adopter customer, built its multilingual Web site with Commerce Server 2002 and experienced increased developer productivity from the product’s integration with Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework.
“Commerce Server 2002’s integration with Visual Studio .NET allowed us to jump-start the creation of .NET-based Commerce Server applications right from within the Visual Studio .NET environment,” said Margo Weeks, vice president of RadioShack Canada. “It was this feature that our developers and business managers found to be the most compelling, because it decreased the overall cost of the solution while accelerating the return on investment. With this version of Commerce Server, Microsoft is continuing to deliver .NET to the enterprise.”
Commerce Server 2002: Global Online Business With .NET
“Utilizing .NET, Commerce Server 2002 provides the underlying technology to allow companies to extend and enhance their online business capabilities, while fostering stronger relationships with their customers, partners and employees,” said David Kiker, general manager for E-Business Servers at Microsoft. “By providing deeper .NET and XML Web services support within our platform, Microsoft is helping drive companies closer to their customers and providing them with the agility to quickly capitalize on new business opportunities.”
Commerce Server 2002 offers online businesses the ability to engage and manage a global network of customers and trading partners, transact business in multiple languages and currencies, and empower business users to make smarter business decisions with enhanced management and reporting capabilities. New features in Commerce Server 2002 include the following:
-
Visual Studio .NET integration. The Commerce Server Developer Portal exposes a suite of tools integrated with Visual Studio .NET, which is used to optimize the developer experience and decrease the number of lines of code needed to configure Commerce Server applications.
-
Commerce Server 2002 .NET Application Framework. Commerce Server 2002 enables developers to create Commerce Server applications using ASP.NET and the .NET Framework with an Application Runtime, Base Class Library and Common Language Runtime Interoperability Layer, allowing ASP.NET applications to benefit from core Commerce Server services and systems.
-
Global Online Business. Commerce Server 2002 introduces virtual catalogs, which provide customers with increased flexibility in aggregating catalogs from multiple suppliers, creating customer-specific or locale-specific catalogs, and delivering specific and custom product pricing. It also provides multilanguage and multicurrency support for global online business solutions.
-
Microsoft .NET Passport Integration. Commerce Server 2002 offers a Passport sitelet to demonstrate through code how to integrate Passport single sign-on capability with the Commerce Server Profiling System. With this capability, e-businesses and Web site users can benefit from a single sign-on authentication service, meaning that users can access more than one secured site with the same set of credentials.
New Enterprise and Standard Editions: Pricing
Commerce Server builds on the six-year success of its predecessors Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition and Commerce Server 2000, and has demonstrated its enterprise scalability at the highest level — including millions of users, thousands of catalogs and gigabytes of data for analysis — and fully supports both scale-up and scale-out configurations. In addition to an evaluation edition and a developer edition, Commerce Server 2002 is now available in Enterprise and Standard editions:
-
Commerce Server Enterprise Edition delivers the highest levels of performance, availability and business analytics to enterprise-class organizations that need to scale up or out to meet globalization demands. It is priced at $19,999 (U.S.) per CPU, with unlimited CPU capabilities. The Enterprise Edition is also certified for Windows®
Datacenter, which provides Microsoft customers with the highest level of enterprise-class scalability. -
Commerce Server Standard Edition delivers the sophisticated features of Commerce Server 2002, including catalog management, personalization and limited business analytics, to medium-sized organizations. It is priced at $6,999 (U.S.) per CPU, with a limit of two CPUs.
Upgrade Program Helps Customers Prepare for Commerce Server 2002 and .NET
Microsoft and its certified partners are initiating an upgrade program that will help prepare the more than 11,000 existing Site Server and Commerce Server customers for Commerce Server 2002 and .NET. This ambitious program will aid customers in their upgrade through a free assessment service provided by those certified partners involved. Accenture is one of the leading certified partners to take on this responsibility and has a strong history of developing today’s largest online business solutions.
“Microsoft solutions offer lower total cost of ownership for many businesses,” said Hans Hwang, partner at Accenture, Microsoft’s 2001 Global Partner of the Year. “The Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 upgrade program and its .NET architecture are bringing scalability and the newest e-business capabilities to our customers. For example, Accenture’s Commerce, Collaboration & Publishing Solutions for Microsoft .NET offer ‘plug-and-play’ e-business capabilities and are available as a fully managed service, so even our smallest clients can forget about infrastructure and concentrate on their core business.”
More information on Commerce Server 2002 and the upgrade program can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/ and http://www.microsoft.com/csupgrade/.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
Microsoft, Visual Studio and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ on Microsoft’s corporate information pages. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. Journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team for additional assistance.
