Commerce Server 2002 contains five core applications that can be called from ASP or ASP.NET pages:

• A catalog system for listing items for sale.
• A targeting system for creating personalized content and managing marketing campaigns (e.g., e-mail, direct mail).
• A profiling system for collecting and storing data about users.
• A business analytics system for data mining and predictive analysis (e.g., recommending cross-selling opportunities based on a user's actions). In Commerce Server 2002, most of the advanced analytics functions are only available in the Enterprise Edition.
• Business-processing pipelines, which are customizable frameworks for defining and linking together functions such as order processing, advertising, merchandising, discounting, and cross-selling.

These systems require SQL Server for storing and retrieving data. The profiling system can also be modified through a graphical interface to use any other OLEDB Level 1–compliant database or LDAP v.3-compliant directory service. Among other benefits, this allows organizations to switch an existing e-commerce site to Commerce Server without migrating large amounts of user data to a new database. All the systems share data, so updates to one system are reflected immediately in the others.

Commerce Server also includes administrative tools for organizations to work with these systems. The Business Desk allows nontechnical decision-makers to make changes in any of the core systems. For example, a manager could use the Business Desk to access relevant analytic data about a specific product, create a marketing campaign to promote it, and lower its price in the catalog. The Commerce Server Manager is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that lets administrators configure and track the Commerce Server applications, databases, Web servers, and other resources.

Finally, Commerce Server includes sample "Solution Sites" consisting of all the above elements, preconfigured for a specific business function (e.g., business-to-consumer e-commerce), arranged behind a sample ASP or ASP.NET presentation layer. Developers can use these sample sites as templates for their own sites, customizing specific elements within them, then using Commerce Server's Site Packager to group them into a new site for easy deployment. The Commerce Server SDK also includes code samples for each individual system (known as "sitelets"), which developers can use to learn about Commerce Server's core functions and to build more customized sites.

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