I spent a good, quality week in Daytona beach, Florida. Nice place, nice people, nice beach. What's not to like? Now I am back to work: let's be honest, how can I get into the work mood? -- How about the release of feature pack 1, something to cheer for about several months hard work. Just like everyone else in the group, I am so excited about the release and anxious to hear from you guys for feedbacks about FP1.

We really packaged some cool stuff this time. As you will probably find out soon, a new-designed, much painless UI replacement for bizdesk, a nice stagging solution for enterprise scenarios and an out-of-box solution for coupon (promotion code), to name a few. However, just like everything else, while you enjoy the new features, chances are there will be some issues bothering you. Let's talk about some potential issues you may face relating to a key addup in FP1, the marketing resource.

Marketing resource is designed to hold new discount business data (including customers, campaigns, discounts, expressions and coupons) in feature pack 1. By using marketing resource, you will have a much easier time to manage your discount data by using the Discount Manager, a windows form application included in FP1. It is not only a better look-and-feel UI tool, it also gives you system better security protection and much better performance when multiple users concurrently access the system. Using marketing resource, you also will be able to enjoy the coupon functionality -- we acutally provide three different types of coupons: public coupons, which are shared among lots of different users, private coupons, which can be sent to individual user and is allowed for the receiver to share with his/her friends and restricted coupons, which will be sent to specific individuals and only who receive the coupons can use them.

If you are kind of familiar with Commerce Server 2002 campaign system, you may have the question that we have another discount system in campaign resource, so are we duplicating the discounts? Good observation. with feature pack installed, it is possible that you will have one set of discounts in campaign database and another set of data in marketing. The reason? we want our customers to start using marketing system instead of the campaign system for the advantage I mentioned above (so it somehow can be regarded as an upgrade). However, if you want to stick your discounts in campaign resource, you still can. So the choice is yours.

That being said, you may ask, what am I supposed to do with discounts? Ok, hopefully I can walk you through some typical scenarios. First of all, you need to install Feature pack 1. And now ask yourself, do you want to use marketing system (refered to the advantaged I mentioned). If the answer is yes, you can find a pup file called FP1.pup under FP1\Pup Packages directory. Open that file, choose to add marketing resource to your existing commerce site. (after marketing resource is added, you may want to open the FP1.pup file again to add MarketingWebService and CatalogWebService apps.)

Ok, now you have the marketing resource, but if you already have discount data in your existing site, they are in campaign system. So you need to run feature pack 1 discount migration tool (you can refer to feature pack documentation, which locates under Documentation directory) to migrate the discount data from campaign to marketing.

After this step is done, when you are using discount manager (the windows form app I mentioned above), you will find out the existing discounts are migrated and can be managed by your new UI tool. In fact, at this moment, under the hood, discount data exist in both place, campaign system and marketing system. So there is an important step you need to do -- to tell your runtime production site that which discounts you want to use. (given we spend coupon of steps to reach here, I assume we want to use discounts from marketing resource, right? :-)) To do that, you need to edit the runtime site web.config, look for the <caches> section, you will find your existing discount cache is defined like this:
 <cache name="Discounts" type="Discounts" refreshInterval="0" retryInterval="60"/>

Now for discounts in marketing resource, we actually use another type of discount cache, named "MarketingDiscounts". So if you change the above configuration to:
 <cache name="Discounts" type="MarketingDiscounts" refreshInterval="0" retryInterval="60"/>

The runtime site will load the discounts from marketing resource. Otherwise, it will still load from campaign resource. (in another word, any change you made using new Discount Manager UI will not take into effect unless you change the discount cache type).

Another thing you may notice is that we are only talking about discount data here. Not advertisements. You are right again. For advertisement data, they are still only in one place, the campaign system. We plan to give you choice to move them to marketing resource as well (so that you can use the new UI tool instead of bizdesk to manage advertisements) in next release.

Finally, one more reason you may want to upgrade your discounts to marketing resource: in Commerce Server 2002, discounts are in campaign resource, and the expressions that discounts refer to are in a different resource, profile resource. So it is impossible to set up a foreign key relationship. Which mean, an example of bad thing, you use bizdesk to create an expression called "books" and create a discount which is "$5 off books purchase". Then you may accidently delete the "books" expressions and the bizdesk won't complain but your discount, in fact, won't work correctly. In feature pack 1, we move both discounts data and expressions data to marketing database and yes, foreign key relationship is established. So using new UI, the same data integrity problem won't happen.

That will do for today. Again, I strong suggest you try out the feature pack if it sounds like fitting your scenario. and feel free to talk with us (in newsgroup or blog or whatever else) about your experiences of using FP1. We are definitely looking forward to hearing from you.