Mart Muller's Weblog

Via Ryan R. Donovan I read that (finally) Commerce Server 2006 is in beta. We’ve implemented several solutions using MSIB and with the Office 12 “features”, there was a black hole concerning CS.

Well, Microsoft’s answer to that is:

As promised from my last posting, after many, many months of hard work - the Beta of Commerce Server 2006 is now done, out the door, and ready for the world - before the holidays. It is available publicly from http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/evaluation/2006/beta.mspx. Contained at that link are instructions to sign up for the Microsoft Connect system to actually download the software.

If you want some additional reading, the README is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=57013 and the Installation Guide is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=57268. These are being maintained on the Web for easy refresh and updating.

This is the first feature-complete release of Commerce Server 2006 made available. It runs on 32-bit Windows Server 2003 platforms and is based upon the RTM versions of Visual Studio .NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 plus the Beta 2 version of BizTalk Server 2006 (for the BizTalk Adapters). All of the great core enhancements such as new Business User tools (no more BizDesk), Inventory system, and enhancements to Orders, Catalog, Profiles, Marketing, and Analytics are all present and accounted for in this build. Likewise, the new Commerce Server Staging feature to automate the deployment/replication of content, business data, and configuration is also there - this is the first drop with this feature. Of course, what I consider to be the two most leading-edge features - full Web Services/SOA support and BizTalk Server 2006 adapters are also there as well.

The first drop of the new Starter Site is coming soon - it trails the core product by a few weeks (since you obviously need complete, stable builds on top of which the site gets constructed). I will post details about this when it is available.

So, nothing mentioned yet about Office 12 integration yet in this post. I guess trying out the beta is the way to find out….

So, what we’ve seen at PDC05 so far is that a lot of server aspects will have WSS as a foundation. Like I’ve told before MCMS will be part of this foundation (in specific, it will use the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace). We have a lot of solutions built right now using MSIB, the integration between MCMS, Commerce and SharePoint (search). So, if MCMS and SPS is part of the WSS foundation, what about Commerce?

Right now, there is little told about how the Commerce team is in this. It seems like they do not move with the Office 12 wave at this point. The WCM guys couldn’t really tell what’s going to happen and in fact the experts at the “Ask The Experts” stands didn’t tell us either.

So, this will be a gap probably in the foundation? Maybe not entirely. There is a lot of Commerce funtionality that will be available by the standard WSS foundation. Think about targetting, connecting to external datasources and rich editing of (list) items. Although I’m not an expert on Commerce I think we should be creative at this point about how to use it in Office 12 Server. So, lots of things to be thinking about in the next months.

Maybe Microsoft could give us a hint on this one?

Via Patrick:

"Interested in the overall story on the forthcoming Microsoft Commerce Server 2006, I attended a session here at TechEd A'Dam where I hoped to have my first glimpse on the product itself. But unfortunately, the presentation was all slides-based with a good overview of the new features of it. Things I will remember are:

• CS has been recreated exclusively on top of the .NET 2.0 framework. No more COM support! (although there is compatibility with your COM components in the CS pipeline)
• And yes, user controls and Web parts now for developers (e.g. shopping basket control, ...)
• There will be a complete set of new business user tools. Yep, they have finally replaced the BizDesk with a number of smart client Windows applications.
• There seems to be good integration (two-way) between Commerce Server 2006 and BizTalk 2006 with some new BizTalk adapters.
• Lots of integration also with SQL Server Reporting Services.
• The Catalog Manager looks very cool with some extra functionalities and we have a new Inventory Manager and Marketing Manager.
• There will be a new Starter Site for VS.NET 2005.
• And of course, we can access the content now with Web services.

CS2006 will be coming Q1 CY2006. There will be more after Longhorn Server."

Interesting news about the future of Sharepoint is posted more often. However it's all unofficial, some logic moves will taken regarding Sharepoint and Microsoft Content Management Server. With the introduction of ASP.Net 2.0 and WebPart development, MCMS and Sharepoint are merging more and more. MCMS and Sharpoint becoming one single server product is not unlikely, also taken the Office 12 strategy in mind.

Patrick had a talk last week with Office Sharepoint product manager Mike Fritzmaurice about Sharpoint vNext and although things are not confirmed yet, they do give the impression that the Sharepoint/MCMS story is true. Not unlikely, considering the first “add-on“ for Sharepoint 2003 was the CMS content connector for Sharepoint. Besides that, using Sharepoint Search for indexing and searching MCMS sites is also recommended by Microsoft.

I do wonder what place Commerce takes in this story.  Right now, MSIB is a solution to integrate MCMS, Commerce and Sharepoint, but how is this going to be in the new situation? There isn't much news on the Commerce side at all.

Anyway, it's interesting when thinking about what the changes are for the Sharepoint and MCMS community...