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….