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?