I awoke to see a very encouraging post from Ryan Donovan on the future of Commerce Server.
Some key points to take away:
Microsoft is committed to their e-commerce platform, and has no plans to roll Commerce Server into another server product (for those of you who follow, there has been a lot of speculation and rumors about Microsoft not being fully committed to Commerce Server - this really helps to dispel those rumors).
Microsoft plans to provide “successors for the current Commerce Server SKUs”
The standard support life cycle for Commerce Server 2007 ends 07/12/2011.
Microsoft plans to find more and better ways to align Commerce Server to major product revisions in the Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET Framework, and BizTalk Server spaces.
The team also plans to add incremental updates and features “on an interim a la carte basis”.
So, as I said, very encouraging.
Some things I’d like to see in future releases …
A fully managed stack; get rid of COM dependencies
Replace pipelines with Windows Workflow
Replace DTS tasks with SSIS
There’s more, but it’s early and my brain is not working yet …
Given the major enhancements Commerce Server 2007 has made over previous versions, I’d say we can expect to see a lot of great things from the Commerce Server team.
Best of luck!