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!