After almost three years Microsoft has released the next version of Commerce Server. With full support for ASP.NET 2.0 (albeit a few older COM components still exist) this release brings Commerce Server into line with other offerings by Microsoft by offering up:
- Unified class hierarchy
- Extensible order classes
- More flexible catalog management
- Smart client applications for management of Catalog, Orders and User Profiling
- Enhanced reporting leveraging SQL Reporting Services
- Web Service interfaces and Biztalk adapters for Catalog, Orders, and User Profile management
- Support for 64-bit Windows Server deployments
- Management Pack for MOM
- Multi-environemnt deployment services
- And the usual bevy of performance improvements
The evaluation edition will be available shortly on the product page. In the mean time you can check out the release candidate code also posted on that page. An update sample site (known as the Starter Site) and documentation refresh are expected for the August timeframe when Commerce Server 2007 becomes generally available through the normal channels.