As many of you know, the next version of Commerce Server is Commerce Server 2006. A page has been recently posted here. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend checking it out. I know that Vinayak, Nihit, and Owen have also discussed it in their WebLogs as well.

If you haven’t taken the time to read it, it is well worth doing as a backgrounder to make the most sense of the flurry of WebLog posts I am preparing on CS2006. BTW, for those that have already sent in questions – your answers are in the process of being prepared. Stay tuned!

Some of you may be wondering, just who the heck is this guy? Well, to answer the question I will do my shameless self-promo spot here and then the subject will not be brought up again… 🙂

I work for Microsoft Corporation and am the Group Program Manager for Commerce Server. In English, this means I run the team responsible for product planning (which features & functions go in the box + when do we ship them), project management (making sure we actually ship and do so in a coordinated fashion across all of the teams responsible for working on the product or that impact it), and functional/high-level technical design (specifying in detail what a feature looks like and how it should work + managing impact to other features). Given my role, I also work closely with our product marketing, customer/partner programs (a.k.a. TAP or Technology Adoption Programs for providing customers access to pre-release/next-gen technology), and the field (I often serve as an escalation point on sales, deployment, or post-deployment support issues with customers/partners).

In my most recent past life, I worked for Microsoft Consulting Services in the Retail & Hospitality Industry vertical (with many projects focused on deploying Commerce Server). I spent much of the last 10 years (as of January 2005) working on Internet and e-commerce solutions of various sorts inside and outside of Microsoft – many also on Commerce Server or its predecessors including Site Server and Merchant Server.

So if you need to know anything about Commerce Server or related subjects, fire away!

Greetings & Happy Holidays!

I just stopped to take a breadth in the middle of holiday madness – and realized it has been about six months (TechEd Europe really) since I really reached out to those outside of Microsoft. Realizing how remiss I have been, I decided to start reaching out again and figured that WebLogging was the way to go.

So effective immediately, I am now online! This will be my official MS WebLog – focused principally on Commerce Server, which is the product I work on at Microsoft. In the future, look for lots of useful information on any/all things related to Commerce Server as well as related products and technologies such as BizTalk Server, SharePoint Portal Server, Content Management Server, ASP.NET, IIS, and more. Realizing that the buck does not stop at Microsoft, I’ll also be discussing partner solutions of interest. After all, if it is our SI and ISV community that really provides complete solutions at the end of the day.

So, stay tuned for lots more to come – and in the meantime – happy holidays!