One question I got asked today was whether or not the Starter Site will be in the Beta. So I figured I would answer that and all of the other obvious questions about the Beta and what is included. A few of the highlights:

• Production Ready – This release will be supported in production, but only for customers that are in the TAP validation program. Those that are not in the TAP validation program will not be eligible to receive product support or a license to go live.
• Starter Site – The first cut of this will be included. It is all new. It will not be complete or production ready – that will come in later downstream milestones. But you will have enough to see how to use things and get going.
• Staging – Our content, code, configuration, and business data deployment service will be present and there for you to examine.
• Bug Fixes – There will be many fixes over and above TP2. [:)]
• BizTalk Server 2006 Beta 2 Support – This will be out by the time CS2006 Beta ships. Our Beta will, of course, work just great with it for the CS BizTalk Adapters.
• VS2005 and SQL2005 RTM Support – This will obviously be in place as well.

Keep the questions coming. Be seeing you.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/comm/default.mspx

For those that are unaware, Commerce Server now has it’s own home on TechNet – mainly optimized for the ITPro audience. Be sure to add this to your Commerce Server bookmark list!

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=77487df3-96dc-41de-9ca0-b7f284a8c113

This community was created by Max Akbar, one of the Program Managers on my team. Max obivously has way too much time on his hands – for which I am very grateful. Otherwise, we would not have all of his many useful utilities.

If you have not checked it out, I highly recommend stopping by. There are 25+ useful tools out there and it is always growing. Some of these will definitely be topics of future posts.

The last month has been one of the busiest for the team ever. But, I am pleased to report that Commerce Server 2006 is now feature complete – finally! This is the culmination of 3+ years of efforts from multiple projects finally coming together into a single deliverable that I hope will be the best and most revolutionary release of e-commerce and self-service technologies from Microsoft yet.

In Microsoft-speak, feature complete means that all features have been completely built to specification and that we have our first level of test coverage passing in all areas. During the same time, we also migrated our code-base and testing to the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. At this point, the march to our Beta release before the holidays is on. Now that the features are done the team is in hardcore testing, documentation writing, and stabilization mode to make sure that the Beta release is of very high quality and that all features are working well. To answer the obvious question, there will not be an interim drop between Tech. Preview 2 and Beta – but Beta is now not *that* far away.

Now that I personally am coming up for some air, look forward to some postings going through all the features and functions to see what you can look forward to in the near future. I have also gone through all the comments and questions and will be posting responses to all of these as well. Be seeing you!