http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/CS06Default/html/02afcee1-5546-4acc-b053-2aa6d7762bd3.asp?frame=true

I am pleased to report that we now have our most up-to-date documentation set live on MSDN. Be sure to add this to your favorites. Many thanks should go out to the great folks in our UA team for making this happen so early on.

Mistakes unfortunately happen. We are definitely not immune. Hence, this post correcting some highly confusing and inaccurate information in the editions and SKUs section of the documentation in the Commerce Server 2006 Beta. For the record:

• Standard Edition supports 2 physical processors – regardless of whether these are traditional, hyperthreaded, or dual core. This is NOT a change from CS2002.
• Standard Edition supports 10 Commerce Server sites/server and 1 application per Commerce Server site. This is also NOT a change from CS2002.
• Standard Edition supports Web farms of 2 physical servers per Commerce Server site. This is also NOT a change from CS2002.
• Enterprise Edition has no limits on physical processors, size of Web farms, or the number of sites or applications per site. There are practical hardware CPU and memory limits though on how much you can realistically run on one box. We are testing 1,000 provisioned with 100 active simultaneously – which aligns well to what has been tested with IIS 6.0 and ASP.NET 2.0.
• Data Warehouse functionality is present in both Standard and Enterprise Editions and there is no difference in functionality.
• Staging functionality is only present in Enterprise Edition.
• All environments used for ANYTHING other than code development require a full production license. This includes staging environments. This is actually also NOT a change from CS2002.

Consider the information in the Beta documentation inaccurate and discard it. This will be fixed in the next documentation refresh.

The first drop of the Starter Site for Commerce Server 2006 is now available immediately. If you have already registered, simply hit http://connect.microsoft.com/, sign in with your Passport, and it will be avalable as part of the downloads for CS2006. Be sure to also get the new installation guide as well as that has been updated.

If you have not registered and gotten the Beta yet, feel free to do so at http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/ and follow the instructions there.

This is the first drop of a work that is still in progress. But, a functional catalog browse through checkout path is now there. The Starter Site has to come after the core product given that we need the core product in a stable state to build a site on top of it. This release should be treated as an end-to-end API example. It is not feature complete, the Visual Studio 2005 designer experience and control gallery is not there, and we have a lot of code refinements and testing still to go. But to give you a good sample to play with, it is ready for action. And for the record, this IS NOT supported in production environments – even for TAP customers. All of that will come in due time.

Hope you enjoy it and Happy Friday!