A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…there used to be a solution offering called the Microsoft Solution for Internet Business (MSIB). The MSIB solution integrated Commerce Server 2000 and 2002, Content Management Server 2001 and 2001, and SharePoint 2001 into a single Internet-facing site for customer deployment.

This solution unfortunately became somewhat orphaned given Content Management Server being folded into SharePoint, and SharePoint itself going through major evolutions with the 2003 and 2007 generations – along with Commerce Server 2007. This was a hot topic some time back – I wrote two posts:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/rdonovan/archive/2006/03/03/content-management-and-commerce-server-2006.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/rdonovan/archive/2007/03/03/and-the-long-promised-sharepoint-integration-whitepaper-is-now-live.aspx

The sad part is, we have never come up with a great encore that offered full feature parity to migrate customers towards, until now…

The SharePoint Commerce Services feature of Commerce Server 2009 provides complete feature parity with the old MSIB feature-set. Details are as follows….

Integrated Site and Catalog Search

Here, customers can search the site and get results returned from both static content (visa vis SharePoint) and dynamic content (visa vis the Commerce Server Catalog).

Inline Catalog Editing

In this instance, through a visual popup implemented in Silverlight, properties of the catalog can be edited inline by navigating the site. Upon submission, changes will be persisted back to Commerce Server and caches refreshed.

Content Management

SharePoint brings complete content management capabilities to Commerce Server sites, including the abilities to:

• Have versioning with check-in/check-out
• Workflow/approvals on content changes
• The ability to make content, layout, and other look-and-feel changes through either the Web-based interface or SharePoint Designer

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With these features in place, customers now have 1:1 feature migration – and then some – and can finally migrate away from MSIB to a modern platform. I wish it had not taken this long to get here, but as they say – better late than never!

Hope this helps!

A colleague asked me the other day – if I have a CS2007 site and don’t feel like changing it (much) at the moment, what’s in it for me to upgrade to Commerce Server 2009? A very good question indeed – I thought…

First, Commerce Server 2009 does not break any compatibility with Commerce Server 2007. So, code that runs on CS2007 will run on CS2009 – unmodified.

Second, Commerce Server 2009 includes a number of fixes over and above SP2 from Commerce Server 2007. So to get the most stable version of the CS2007 bits, one should be running CS2009.

Third is support lifecycle; Microsoft’s standard support policy is 5 Years of Standard Support and 5 Years of Extended Support. Standard support began in 2006 for Commerce Server 2007, versus 2009 for the 2009 version. So you automatically get 3 more years of support.

Fourth and finally is platform support – CS2009 is tested with the latest and greatest – and will be evolved throughout its support lifecycle.

With respect to some other questions:

• Performance of the Core System (old) APIs will be about the same on ’09 versus ’07 – ’09 does have more fixes as reported by customers rolled in than ’07 SP2 though
• The new Commerce Foundation APIs when used in an ASP.NET site will perform marginally better than the old Core System APIs if used correctly; less so if used incorrectly

So – that’s it in a nutshell. Hope this helps!

Life has been busy. Busy working on the next version of Commerce Server, that is. A few weeks back we posted the June CTP of CS2009 code name “R2”. This is the first CTP of the next version of Commerce Server, which will be available by 1st Quarter 2010. Some key changes in this CTP versus the released version of Commerce Server 2009 include:

• Commerce Server is now x64-only
• Setup is now integrated into a single install/configuration experience
• The Template Pack site is now the out-of-box default experience
• Products and categories can now be updated (as opposed to just queried) through the Commerce Foundation API
• Business Administration Toolbar and Cross-Sell/Up-Sell Manager are now included – as the start of delivering the product’s next-generation business user experience
• The Commerce Foundation can now be run as a service for full 3-tier deployments

For more details and to get this, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dfaca6d6-6e1a-4067-8857-61ff1300bf6b&displaylang=en.

Enjoy!

New Links from Microsoft:

• https://connect.microsoft.com/Survey/Survey.aspx?SurveyID=8674&SiteID=643 – The Connect Feedback site and June Evaluation VPC
• http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/en/us/downloads.aspx – The authoritative download page for all things Commerce Server from Microsoft.
• http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/en/us/try-video.aspx – The authoritative source of videos on Commerce Server from Microsoft.

Some New Blogs to Follow:

• Kelly Andrew Heard @ http://blog.kellyheard.com/
• Dominic Citino @ http://blogs.msdn.com/domc/
• Jeff Lynch @ http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeff.lynch/
• Ravi Kanth @ http://microsoftblog.co.in/commerceserver/
• Asad Khan @ http://commerce-server-guy.blogspot.com/
• Brad Bont @ http://blogs.msdn.com/bbont/
• Sathish Chittur Griampet @ http://blogs.msdn.com/sathishcg/
• Software Smith @ http://software-smith.blogspot.com/
• Soren Spelling Lund @ http://www.publicvoid.dk/default.aspx
• Tom Schultz @ http://blogs.msdn.com/tschultz/
• Gael Duhamel @ http://www.itcreme.com/
• Kerry Havas @ http://blogs.msdn.com/khavas/default.aspx
• Max Akbar @ http://www.maxakbar.com/blogs.aspx 
• Winson Woo @ http://technicalmultiverse.blogspot.com/ 
• Ben Taylor @ http://bentaylor.org/

If I’ve missed anyone or you want any changes, please let me know through a comment. 

Hope this helps!