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!