What's new in Commerce Server 2007?

Twenty months back when we started planning for the next release of Commerce Server I had written a post asking for feedback on Commerce Server 2007. Now twenty months later we are on track to ship Commerce Server 2007 sometime soon. Commerce server 2007 beta was released in December, '05 and is available for download. The first drop of the Starter Site and the documentation are also available.

   Given that this is the first major Commerce Server release since Commerce Server 2002 the obvious question is "What's new in Commerce Server 2007"? 

These are just some of the new features in Commerce Server 2007

1. The biggest feature is the architectural change in the major commerce components to use the web service model.What this means is that the functionality of the catalog, orders, marketing and profiles systems is now available as web services. Some of these components have been fully written in managed code and provide a developer friendly object model to program against.

2. A flexible role based security model based on Windows Authorization manager which defines which users can perform which operations based on their role has been built in the catalog , orders, marketing and profiles systems.

3. Performant Winforms UI for managing catalog schema, managing catalogs, marketing and orders.

4. A C# based production ready starter site which demostrates how to use the commerce components.

5. A new Inventory component, tightly integrated with the catalog system which will allow you to store, update and maintain inventory information for products and variants and also control how they are rendered on the site based on their inventory levels.

6. Staging data from staging servers to production servers was a big issue in previous releases. We now have a product team tested staging module which will allow staging your commerce data from staging to production servers.

7. LOB adapters for inventory, catalog, orders and profiles.The will help you build Connected Commerce applications that will easily tie your Commerce Server deployment into LOB systems, trading partners, or other Commerce Server deployments.

8. Revamped orders systems.

9. Major improvements in the catalog system especially virtual catalogs, search functionality, security and ranking. More on this later.

10. MOM pack for monitoring the state of your commerce server deployment.