Commerce Server Q1 Progress Report

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It has been a busy, heads-down Q1 at Commerce Server with a number of simultaneous initiatives in-flight. With the end of the quarter upon us, I wanted to provide an executive update and preview of coming attractions. 

Business results continue to be very strong and consistently meeting or exceeding expectations. We have seen very strong interest in Commerce Server 10 and have had several customers already complete their migrations in North America (which is surely a record for a new Commerce Server release)!

On the engineering front, we are putting the finishing touches on all of our first-half roadmap. Customers can look forward to very soon having available:

  • Maintenance releases of both Commerce Server 2009 R2 and Commerce Server 10
  • SharePoint 2013 and BizTalk 2013 support
  • Cloud support

Detailed disclosures and availability will start for this wave in early April. I am also pleased to say that with this quarter, we have finished our transition of our engineering processes to allow for agility on a quarterly basis – versus the multi-year approach of years past. 

On the customer engagement front, we are at the last stages of preparing our new support and online community to replace MSDN and the various other properties on Microsoft.com (including migration of things like all of the support knowledge-base articles, etc.) – that will be coming live in early Q2. I am personally quite excited about this, as it will allow us to have a much better mechanism for engaging with the entire ecosystem.

And to wrap-up, it’s time to talk about futures… Replacing the business user interfaces in Commerce Server represents the core of our major release for this year. And I’m pleased to report that we are well underway and on-track. In Q1 quarter, we have completed the technology selection for building the next-generation UIs as well as begun the user experience design process. We will be sharing a detailed progress update in the very near future and starting customer design validation in Q2 (be thinking about if you’d like to participate!).

Of course, we are continuing our process of refining our roadmap and encapsulating the feedback from all of the customer and partner conversations over the last time period. The Spring Edition will be published in concert with our Q1 release wave and provide much greater clarity into the 2013 and 2014 major release waves, as well as our CXM integration strategy and a first look into what’s coming for 2015.  

It’s very exciting times at CommerceServer.net!