'Jupiter' to Merge E-Commerce Servers

Microsoft has announced it will merge BizTalk Server, Commerce Server, and Content Management Server (CMS) into a unified e-commerce offering, code-named Jupiter, that will be rolled out in two phases in 2003 and 2004. Microsoft intends Jupiter to make it easier for organizations to build complete e-commerce infrastructures. However, the project is only in the preliminary stages and Microsoft gave few details about what “unified” really means, other than that Jupiter’s development environment will be tightly integrated with Visual Studio .NET.

The first phase, due in the second half of 2003, will be BizTalk-centric and will focus on business process management and monitoring, and better integration with the other two component products. The second phase, due in the first half of 2004, will focus more on content and site management and on creating a better experience for users, in part through tighter integration with Office. Jupiter will heavily use Web services to link its own components and to provide connectivity and interoperability with other systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or legacy databases.