Understanding the Commerce Server Support Lifecycle

One of the most often-asked questions is…how long can I get support for a given version of Commerce Server? Now that we’ve talked about how we’re engineering Commerce Server, we wanted to shed some light on this.

As a starter, if you are using a Microsoft-branded/sourced version of Commerce Server, please refer to the Microsoft Support Lifecycle at https://support.microsoft.com/.

Understanding the Ascentium Support Lifecycle

Now, for Ascentium-branded versions of Commerce Server, we have taken the following approach:

• 3 years of mainstream support from a Release/Upgrade
• 6 years of extended support from a Release/Upgrade
• 10 years of online support from a Release/Upgrade

 

This means that you get the following:

Item	Mainstream	Extended	Online	Custom Contracts
Access to Standard and Premium Support	Yes	Yes	No	Yes – depends on contract scope.
Reactive and Proactive Patches	Yes	Reactive patches for charge only.	No	Yes – depends on contract scope.
Security Patches	Yes	Yes	No	Yes – depends on contract scope.
Online Community and Knowledge Base	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Access to Previously Released Upgrades and Patches	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Underlying Base Platform Support	Yes	No	No	Yes

 

For our currently released products, this applies as follows:

Product Family	Current Major and Minor Versions	Mainstream Support	Extended Support Date	Online Support Date	Notes
Ascentium Commerce Server 2009	N/A	July 1, 2015	July 1, 2019	July 1, 2022	SharePoint 2010 only. Extended support end-date synchronized with Microsoft release.
Ascentium Commerce Server 2009 R2	9.0	July 1, 2015	July 1, 2019	July 1, 2022	Extended support end-date synchronized with Microsoft release.

We will update and post new versions of this as new Releases/Upgrades become available.

 

Base Platform Support

A key component of this is the term we would like to introduce known as Base Platform Support. What this term describes is the underlying products that Commerce Server depends upon to run, such as:

• Microsoft Windows Server
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft SharePoint
• Microsoft BizTalk Server
• Microsoft .NET Framework

As part of our engineering lifecycle, Major releases of Commerce Server (e.g. – 10.0) will typically target currently shipping sets of Base Platforms as well as a generation back. We may occasionally add, at our discretion, additional platforms in the form of a Patch or Minor release or go back further in our support.

In all cases, we will ensure that a vendor-supported set of Base Platforms will be available for any given Major release of Commerce Server for the entire length of that Commerce Server release’s Mainstream and Extended Support lifecycles.

During a Commerce Server release’s Mainstream Support lifecycle, we will test any patches provided by vendors to the underlying base platforms supported by that Commerce Server release. So you can rest easy that, for example, a Service Pack of Windows won’t break Commerce Server, and so forth.

This way, customers can be assured that both their Commerce Server release as well as what it’s running on will be totally supported for the entire lifecycle of that given Commerce Server deployment.

Hope this helps!