Magento had a webinar yesterday where the roadmap for the Magento Enterprise Edition for Q3 / Q4 2009, & early 2010 was given. Some very exciting (and much-needed) new features were announced, hot off the presses here are the highlights:

1. A WYSISYG CMS system with a lot more flexibility: including creating widgets, the maintenance of CMS page structures (categories for CMS pages), and re-usable and configurable product listings. Managing the presentation of informational pages on the frontend will get a lot easier;
2. Market segmentation / behavioral targeting: very nice. Offers you the possibility to show highly relevant product offerings to your visitors by segmenting on customer attributes of your choosing. Of course, this is a marketeers dream. Building on this functionality it should be quite manageable for an implementation partner to build additions where you can target product offerings based on a user’s clicking behavior, resulting in true behavioral targeting;
3. RMA module: just much needed basic functionality. The main thing this offers is the possibility for clients to ask for returns and then entering the dialog with the store through a new section in the customer account;
4. Loyalty programme: also much requested, this functionality can be worked around on currently but a good / tight integration into Magento would be very good;
5. Multiple warehouses: also much requested, a solution for multiple stock locations will be very good to have tied into Magento (though several workarounds exist today).

Also, judging from the poll currently running on Magento’s site, there is a distinct possibility Varien are considering upgrading the functionality of the newsletter system as well…

The CMS functionality is also going to be made available for the community release. The other points will have to be arranged through workarounds or community modules if you are stuck on using the community for the forseeable future, unfortunately.

Good to see these much-requested functions announced; it makes the pitch against other Enterprise-grade solutions even more easy :-)