It is intended to allow OS/2 applications to run on modern hardware, and is used by a number of large organizations for this purpose.

[5] Financial difficulties at Mensys in 2012 led to the development of eComStation stalling, and ownership being transferred to a sister company named XEU.com (now known as PayGlobal Technologies BV),[6] who continue to sell and support the operating system.

In addition, from the beginning it bundled a number of additional features and enhancements, including (but not limited to): As IBM began to wind down OS/2 development, Serenity and its partners began to take up the slack (through a combination of in-house, contract, and community/open source development efforts) in terms of keeping the operating system usable on current hardware.

[16] Notwithstanding Cheung's fairly simple initial concept, community input was actively solicited from the beginning, and feature requests quickly began coming in.

eComStation 1.0 was built on the 2000 release of IBM's Convenience Package for OS/2 Warp version 4 (commonly referred to as MCP or MCP1).

Additionally, several commercial applications were bundled with the operating system package, most notably Lotus SmartSuite for OS/2 and IBM Desktop On-Call.

In addition, a number of enhancements to the OS/2 user interface had been integrated, including a revamped desktop layout with entirely new icons, customizable graphic effects in a number of windowing components, redesigned system dialogs, and an enhanced, user-extensible system shutdown.

However, the first non-English NLV targeted, German, was not released until the end of 2001, due in large part to the greater-than-anticipated effort of localizing the redesigned installer and other new materials.

The largest change to the operating system as installed was a package of wide-ranging functional enhancements to the desktop environment (Workplace Shell), based on the open source XWorkplace project from NetLabs.org.

Multi-processor support was not included in eComStation Entry, due to the additional license fees required by IBM at the time.

Serenity Systems announced its intention to provide a "media refresh" incorporating a number of fixes and updates which had been made available after the release of eComStation 1.2.

[21] The principal new feature of eComStation 1.2R was support for installation on Athlon 64 systems, which had previously required unsupported workarounds.

Additionally, a beta release of a Traditional Chinese NLV was made available via download for registered customers.

This edition had a lower recommended retail price than previous versions of eComStation; however, one customer was limited to five purchases.

The second is the replacement of the old IBM Boot Manager with the open-source Air-Boot software, which does not require a primary partition and is therefore easier to install on disks with pre-existing operating systems.