Organization structure

In order to allow customers or buyers to access your site, browse your catalog, and place orders; or to allow employees to administer the site, including updating the catalog, creating new promotions, or managing orders; or to allow resellers or other business partners to complete transactions on your site, all actors in your business scenario must be assigned a position in the WebSphere Commerce organization structure.

The WebSphere Commerce organization structure provides a framework for the actors, or entities, in your business scenario. This framework is organized in a hierarchical structure, which mimics typical organizational hierarchies with entries for organizations and organizational units and users. The organizations and organizational units in the framework act as owners for the parts of your business. All parts of your business, including customers, administrators, stores, catalogs and distributors, must be owned by an organization or organizational unit.

The organization structure and the access control model, are closely related, in that the access control model applies access control policies to organizations rather than to individual entities (stores, customers, administrators and so on). The policies that apply to an entity (or resource) are applied to the organizations that own the entity or resource.

The following diagram outlines the basic WebSphere Commerce organization structure. The basic organization structure is installed during instance creation, regardless of the business model.

Root organization

The root organization is the top level organization and is its own parent. All organizations in the WebSphere Commerce organization structure are descendents of the root organization. The site administrators are owned by the root organization.

Default organization

The default organization is owned by the root organization. All guest customers and all customers in a consumer direct scenario belong to the default organization. Customers in a B2B direct or B2B indirect scenarios can belong to either the default organization, or other organizations.

One or more other levels of organizational entities can exist beneath the parent organizational entities. You can add as many child organizational entities as necessary to support your business.

 

Sample organization structures

WebSphere Commerce provides sample organizations structures for each supported business model. These sample organization structures are available on their own (as component store archives) allowing you to use the sample organization structure as starting point for your own site, or as part of the sample businesses.

 

Create organization structures

Rather than create new organization structures for your site, IBM recommends that you begin by publishing one of the sample organization structures provided with WebSphere Commerce, and then make changes to that organization structure as necessary.

The WebSphere Commerce organization structure is flexible enough to support all entities in the supported business models.

 

Related Concepts

Consumer direct organization structure
B2B direct organization structure
Demand chain organization structure
Supply chain organization structure
Extended Sites - extended sites hub organization structure