What's new - WebSphere Commerce Enhancements for version 6.0

This section describes new capabilities, and enhancements to existing capabilities, in WebSphere Commerce Enhancements for version 6.0. It describes functionality for Feature Pack 1, Feature Pack 2, Feature Pack 3 and Feature Pack 3.0.1. It is intended for users who have experience with previous versions of WebSphere Commerce. It is a quick reference, and describes only the differences between WebSphere Commerce 6.0 and WebSphere Commerce Enhancements for version 6.0.

In this topic, all editions of WebSphere Commerce (Express, Professional, and Enterprise) are referred to as WebSphere Commerce. Furthermore, all editions of the WebSphere Commerce development environment are referred to as WebSphere Commerce Developer.

Enhancements have been made in the following areas:

 

Foundational leadership

Front-office integration

In Feature Pack 2, WebSphere Commerce is continuing its transition to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) by de-coupling business subsystems. Particularly, the focus in this feature pack is on WebSphere Commerce being the master data record and exposing services to be consumed by clients. These services are termed front-office services. WebSphere Portal is used to show how to build a client to consume these new services. However, these services are not limited to WebSphere Portal and are generic enough to be consumed by rich clients or other Web services clients.

In Feature Pack 3.0.1, additional services were added to support the IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce. Feature Pack 1 and Feature Pack 2 focussed on providing services to support storefront services.

WebSphere Commerce services

WebSphere Commerce now provides logical groupings of services to standardize communication:

Catalog

Catalog services enable an external system, such as WebSphere Portal, to search for Catalog related information in WebSphere Commerce. There are three top level nouns defined in the logical model: Catalog, catalogGroup, and catalogEntry.

Contract

Contract services define a contract noun and get verb. The contract noun includes the contractId, contract name and contract description. The contract noun retrieves all entitled contracts for a given user in a store and retrieves the contract content by the contractId.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure services describe general store information, and store-related information such as language, currency, fulfilment center, and inventory system for the store.

Order

The order management subsystem is a component of the WebSphere Commerce Server that provides shopping carts, order capture, order fulfillment, inventory, and payment function support. Order management is broadly divided into these processes: order capture, order processing, inventory processing, payment processing.

Marketing

Marketing services provide functionality to create marketing campaigns, customer segments, advertising; and e-mail activities.

Member

Member services allow an external system, such as WebSphere Portal, to create, update and search for members (organizations, users, and member groups) in WebSphere Commerce. The member component provides a client library and a component facade. Member services use the person and organization nouns and the following verbs: get, process, change, and sync.

Price

Price services manage and calculate prices for products in the store.

WebSphere Commerce Portal integration

WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 2 introduces a new service-oriented integration with WebSphere Portal. The new implementation is not compatible with Commerce Enabled Portal available in version 6 and earlier. The WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Portal version 6.0 service-oriented integration support gives you an aggregated presentation of WebSphere Commerce Services and non-WebSphere Commerce services. There are a couple of benefits:

  • WebSphere Portal provides the ability to aggregate and to present contents delivered from services, whether they are provided by WebSphere Commerce or a vendor-acquired software application.

  • Single sign-on from WebSphere Portal provides a secure method of authenticating a user one time within an environment and using that single authentication (for the duration of the session) as a basis for access to WebSphere Commerce Services.

Here are the features of the WebSphere Commerce Portal integration:

Aggregation support

Administrators can compose portal pages that have both WebSphere Commerce portlets and vendor-acquired portlets.

Personalization functionality

WebSphere Commerce portlets can participate in the personalization functionality of the WebSphere Portal Server. For instance, you can display them or not, depending on the role of the user; they can also assume the theme of the page.

Support for multiple devices

Use WebSphere Commerce portlets in your browser or on mobile devices.

SingleSignOn (SSO) capabilities

Users who have signed on to WebSphere Portal are automatically authenticated and registered in WebSphere Commerce.

Standards based solution

Portlets that render WebSphere Commerce content are JSR-168 compliant, enabling them to work with other vendors' portlets in a single portlet container. JSR-168 compliance also allows you to leverage tools that are designed for JSR-168.

Support for portlet-to-portlet communication

Have your WebSphere Commerce portlets communicate with your other portlets to deliver a rich user experience. For example, a contractor portlet on your page can interact with your WebSphere Commerce portlets to offer services in your local area.

Leverage for the portlet tag library

Use the portlet tag library in your pages.

Easier customization

Reuse existing Web services in portlets you develop.

UI technology

The Management Center user interface is a rich graphical Web-based tool that business users interact with, to manage their catalog, promotion, and marketing assets. The Management Center uses OpenLaszlo open source technology, which involves writing declarative XML files with embedded JavaScript. In contrast with an SOI implementation, it is not necessary to go through the name-value pair transition to execute commands. Also, the business logic layer is not bound to the persistence layer.

BOD command framework

As part of the WebSphere Commerce transition to an SOA architecture, three different layers of the application are identified and interactions between the layers are defined by consistent interfaces. In prior versions of WebSphere Commerce, there are implementation dependencies between the presentation layer, business logic layer and persistence layer. The new architecture addresses this issue by using OAGIS messages to interact with the business logic. The business logic command framework provides the capability of processing business object documents.

The interaction between the business objects and persistence layer is isolated in an object called the Business Object Mediator. Business object document (BOD) commands interact with the Business Object Mediator to handle the interaction with the logical objects and how they are persisted. The key differences between the SOI framework (on the left side) and the framework introduced in Feature Pack 3. The application is divided into three layers:

Presentation layer

Acts as the interaction service that aggregates business components to form an application. The presentation layer interacts with business logic through the OAGIS defined services; it does not contain any business logic. OAGIS defined services of a service module retrieving business data, or executing any business logic. The presentation layer cannot query the database directly to retrieve business data. It interacts with business components. The IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce is an example of a presentation layer.

Business logic layer

The business logic layer is the business components that provide OAGIS services to return data or execute business processes. The presentation layer leverages these OAGIS services to display data, or to invoke a business process. The business logic provides data required by the presentation layer. The business logic layer exists because more than just fetching and updating data is required by an application; there is also additional business logic independent of the presentation layer. The SOI implementation of the business logic layer is fronted by services, which transform the OAGIS messages (BODs) to name-value pairs for processing. This makes for easy integration with existing WebSphere Commerce or customized commands. The BOD processing patterns for OAGIS requests uses the persistence layer to accept structured data objects (SDOs) and handle the mapping between these logical structured objects and how they are persisted. The business logic layer is independent of the technology used to interact with how data is persisted. By interacting with the Business Object Mediator object, the business logic layer passes SDOs to the persistence mechanism without binding itself to the persistence technology. There are four processing patterns:

Data service layer

The business logic layer interacts with the data service layer through the Business Object Mediator (BOM) object. The persistence layer maps these structured objects to the persistence implementation to perform the data retrieval or updates. The persistence layer accepts structured data objects (SDOs) which are transformed (mediated) into objects called physical SDOs. Physical SDOs are stored in the data service layer. All persistence-specific assets, such as SQL queries, are isolated within the data service layer. For simplify maintenance, the query template file stores SQL. In an SOI implementation, the business logic layer was bound to the persistence layer through the use of access beans and EJB 1.1.
Back-office integration As the online channel becomes strategic to your business and instrumental to your multichannel strategy, it is imperative that it be quickly, seamlessly integrated with back-office systems and processes. Available in Feature Pack 1, the service-oriented integration (SOI) back-office support enables you to integrate sales channels served by WebSphere Commerce to your back-end systems. Two scenarios are demonstrated:

  1. The ability to integrate WebSphere Commerce with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

  2. The ability to integrate WebSphere Commerce with your order management system (OMS).

Here are the benefits of these scenarios:

  1. Reduced cost of integration with back-office systems.

  2. Improved business flexibility by externalizing internal processes.

  3. Use of Web services by WebSphere Process Server to compose flexible business scenarios.

Web services support for back-office integration

In Feature Pack 1 numerous Web services have been exposed to allow for easier integration to back-office systems. Web services exposed include those for Member, Order, and Inventory integration. The supported protocol for these Web services is either SOAP over HTTP or SOAP over JMS. To bridge the integration from WebSphere Commerce to your back-end system, IBM recommends that you use a enterprise service bus (ESB) .

WebSphere Commerce and SAP system integration

Available in Feature Pack 1, this solution demonstrates how use WebSphere Commerce to enable the Web and call-center channels for SAP systems. It uses Web services and the ESB pattern which are the recommended approach for integration with other enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This integration illustrates the scenario where the SAP system provides the master data for catalog and customer, but the SAP system does not focus on selling through the Web channel. When WebSphere Commerce is integrated with the SAP system, customers registered in SAP can use WebSphere Commerce as the front-end to browse and purchase the products that are managed within SAP. With the integration of WebSphere Commerce to SAP, you can benefit from WebSphere Commerce personalization, marketing, merchandising, and user management functions enabled on robust Internet selling sites for B2B direct and consumer direct clients.

WebSphere Commerce and Sterling Customer Order Management PCA (Sterling COM PCA) integration

As companies use the Internet to open their enterprises to customers, partners, and suppliers, they encounter layers of different enterprise systems that have been purchased over time, many of which are unable to operate together. New to Feature Pack 1, this integration describes how to use an independent OMS, such as Sterling COM PCA, to process orders captured by WebSphere Commerce. This integration provides an open and extendable integration framework that supports both inbound and outbound integration of WebSphere Commerce with order management back-end systems. The OMS is responsible for processing the order, editing the order, and releasing the order to the appropriate fulfillment system. In most cases, inventory is also managed by this external system. By integrating with WebSphere Commerce, you can enhance your Sterling catalog for online selling by adding marketing features such as campaigns and promotions. You can also partition your catalog based on entitlement of various resellers or business customers.
Reduced total cost of implementation

Paymentech Plug-in for WebSphere Commerce

New to Feature Pack 2, the Paymentech plug-in allows the Payments plug-in controller to communicate directly with the Paymentech gateway through the plug-in. In previous versions, the payment processing component was configured to use WCPayments plug-in with the Paymentech Cassette. The new implementation leverages the advantages of payment plug-ins and removes the complexity of using payment cassettes.
Security

PABP Certification and PCI enhancements

WebSphere Commerce version 6.0.0.2 has been validated against a standard known as the VISA Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP) Payment Application Best Practices (PABP). This standard addresses security issues specific to payment applications. Validation against this standard helps to ensure that WebSphere Commerce v6.0.0.2, when installed and configured correctly, enables merchants to certify their sites for PCI compliance. PCI compliance remains solely your responsibility.

A detailed technical paper on the PCI DSS and how it relates to WebSphere Commerce has been provided. See WebSphere Commerce version 6.0.0.2 and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard on IBM developerWorks for more information.

 

Customer empowerment

IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce business user tool

The IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce, or Management Center, is the next generation business user tool for managing online business tasks, introduced with WebSphere Commerce version 6, Feature Pack 3. It is intended for business users who manage merchandising and marketing tasks for stores using the consumer direct and B2B business models. The Management Center offers three tools: Catalogs, Promotions, and Marketing. A site administrator has access to all the tools; however, depending on your business role, from the Management Center menu within the tool, you can see and use the tools to which you have been granted access.

Management Center supported tasks

Here are the tasks supported by the Catalogs, Marketing, and Promotions tools within the Management Center:

Catalog tasks

  • Create and manage master and sales catalogs, including defining categories, creating products and SKUs, categorizing SKUs, and bundling SKUs

  • Enrich and manage product content, and create merchandising associations

Promotions tasks

  • Create and manage promotions for your merchandise

  • Review and manage marketing promotions using the promotions calendar view

Marketing tasks

  • Design creative marketing campaigns containing Web and e-mail activities

  • Define the flow of marketing activities using activity templates and change marketing activities through the marketing activity builder

  • Review and manage marketing activities using the activities calendar view

Continue to use the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to maintain stores for other business models, and to perform other business operations, such as managing stores, inventory, fulfillment, orders, returns, payments, auctions, customer segments, e-Marketing Spots, and content.

Management Center usability and productivity features

The Management Center is also a more usable, intuitive, and efficient way to complete your tasks. The Management Center has been designed with focus on productivity, which means fewer screens and fewer clicks are needed to manage your assets. For details on the Management Center usability features and tasks that you can accomplish with the tools, see IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce. For details about each tool, see Catalogs tool, Marketing tool, and Promotions tool.

Feature Pack 3 starter store enhancements

In addition to the Management Center tool, you can see Management Center features within existing WebSphere Commerce starter stores, including the consumer direct, B2B direct, advanced B2B direct, and Web 2.0 starter stores. These starter store enhancements include a sample catalog with new marketing data and new eMarketing Spots JSP snippets to be used only if you are using the Management Center. For details on the features, see Feature Pack 3 and 4 starter store enhancements.

To see Management Center features within existing WebSphere Commerce starter stores, enable these features. For instructions on how to enable them, see Enabling starter store enhancements

Personalization ID used for Management Center Web activities

The WebSphere Commerce personalization ID identifies the user, so that when a customer interacts with the store throughout the business lifecycle, the customer is presented with personalized content. The personalization ID tracks the customer's interactions and this data can be used to determine the content for a Web activity. The new marketing engine provided with Feature Pack 3 uses personalization ID to track previous shopping behavior. This way, the engine appropriately and consistently targets marketing content to a customer, regardless of whether they have registered or logged on.

WebSphere Commerce Web 2.0 store solution

New to Feature Pack 2, the Web 2.0 store solution uses RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Dojo widgets to provide customers with an interactive and rich shopping experience. This in turn, helps to improve order conversion rates and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

The Web 2.0 store includes all of the features and capabilities of the Consumer Direct starter store. However, in this solution, the starter store features are enhanced from the Web 1.0 stores and provide a more interactive user interface for your customers. The shopping experience mimics using a Windows desktop application rather than the traditional static Web pages. The major attractions of this Web 2.0 store are the Fast Finder page (which provides an interactive and intuitive way for customers to narrow down product selections) and a single page checkout (which drives checkout more efficiently and can decrease the chances of shopping cart abandonment). For more information see Web 2.0 store solution. Enhanced Web analytics

To maximize conversion rates in a multichannel environment, track and analyze cross-channel customer behavior to gain insights, then apply them to your sales and marketing initiatives. The following enhancements, available in Feature Pack 1, build on the Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce offering in WebSphere Commerce, version 6.0.

Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce auto tagging utility

Building on the Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce offering in version 6.0, the auto tagging utility automates the process of tagging your store JSP pages with Coremetrics tags. The auto tagging utility scans the WebSphere Commerce Web pages and inserts the Coremetrics tags in the appropriate positions. This results in a much quicker and easier implementation. See Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce for more information.

Coremetrics Tag Library support for WebSphere Commerce, versions 5.6 and 5.6.1

Building on the Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce offering in version 6.0, Tag Library support is now offered for WebSphere Commerce, version 5.6, and 5.6.1. The tag library helps to ensure a quicker implementation and maximum data accuracy. See Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce for more information.

Coremetrics reports for WebSphere Commerce

By default, Coremetrics for WebSphere Commerce now offers out of the box Coremetrics reports including these:

  • A/B testing

  • B2B contracts

  • Campaigns

  • Promotions

  • E-Marketing Spots

Reports for IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce and e-mail campaigns

Available in Feature Pack 2, these two new report categories continue to build upon build upon state-of-the-art analytics solutions for cross-channel businesses. They provide a multi-channel solution for WebSphere Commerce channels. They allow you to analyze the performance of CSRs and CSR teams, and allow business users to track their e-mail campaigns without any IT intervention.

Reports for IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce

New reporting capabilities now allow you to transmit statistical data to Coremetrics that feeds the following types of reports to illustrate CSR performance and channel analysis:

  • Team CSR Summary

  • Quotes to Order Conversion Rates

  • CSR Order and Shipping Status

  • Personal Revenue, Profit

  • Price Quotes

  • Price Overrides

  • CSR Category Revenue

The new IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce reports include these:

  • Top Line Cross Channel Report

  • Cross Channel Graphical Dashboard Report

  • Cross Channel Merchandising Report

Reports for e-mail campaigns

Feature Pack 2 provides enhancements to the e-mail activity template editor so that you can create e-mail activities that transmit statistical data to Coremetrics. The statistics give raw data about the number of target customers who have opened the e-mail, and also the number that have clicked any of the links included in the e-mail. This information is integrated into the existing Campaign reports to give a more complete representation of the statistics associated with a campaign's activities.

See Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce for more information.

Web content management Customer experience is now a point of differentiation, so the business people most qualified to define and manage the content and context that enrich the experience, should have complete control - without IT reliance. The following new capabilities have the potential to touch all users and improve their overall experience:

WebSphere Commerce and content management system integration

Available in Feature Pack 1, you can now integrate a content management system, such as IBM Workplace Web Content Management, with WebSphere Commerce. New to this enhancement, is the ability to use IBM Workplace Web Content Management as a content management system with workspaces and preview capability. You can create Web content for your store and associate this content with your product pages. For example, you can author an article about camping and then provide links from the article to camping-related products in your catalog. IBM Workplace Web Content Management builds upon the workspaces environment provided with WebSphere Commerce and allows you to preview your Web content in the context of other changes you are making for your store. By integrating WebSphere Commerce and IBM Workplace Web Content Management, you enable business users to author and manage Web content without requiring intervention from technical support. The sample integration, managing articles, is provided as an example that you can extend or customize for other scenarios.

IBM Workplace Web Content Management on WebSphere Portal 6.0 for WebSphere Commerce 6.0

Released in Feature Pack 2, the integration of WebSphere Commerce with IBM Workplace Web Content Management is extended to work with WebSphere Portal, version 6.0. For more information on the capabilities of WebSphere Portal, version 6.0, see IBM Workplace Web Content Management integration for WebSphere Commerce in the WebSphere Commerce Information Center.
Enhanced search and navigation

WebSphere Commerce integration with site maps

In the past, in order for a search engine to index your stores pages the spider needed to crawl through the Web site and index every page that it found. With the WebSphere Commerce integration with site maps, released in Feature Pack 2, you can create a site map XML file, site map_ storeID.xml, that contains a list of URLs for your site. This way, customers are able to find your site when they perform a search, promoting activity to your site, and increasing the probability of sales.The WebSphere Commerce integration with site maps is made up of two parts:

  • A sample site map JSP file that can be used to generate the content of a search engine site map XML file. The content is the URLs that you want to index such as the catalog, contact us, and help pages.

  • The WebSphere Commerce integration with site maps is made up of two parts:

  • A command that compiles the JSP file, optionally validates, and saves the search engine site map XML file. The command can be scheduled to run regularly. For example, it can be scheduled to run at night based on your catalog update schedule.

Enhanced search and navigation by integrating to IBM OmniFind Discovery Edition 8.4

Available in Feature Pack 1, the integration between WebSphere Commerce and IBM OmniFind Discovery Edition 8.4 has been enhanced for better natural language search and search-based merchandising. This results in improved site conversion rates, increased customer satisfaction by using the advanced search capabilities, and improved business productivity and control through the business user Management Console. See OmniFind Discovery Edition 8.4 for more information.

Contract terms and conditions

Prior to Feature Pack 2, in order to create a new term, you needed to create a new term EJB bean, extending the base term EJB bean. After you created the term EJB bean, you had to store it back into the same JAR file as the base term EJB bean, which meant redeployment to the application server. Any fix packs that affected the terms files overwrote the JAR file, and the changes were lost.

With the release of Feature Pack 2, it is no longer necessary to create a new term EJB bean. Now, you make the term mappings in an XML file, rather than hard coding them in a term EJB bean. When the contract page is opened, any displayable extended terms are shown on separate tabs. On those tabs, you can set the values for these terms. Depending on the definition of the term, values are verified as well.


Related Concepts


Workspaces
WebSphere Commerce Web services with JSP pages
WebSphere Commerce and service-oriented architecture (SOA)
Integration of WebSphere Commerce with ERP systems: scenario overview
Integration of WebSphere Commerce with order management systems: scenario overview
IBM Workplace Web Content Management integration for WebSphere Commerce