What's new in this release

This section describes new capabilities and enhancements to existing capabilities in WebSphere Commerce, version 6.0. 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, version 6.0, and WebSphere Commerce, version 5.6.1. See What's new for version 5.6 and What's new for version 5.6.1 for previous version new capabilities and enhancements.

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:

 

Industry-aligned cross channel delivery

Cross channel e-commerce enables you to deliver a consistent experience to your customers and partners across every channel, regardless of your business model or your industry. WebSphere Commerce, version 6.0 enhancements allow a single platform and common set of services to support a personalized, relevant experience for customers and partners as well as enable back end integration of data and processes. The following new and enhanced capabilities focus on meeting the needs of customers and partners:

 

IBM Sales Center

This new, separately orderable feature leverages the catalog, order management, promotions, and merchandising capabilities of WebSphere Commerce to provide call center representatives with the functionality they need to service and up-sell your cross-channel customers. It delivers the speed and productivity required for high-volume call centers via a customizable user interface designed for maximum productivity and multi-tasking.

Sales Center key capabilities:

Sales Center key benefits:

IBM Gift Center

This new, separately orderable feature is a complete multichannel gift registry solution. It can operate as a Web-only gift registry, integrate to an existing back-end registry system or stand on its own as a centralized cross-channel solution. It leverages the marketing and merchandising capabilities of WebSphere Commerce and provides integration points to your store kiosk and scanning devices.

IBM Gift Center key features:

IBM Gift Center key benefits:

Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce

IBM WebSphere Commerce and Coremetrics have joined forces to deliver a best of breed cross-channel business analytics solution specifically for use with IBM WebSphere Commerce software. Starting with Coremetrics' deep e-commerce expertise, marketing leading reporting interface and aptitude for integrating data across channels, the combined solution will now include reports specifically designed for WebSphere Commerce.

For availability of Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce functionality, refer to

Coremetrics Analytics

.

 

Cross-channel order processing

The Order subsystem has been extended and improved to provide enhanced support for cross-channel business processes and efficiently serve new constituents such as call center representatives, gift registrants, and distribution channel partners. Additional integration interfaces have been added to facilitate communication with external systems (for example, POS systems, kiosks, Enterprise Resource Planning, and fulfillment systems), and a new "plug-in" based payment processing capability has been added.

Cross-channel order processing provides these benefits:

New and changed cross-channel order processing capabilities:

 

Order capture

Order processing

Integration

Payment

 

Customer empowerment

Customer empowerment focuses on the total experience of your customers, partners and employees. It enhances their ability to serve themselves and help each other, maximizing each user's productivity and usability. The following new capabilities have the potential to touch all users and improve their overall experience:

 

Workspaces

Workspaces enhance staging server function with the addition of isolated access-controlled work areas in which you can make and preview changes to managed assets without affecting managed assets and users outside the area.

Workspaces give business users the ability to control site changes end to end:

Additionally, the loading utilities have been updated to support loading data into workspaces.

 

Publishing options

 

Quick publish

When all tasks are completed in a task group in a workspace, the task group data is committed to the production-ready data. When the task group commit is successfully completed, and is marked for quick publish, the task group data is published to the production server.

If the task group commit fails, the data is not published to the production server.

 

Global publish

Production-ready data and managed files are published to the production server using the stagingprop utility. The fileprop utility is still available to send managed files only.

 

Store preview

You can now preview changes that you make to a store in production, staging, or authoring environments to ensure that new or changed content is displayed correctly before store users see the changes. Preview your store at a specific time to ensure that time-sensitive content, such as a promotion or a price change, is displayed only when it is expected. You can also preview store behavior for a specific user to view what the store looks like to that user.

 

Attachments

Attachments can be images, flash files, warranty documents, and user manuals. They can be associated with catalog categories, catalog entries, and content. You can load and manage file contents and define how they are used on the Web site.

 

Content

Content refers to any creative material that is created for your site. Content is what was referred to in past releases as Ad Copy.

 

Content spots

Content spots reserve space for displaying site content on your store pages. You create the content spots during page creation. The content displayed in a content spot can be changed by the business user either manually, or according to a defined schedule, without having to consult the IT department. Contents spots differ from e-Marketing spots in that they are not tied to campaigns. The difference means that content displayed in content spots does not change based on who is browsing the site.

Content spots are supported by special data beans that are used in conjunction with JSP page technology to generate Web page content using WebSphere Commerce. Once the content spots are included in the store pages, they must be created using the Content Spot wizard in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.

 

E-mail template editor

In the last release, e-mail activities required the creation of JSP files as templates for e-mail messages delivered to customers. You can now create e-mail templates using the e-mail template editor in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. The editor facilitates the creation of these templates by the business users who need them, and makes the technical staff less dependent on new templates and updates to existing templates. With the e-mail template editor you can perform the following tasks:

Note: Any templates created using earlier versions of WebSphere Commerce are supported by the e-mail activity system, but are not supported by the new template editor.

 

Business accounts and contracts

 

Term and condition locking

Multiple account representatives can now edit the same contract. Each account representative locks the terms and conditions they are working on. A Site Administrator, Sales Manager, or Seller can unlock a contract for a user, using WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. For example, if a user's system stops while the user is editing the contract, the contract might be locked on the system, and an administrator must unlock it. Also, if one user is editing a contract, the contract is locked and other users cannot edit it.

 

Shipping charge discounts

Set shipping charge discounts or increases for a business account or contract using the Accounts or Contracts notebooks within WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. You can adjust the shipping charge by a fixed value (for example, discount all shipments to $10), or set a percentage adjustment (for example, discount all shipments by 10%).

 

Reports

WebSphere Commerce Analyzer now includes additional reporting functionality that supports Customer Service Representatives and IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce.

 

Pricing

 

Start points

A starting point is a collection of components that is prepopulated into a kit during configuration. A starting point also associates a price with the set of components. This feature allows you to assign a price for a predefined configuration of a dynamic kit, and to calculate corresponding price deltas based on changes made to the configuration. These deltas are applied by the configurator to update the price of the resulting dynamic kit.

 

Flexible pricing of dynamic kits

You can now set different prices for the same item that is a component in two different kits. For example, a 100 GB hard drive costs $300 in a personal computer and $200 in an enterprise server.

Contract pricing also allows two different users to see two different prices for a component within the same dynamic kit. For example, a 100 GB hard drive in Kit #10001 is $300 for user 10001, but $400 for user 10002.

 

Price-override limits

This feature enables CSR supervisors to define the limits to which a CSR can override prices to reach a sale. This gives CSRs the ability to negotiate prices with customers, if necessary, to ensure a sale. These limits are applied at the member group level, allowing for different limits for different CSR groups. For example, CSRs in one group might be granted more pricing discretion than those in another group.

 

Documentation

 

Programming tutorials

In this release, there are several new programming tutorials that describe some of the new capabilities of WebSphere Commerce, such as how to deploy store customizations using WAS, and how to setup optimistic locking in enterprise beans. For more information and a full list of tutorials, see Tutorials.

 

IBM Sales Center tutorials

These tutorials demonstrate how to customize IBM Sales Center using the IBM Sales Center development environment.

 

Foundational leadership

Your e-commerce system supports customers, employees, and partners. It supports multiple channels and external integration. As your e-commerce system generates more revenue, serves more users, and handles an increasing number of business processes, it becomes important to keep it running at an optimum level. The following capabilities provide performance and scalability to support transaction loads, the flexibility to adapt to changing technologies, and support for standards to make integration faster.

 

WebSphere Commerce Runtime Framework

The following enhancements were made to the WebSphere Commerce Runtime Framework:

 

Struts

As of WebSphere Commerce V6.0, the WebSphere Commerce Web application has moved from a proprietary model-view-controller implementation to the struts open source implementation. Struts is a well-documented framework for J2EE Web Application development, which has become an industry standard for deploying model-view-controller applications. Struts enforces best practices and design patterns, boasts a large developer community, and is supported by IBM development tools such as Rational Application Developer, as well as by third-party tools. Among key benefits of Struts are its support for dynamic action forms, form validation, versatile tag libraries, and Tiles. WebSphere Commerce has extended the base Struts configuration model to provide the traditional WebSphere Commerce function seen in previous releases. For more information on struts, see WebSphere Commerce Struts framework.

 

Web Services

Web services are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published and invoked across the Web. Web services perform functions ranging from simple requests to complicated business processes. After a Web service is registered, other applications can discover it. In this release, WebSphere Commerce has a new Web services framework. This new framework has the following capabilities:

The new Web services framework uses the existing command pattern to represent the business logic, and allows for the existing URL-based controller commands to also be used by the Web services channel.

You can allow WebSphere Commerce to be the service provider by enabling its business functions as Web services that can be accessed by external systems. You can also allow WebSphere Commerce to be the service requester by enabling it to invoke Web services that are hosted by external systems.

 

Business Context Service

In previous versions of WebSphere Commerce, runtime infrastructure was designed to serve customers from the Web channel. As WebSphere Commerce moves towards a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based infrastructure that exposes our business functions to new channels, such as Sales Center, a new infrastructure has been created to solve the problems that can arise from supporting multiple channels. Business Context Service solves these problems by providing the following capabilities:

WAS 6.0

In this release, we moved to WAS 6.0, so you can take advantage of all of the new features included in that release. For information see, the WAS, v6 Information Center.

 

J2EE 1.4

In this release we changed to J2EE 1.4 which includes the following:

This new functionality allows customers to take advantage of the function in this level of J2EE.

 

Rational Application Developer

WebSphere Commerce Developer now uses Rational Application Developer as its Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It supports Cloudscape 10 in addition to DB2, DB2 for iSeries, and Oracle. Due to changes in WAS version 6.0, the lightweight and full test environments have been replaced by a single WAS test environment. To reflect WebSphere Commerce's J2EE compliance, the workspace within WebSphere Commerce Developer now contains an Enterprise Archive file called WC.

The setup of WebSphere Commerce Developer has been simplified. The setdbtype.bat script now provides more descriptive error messages and the createdb.bat script is automatically run.

The ejbDeploy.bat script that converts entity bean meta data from one database type to another has been deprecated and replaced with the ejbConvert.bat script to avoid confusion with the deployment tools provided by WebSphere Application Server.

 

Scalability and performance

 

Optimistic locking

Optimistic locking allows the isolation level in database transactions to be lowered from "repeatable read" to "read committed." In an optimistic locking scheme, database rows that are not normally accessed concurrently are not locked with an intent to update when they are read. Instead, when the update is eventually made, the row is checked to make sure it has not been updated concurrently since it was read. If it has been updated concurrently, then the transaction is rolled back and the command can be re-started from the beginning in a new transaction, if appropriate. In such a scheme, performance is improved when concurrent updates do not normally occur, because the relatively expensive process of obtaining the database locks with intent to update is avoided. On the other hand, for those operations where concurrent updates are more likely to occur, then pessimistic locking, whereby intent to update locks are obtained when the row is read, continues to be used to avoid the more expensive process of rolling back and re-starting from the beginning in a new transaction.

 

Caching using Edge server

Enhancements to WebSphere Commerce for edge caching:

Benefits of WebSphere Commerce edge caching:

Caching dynamic content from the marketing subsystem

The Marketing subsystem now supports the fragment caching feature from DynaCache. This allows e-Marketing Spots to be cached as fragments, and to be invalidated as appropriate, removing a limitation in which marketing assets were sometimes displayed incorrectly on cached sites.

 

Improved install and stability

 

Deploy customizations

In WebSphere Commerce, version 6.0, use WAS tools to deploy changes such as customized code to an application. This is now also the method used by the WebSphere Commerce Update Installer. Using the WAS tools ensures that all the nodes in a cluster are updated. By spreading a software application across multiple servers, you can handle larger computing workloads as you share work across servers in a cluster. If one server in the cluster fails, the others will share the workload, maintaining service and providing a higher level of reliability. For more information, see What's changed for deploying customized assets. The use of WebSphere Application Server's administration console is also demonstrated in a number of WebSphere Commerce, version 6.0 tutorial and task topics whose subject matter deals with deployment.

Installation of WebSphere Commerce fix packs or maintenance

Fixes for WebSphere Commerce need to be installed only once per instance. The Update installer will ensure that the fix is distributed to all cluster members.

 

WebSphere Commerce Migration wizard

In WebSphere Commerce Developer, version 6.0, use the WebSphere Commerce Migration wizard to guide you through the WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Commerce Developer migration process. This eliminates many of the manual steps used in migrating previous versions of WebSphere Commerce. The Migration wizard takes care of all these migration issues:

Use the WebSphere Commerce Migration wizard when migrating, to reduce the probability of errors.

 

Packaging

In WebSphere Commerce, version 6.0 the following product names have been changed:

Related concepts

IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce (Windows XP)
IBM Gift Center for WebSphere Commerce and gift registry feature
Business context service
Workspaces
Attachments
E-mail activity templates
Orders
Dynamic caching
Inventory
Calculation framework
Shipping
WebSphere Commerce Web services with JSP pages