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

  • IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce

  • IBM Gift Center for WebSphere Commerce

  • Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce

  • Cross-channel order processing

• Customer empowerment

  • Workspaces

    • Publishing options

      • Quick publish

      • Global publish

  • Store preview

  • Attachments

  • Content

  • Content spots

  • E-mail Template Editor

  • Business accounts and contracts

  • Reports

  • Pricing

    • Start points

    • Flexible pricing of dynamic kits

    • Price-override limits

  • Documentation

• Foundational leadership

  • WebSphere Commerce Runtime Framework

    • Struts

    • Web Services

    • Business Context Service

  • WAS 6.0

  • Deploying updates using WAS 6.0

  • J2EE 1.4

  • Rational Application Developer

  • Scalability and Performance

    • Optimistic locking

    • Caching using Edge Server

    • Caching dynamic content

  • Improved install and stability

    • Deployment of WebSphere Commerce customizations

    • Installation of WebSphere Commerce fix packs or maintenance

    • Migration wizard

• Packaging

 

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:

• Work with multiple stores, customers, and orders simultaneously

• View cross-sell, up-sell, and promotional information

• Find and visually compare products

• View product availability

• Create quotes and turn quotes into orders

• View and override contract and list pricing for products, orders, and shipping

• Create, update, block, and cancel orders

• Create and manage customer profiles

• Ability to process returns

• Create and manage ticklers ("to-do's") for themselves or others

• Use hot-key-enabled functions

• Easily integrate to other applications with this Eclipse-based solution

Sales Center key benefits:

• Improves service for cross-channel customers

• Increases sales in the call center by enabling cross-selling and up-selling

• Reduces the cost and complexity of your technology environment by using WebSphere Commerce as the central server for call center and Web operations

• Eliminates the need to synchronize catalog, customer, promotion, and order data between disparate systems

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:

• Support for multiple events types such as weddings, engagements, and birthdays

• Private and public registries

• Rich registry creation and management features

• Ability for multiple co-registrants

• E-mail announcements for gift givers

• Completion program with seller-defined discounts upon closeout

• "Thank you" notes tracker

• Sample kiosk user interface

• Sample gift store consultant user interface

• Ability for gift givers to purchase an item for themselves and from the registry in a single checkout

IBM Gift Center key benefits:

• Increases revenue for the seller, as each purchase from a gift registry is an additional sale for the store

• Improves customer service through seamless registry interaction and service across channels

• Improves average order values as gift givers often buy items for themselves when purchasing from a registry

• Improves customer reach as registry guests who purchase become new customers

• Reduces the cost and complexity of your technology environment by using WebSphere Commerce as the central server for all cross-channel gifting processes

  • at an in-store kiosk

  • from an online Web site

  • by working with an in-store gift consultant or Customer Service Representative

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:

• Reduced order processing costs through automation and streamlining of processes

• Greater efficiency through single view of transactions across multiple channels

• Improved customer satisfaction through:

  • Better visibility into inventory and order history

  • Seamless and consistent order experience across all channels

  • Easier and quicker integration to third-party online payment providers

New and changed cross-channel order processing capabilities:

 

Order capture

• Ability to create orders and order items with a requested shipment date A customer can request that items in an order be shipped on a particular date.

• Ability to specify tie codes and to request orders to be shipped as complete A customer can specify grouping codes so that certain items in a shopping cart ship together. A customer can also request the entire order to be shipped as complete, in which case all items in the order will be released to fulfillment at the same time. A shopper can choose to ship the order when all order items are available (ShipAsComplete), or the shopper can choose to ship items as they are available.

• Multiple payment methods per order More than one payment method can be used to pay for an order, such as a gift certificate for the first $25 and a credit card for the balance. Each payment method has a priority. The priority is used to determine which payment method should be used or used first.

• Ability to specify shipping instructions A customer or (CSR) Customer Service Representative can specify shipping instructions when placing an order at a store. For example, customers can specify that packages shipped with a particular shipping mode should be "left on the back porch" or "under the door mat" at delivery.

• Ability to specify shipping carrier account codes If allowed by the contract terms and conditions, a business customer can specify a shipping carrier account code. If a shipping carrier account code is specified, instead of shipping charges being applied to the corresponding order items, the account code is passed to the carrier for settlement between the carrier company and the customer.

• Ability to block orders A CSR can mark an order as blocked, which means that items belonging to this order cannot be shipped. Each block is associated with a reason code. The store can configure which block reason codes will automatically generate a tickler for tracking the issue. Orders can be blocked manually by a CSR, or automatically by the order processing system if the order needs manual approval before processing.

• Ability to create quote and convert quote to order A CSR can create a price quote for a customer, which guarantees the price for a specified period of time. Within the quote expiry period the CSR can, at the customer's request, convert the quote to an order.

• CSR Order Edit A CSR can edit an order after it is submitted, as long as it has not been released to fulfillment. The CSR can add or change order items, payment instructions, or shipping instructions. The CSR can also add or change overrides for item prices or for shipping charges. When one CSR is editing an order or return, the order or return is locked, and another CSR cannot edit the same order or return. Another feature of order edit is that a CSR can view the order edit history.

• Support for manual price and shipping charge overrides A CSR can override prices and shipping charges when creating a quote or an order. CSRs can be assigned to groups which give limits as to the depth of discount that they can give. If a CSR exceeds their override limit, then the system can automatically block the order and also optionally create a tickler.

• Ability to track orders by channel A CSR is allowed by the Order channel tracking feature, to assign a channel to an order during the creation of the order.

• Itemized shipping manifests and the ability to use product serial numbers for verifying received returns The order manifest can now include itemized information, including which order items have been shipped, and their corresponding serial numbers. Serial numbers can also be specified for items that are being returned.

• Address validation for business accounts The organizational address book can be used for orders placed on behalf of business accounts.

Order processing

• Support for multiple ship dates for different items in an order When using the ATP inventory system, different items within an order can be released to fulfillment at different times. This can happen either because of different inventory availability of the items, or because the customer requested different ship dates. The release to fulfillment process has been updated to support the new features within order capture, such as ship as complete, tie codes, and order blocking.

• Support for non-taxable charges The calculation framework has been enhanced to allow a store to create non-taxable charges, such as recycling fees, with products in specific jurisdictions.

Integration

• Ability to separate inventory, order capture, and order processing In this release, clear interface boundaries are defined within the Order subsystem between order capture, order processing, and inventory. This allows for easier integration with external order processing and inventory management systems. The Inventory System behaves differently depending on whether the store is configured to use Available-To-Promise (ATP), Non-ATP, or No Inventory.

• Ability to integrate with external order management systems (OMS) Integration is enabled between WebSphere Commerce and any external order management or fulfillment system, which provides an integrated solution that encompasses the entire order lifecycle. When orders are placed, the overall charges for the order and order items are calculated, and the order is handed off to the external OMS. The OMS can subsequently interact with the WebSphere Commerce order pre-processing service to re-calculate the order charges during the order, if the order needs to be modified within the OMS. This service also includes the checking of product entitlement, PO numbers, shipping and payment information, contract spending limits, and payment methods.

Payment

• Support for non-taxable charges More than one payment method can be used to pay for an order, with an amount specified for each payment method.

• Payment rules Payment rules specify the set of payment actions that need to take place at different points in the order flow. Payment rules are configurable for different payment methods within different stores.

• Plug-in payments processing for integration to third-party payment providers The payment system allows the use of lightweight payment plug-ins to integrate with payment provider gateways. The WebSphere Commerce Payments cassettes can also be used.

 

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:

• Assign work by tasks that are contained in task groups

• Sending notifications

• Executing site changes to product, content, promotions, and campaigns

• Previewing changes

• Approving changes

• Scheduling when changes go into production

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:

• Create targeted personalized e-mails

• Select from available e-mail templates

• Enter text and HTML and add images

• Add e-spots and use campaign activities to target content and product recommendations as part of the e-mail content

• Point and click to add tags to include the customer's name in the e-mail

• Create links to other Web pages and images

• Select from lists of available URL commands to direct the customer to the Web site and add an item directly to a shopping cart

• Use push-button preview to see the completed e-mail before it is sent out to customers

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:

• Leverages the WebSphere Web Service Runtime Infrastructure and Rational tooling

• Promotes the use of industry-standard service definitions

• Allows top-down and bottom-up creation of Web services

• Leverages the JSP page composition service to generate the Web service response, allowing dynamic caching to be optimized (for either full-page or fragment caching).

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:

• Tracks user session information from different channels by using different types of business contexts

• Provides a pluggable interface where custom context information can be defined

• Provides the ability to extend WebSphere Commerce out of the box session attributes with custom information

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:

• EJB 2.x modules with a combination of 1.1 and 2.x beans.

• Servlet 2.4

• JSP 2.0

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:

• Pages can be cached based on WebSphere Commerce Session information on the edge server

• WebSphere Commerce caching is now reconfigurable without shutting down the application server

Benefits of WebSphere Commerce edge caching:

• Increases the number of pages being cached on the edge server which translates into increased performance

• Session cookie customization is not required as changes are only needed to the cachespec.xml

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:

• It outlines the best practice approach to migration. You will be guided through all steps of the migration process.

• It provides default values where possible.

• It hides the complexity of running the underlying tools.

• It reduces the probability of migration errors.

• It provides a navigation tree that displays the tasks you have performed, the migration step you are currently in, and the steps complete.

• It provides context sensitive help.

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:

• WebSphere Commerce Business Edition to WebSphere Commerce Enterprise

• WebSphere Commerce Professional Edition to WebSphere Commerce Professional

• WebSphere Commerce Express - no change.

• WebSphere Commerce Developer Business Edition to WebSphere Commerce Developer Enterprise

• WebSphere Commerce Developer Professional Edition to WebSphere Commerce Developer Professional

• WebSphere Commerce Developer Express - no change.

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