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3.1 OverviewIn a complex business environment, an enterprise needs to have multiple strategies to make its products available to customers. To ensure business success, an enterprise must present many faces to the market, and each face is perceived by customers as a unique site. Some examples involve customizing the sites for distinct geographies, presenting unique sites based on branding requirements, and setting up customized sites for large customers. Each of these sites must appear unique to the customers that access it, and each site should implement business rules unique to that site. For example, different geographies may have unique legal and tax regulations. However, for operational success, the scalability of management of this large set of sites becomes critical. While those aspects that are unique to each site, such as presentation, marketing campaigns, and catalog variations, must be maintained, it is important that aspects common to the installation be factored out into a single shared set of data. In our experience, typically from 75% to 90% of all configuration data managed by the enterprise is common to all the customized sites that must be created and maintained for marketing reasons. This book describes how to utilize the Extended Sites capability of WebSphere Commerce to address this site scalability challenge. With this capability, the enterprise creates and manages a set of common configuration data assets that are shared across multiple storefronts. For each face that the enterprise presents to the market, you create an extended site that contains all necessary customizations to uniquely position the site for a specific market. The Extended Sites capability provides distinct advantages over basic store modeling. Basic store modeling is when you use a standard consumer direct or B2B direct store model and create a complete set of presentation and data assets for each store within a WebSphere Commerce implementation. The advantages of the Extended Sites model include:
There is no need for the duplication of data for multiple stores. A set of catalog data can be shared across multiple stores.
A single set of presentation JSP files can be used for any number of stores. Changes are propagated to all stores that are sharing this asset.
Lightweight stores can be created very quickly. There is a rich set of capabilities provided to customize each individual store. See 2.6, WebSphere Commerce flow infrastructure.
With less data and fewer assets in an Extended Sites environment compared to the same number of stores created with basic store modeling, there should be a considerable performance improvement using Extended Sites. The more stores that are built, the greater the performance improvement. |
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