IBM Gift Center for WebSphere Commerce and gift registry feature
What is the IBM Gift Center?
IBM Gift Center for WebSphere Commerce allows you to incorporate a gift registry solution into your business. You can offer a gift registry service to customers to ease gift selection and decision making. Gift registries are particularly helpful for events where your customers have invited several guests and intend to receive many gifts. Weddings, anniversaries, baby or bridal showers, and significant birthdays are popular events for gift registries. From your perspective, you can take part in your customer's life events, maximize revenue, and increase customer loyalty.
IBM Gift Center for WebSphere Commerce, an optional, chargeable feature, can be licensed to run only on WebSphere Commerce Enterprise or WebSphere Commerce Professional, not WebSphere Commerce Express. IBM Gift Center software can be installed using either WebSphere Commerce Enterprise or WebSphere Commerce Professional CDs, but you are required to purchase separate licenses to legally use the IBM Gift Center software. However, license of the WebSphere Commerce Enterprise or Professional product does not permit you to use the IBM Gift Center. You must first purchase the processor and store features of the IBM Gift Center available for the WebSphere Commerce Enterprise or Professional product before you can use any IBM Gift Center function included in the products. If you are interested in purchasing a license for the IBM Gift Center for WebSphere Commerce, please contact your IBM sales representative.
Two key roles in the gift registry solution are as follows:
- The gift registrant and co-registrants, who define the purpose of the gift registry, select the gifts they want, and manage aspects of the gift registry profile.
- The gift givers, who purchase gifts for the registrants from the gift registry.
In addition to the base IBM Gift Center solution, you can download three sample applications, which contain the user interfaces for a true multichannel solution. The sample applications illustrate how customers can create and manage their gift registries using various methods: from an online Web site, in-store with a trained gift consultant, or at in-store kiosks with a hand-held scanner to add items.
How do I install the the IBM Gift Center?
For details on how to install the IBM Gift Center, and where to download the sample applications, refer to the WebSphere Commerce Additional Software Guide.
At a high level, when you run the enablement script (that is, enableGiftCenterForServer.xml or enableGiftCenterForToolkit.xml) to install the base IBM Gift Center, the script executes the following tasks:
- Checks to see whether or not IBM Gift Center is already enabled on your system. If it is not, it continues to install. If it is, then an error message is displayed, to indicate that the IBM Gift Center is already enabled and cannot be enabled more than once.
- Loads the IBM Gift Center bootstrap data XML files into the following directory:WC_installdir/components/GiftCenter/schema/xml
WCDE_installdir/components/GiftCenter/schema/xml
- Loads the IBM Gift Center access control policies data XML files into the following directory:WC_installdir/components/GiftCenter/xml/policies
WCDE_installdir/components/GiftCenter/xml/policies
- Updates the following configuration file to enable IBM Gift Center:WC_installdir/instances/instance/xml/instance.xml
WCDE_installdir\xml\config\wc-server.xml
For example, the script updates the BusinessContextConfigFile attribute of the BusinessContextService element to include "config/businessContext-GiftCenter.xml"
- Updates the WebSphere Commerce EAR with the files in following directory:WC_installdir/components/GiftCenter/wc.ear
WCDE_installdir/components/GiftCenter/wc.ear
Note that the script installs the base IBM Gift Center. To use the IBM Gift Center user interfaces for each gift registry channel, download and install the IBM Gift Center sample applications.
How do I customize the IBM Gift Center?
The IBM Gift Center uses the same development environment as WebSphere Commerce. You should be familiar with the development environment (and the related information about IBM Gift Center customization) if you plan to customize the IBM Gift Center.
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