The information contained in this section applies to IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0.0.9 and Feautre Pack 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in new editions.
You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
Workspaces can be used in a variety of scenarios.
Creating a custom implementation of a WebSphere Commerce store requires a significant amount of planning. From gathering client needs, to deploying the live solution, much work is needed to successfully deploy a custom client store. Use the resources in here to help you plan every phase of store creation.
Review this section for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
Before you migrate WebSphere Commerce, review this information for an overview of the migration process.
In WebSphere Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains WebSphere Commerce and the associated software and hardware. The administrator responds to system warnings, alerts, and errors, and diagnoses and resolves system problems. Typically, this person controls access and authorization (creating and assigning members to the appropriate role), manages the Web site, monitors performance, and manages load balancing tasks. The Site Administrator might be responsible for establishing and maintaining several server configurations for different stages of development such as testing, staging, and production. The Site Administrator also handles critical system backups and resolves performance problems.
Every WebSphere Commerce installation requires at least one instance to function, and each WebSphere Commerce instance can contain one or more stores.
You can administer catalog features such as the attribute dictionary and categories.
You can administer marketing features such as marketing activities, statistics, experiments, and e-mail activities. The adminstration tasks differ depending on whether you use WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or Management Center.
You can administer promotion features such as creating or deleting promotion folders and configuring the promotions engine.
A workspace is an access-controlled work area where you can make and preview changes to managed assets, without affecting what is currently running on your site. Working in the context of a workspace is similar to having your own private copy of the managed assets. You can make and preview changes without affecting managed assets outside the workspace. You can commit the changes that you make in a workspace to the production database, and see the effects of your changes on your site.
You enable workspaces by creating a new WebSphere Commerce authoring server instance.
The following scenario is an example of a workspace, task group, and task lifecycle for emergency fixes. In this scenario, wrong information about several products is appearing in a store on the production server. The product information must be corrected as quickly as possible on the production server. The changes require the approval of one person, the Product Manager.
The following scenario is an example of a workspace, task group, and task lifecycle for regular maintenance for your store. In this scenario, some product descriptions are being changed, and some new merchandising information is being added for products in the store.
The following scenario is an example of a workspace, task group, and task lifecycle for seasonal changes to a store. In this scenario, the store is preparing the introduction of new products for summer, while removing winter products from the store.
Managed assets are WebSphere Commerce components or resources that are enabled for workspaces and allow content to be written to separate workspace database schemas. Workspace Content Contributors can modify managed assets in the context of a workspace.
Locking policies in workspaces allow you to control how changes are made and who is able to make the changes. A locking policy determines if managed assets are locked to a workspace, task group, or task, or if they are not locked at all. The locking policy applies to the entire WebSphere Commerce site and is not configurable by store.
Once all workspace tasks are completed and approved, you can publish files and data from the authoring server to the production server to view the effects on your site.
When you use workspaces, you should have strong business processes in place to prevent the situations outlined in Workspaces limitations and restrictions. These apply to workspaces managed in both the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, and the Management Center.
When you are using workspaces, be aware of known limitations.
Workspaces use of database views instead of tables to retrieve data. Retrieval of underlying data might be more time-consuming because of the complexity of SQL statements that are used in workspace view definitions.
Content management is achieved through the use of workspaces. Each workspace in WebSphere Commerce Version 7 is comprised of three database schemas. These schemas are identical whether you are using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or the Management Center.
Workspaces can be used in a variety of states. State-flow diagrams can help you understand the allowed actions during various states in workspaces, task groups, and tasks.
A Site Administrator must perform a series of tasks to enable and configure price rules and price lists in Management Center.
As Site Administrator, you might be required to assist business users with certain catalog filter tasks that relate to the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center.
You can administer store preview functions such as enabling and disabling commands and views, and adding a customized business context.
As a Site Administrator, you can manage various features of the order management subsystem.
Before you can run auctions in your store, you must first enable auctions with WebSphere Commerce.
As a Site Administrator, you can enable and disable the RFQ trading mechanism, and enable RFQ notification messaging.
Some of the store database assets, (business accounts, and contracts) cannot be loaded by the loading utilities. You can publish these database assets by using the Administration Console or from the command line, as part of the Publish process, or you can publish business accounts and contracts using their corresponding commands.
Edit the WebSphere Commerce configuration file to set the level of caching performed on user traffic data. The default number of URLs in the cache is 20. If this number is too low for your site, for example, if your site is very busy and you are concerned about performance impacts, you can increase the cache size. User traffic data is used in some operational reports.
The Workspace Administration Tool is a graphical user interface tool used to manage workspaces and workspace-related activities. It provides a single view across all workspaces and all tasks in the workspaces where managers can see how work is progressing.
A Site Administrator can enable logging and tracing for the Management Center to troubleshoot problems that a business user might have while using the Management Center. Client-side logging and tracing refers to tracking all the actions that a business user completes while using the Management Center user interface.
If you no longer want to use Management Center to manage your catalogs, promotions, and marketing, you can disable the feature. Note that if you disable Management Center, some objects that you created or updated using Management Center might not work properly in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
WebSphere Commerce provides facilities for logging. For existing customers, ECTrace and ECMessage are still supported. For new implementations, use the WebSphere Application Server recommendation for logging and tracing.
Business auditing is the capturing of the business logic and objects during a WebSphere Commerce operation. You may want to audit your business for various reasons: generic, such as to review various tasks performed weekly; or specific, such as to track the steps involved in a particular Customer Service Representative's order. A report on business auditing is available in the Administration Console.
Each time that a command triggers a business event, a record is added to the BUSEVENT database table to persist data from the event. Event listeners and external systems (such as the Marketing component, a back end order management system, or an external analytics system) can use this data to perform further processing.
The WebSphere Commerce staging server is a part of the production environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production server.
As a site administrator, maintain the WebSphere Commerce database and ensure that any WebSphere Commerce utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
WebSphere Commerce provides multiple utilities for preparing and loading data into a WebSphere Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the WebSphere Commerce schema.
The extended sites business model provides scalability and manageability improvements for WebSphere Commerce sites where there are multiple stores which can share assets including non-ATP inventory. The sharing of non-ATP inventory reduces the complexity of managing inventory assets for all the stores in the site. All stores in extended sites can share inventory from a single asset store with distributed fulfillment centers.
In extended sites store model, tax assets can be shared between the extended site asset store and the extended site store. You can manage the tax assets in an extended site store in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
WebSphere Commerce provides a listener for WebSphere MQ (formerly MQSeries) for inbound requests and an adapter for WebSphere MQ for outbound requests to allow you to integrate back-end and external systems with WebSphere Commerce using WebSphere MQ.
Today's marketplace includes inbound call centers where Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) manage inquiries from potential customers. The IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce manages stores, customers, organizations, orders, quotes, and payment information. The IBM Sales Center is a rich client interface which is installed on CSRs' systems.
WebSphere Commerce provides integration code and support for WebSphere Portal Server. This integration allows to you aggregate WebSphere Commerce services and other content in a portal interaction environment.
You can integrate WebSphere Commerce with Pinterest through Pinterest Buyable Pins that are available through the Pinterest iOS app. Use the WebSphere Commerce Pinterest Integration Accelerator to help with integration.
You can integrate WebSphere Commerce with an external content management system through a punch-out window from Management Center and through the web feed utility. You can integrate WebSphere Commerce with IBM Web Content Manager to provide Management Center users the ability to associate IBM Web Content Manager content with WebSphere Commerce objects.
Dynamic Pricing 16.4 is a cloud-based pricing system that analyzes real-time market data to provide suggestions on how merchandisers can react to competitor pricing and shifts in market conditions. Data can be fed to Dynamic Pricing from multiple sources, including WebSphere Commerce. You can configure WebSphere Commerce to export pricing data to Dynamic Pricing for pricing analysis and adjustment. The adjusted pricing data can then be imported from Dynamic Pricing to WebSphere Commerce, so the prices can be propagated to your live store front.
If your site is integrated with IBM Enterprise Marketing Management applications, such IBM Digital Analytics, IBM Product Recommendations, or IBM Marketing Center, you can administer the application features that your site uses. For example, you can administer IBM Digital Analytics based customer segments and import recommendations for IBM Product Recommendations.
For a fully functioning WebSphere Commerce search implementation, you must understand and complete the search administration tasks which include deployment, search index management, and ongoing maintenance.
A cloned virtual environment creates a separate copy of the original web server, application server, and database. After you clone a WebSphere Commerce virtual environment, you need to configure the clone to differentiate from the original environment.
Consider deploying a dual cell environment to achieve continuous availability and ensure that shoppers are minimally affected by planned or unplanned outages.
WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials.
The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
The following section describes how you can leverage WebSphere Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.
