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HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
Administering
Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
Workspaces
You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
Enabling Workspaces
You enable workspaces by creating a new HCL Commerce authoring environment instance.
Synchronizing an authoring environment with a production environment
If you create your authoring environment after creating a production environment, you must synchronize your production and authoring environment to ensure that the authoring environment accurately reflects your production environment. You should also synchronize your authoring environment and production environment if at any point your production-ready data on the authoring environment does not accurately reflect your production environment. This can be caused by changes made directly on the production environment, either one large change or a series of smaller, incremental changes that cause the information about the authoring environment and production environment to no longer be synchronized.

Documentation
HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
- Getting started
  HCL Commerce has different advantages for business users, administrators and developers. HCL Commerce targets each of these roles with a tailored set of offerings so that each of your users can get maximum benefit.
- Installing and deploying
  Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Operating
  Topics in the Operating category highlight tasks that are typically performed by business users, customer support representatives, to complete their day-to-day tasks in the operation of the HCL Commerce site.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
  - The HCL Commerce application
    Every time you deploy the HCL Commerce application, you are deploying a set of Docker containers that communicate with each other to run your HCL Commerce site. Each HCL Commerce application deployment can contain one or more stores.
  - Overview of administering an HCL Commerce site
    In HCL Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains HCL 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.
  - Staging environment
    an HCL Commerce staging environment is a runtime environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production environment.
  - Workspaces
    You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
    - Workspaces overview
      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.
    - Enabling Workspaces
      You enable workspaces by creating a new HCL Commerce authoring environment instance.
      - Creating an authoring environment
        You can run an authoring environment on a separate system or machine partition from your production environment.
      - Synchronizing an authoring environment with a production environment
        If you create your authoring environment after creating a production environment, you must synchronize your production and authoring environment to ensure that the authoring environment accurately reflects your production environment. You should also synchronize your authoring environment and production environment if at any point your production-ready data on the authoring environment does not accurately reflect your production environment. This can be caused by changes made directly on the production environment, either one large change or a series of smaller, incremental changes that cause the information about the authoring environment and production environment to no longer be synchronized.
      - Authoring environment schema update tool
        The content management solution in HCL Commerce introduces multiple database schemas on the authoring environment that require each and every table to have a definition within each schema. The definition within the workspaces schemas differ depending on whether the table is considered to be one of the following resources:
      - Enabling quick publish
        If database information for your production environment changes, you must update the quick publish target.
      - Enabling e-mail notification for workspaces
        Enabling e-mail notification in workspaces allows HCL Commerce to send e-mail automatically in certain situations.
      - Enabling shopping flow preview for workspaces
        Enabling shopping flow preview in workspaces allows users to preview how their changes affect the experience of a customer when the customer is completing a shopping flow.
      - Changing workspaces locking policy
        Do not change the workspaces locking policy if you have uncommitted data in any of your workspaces. This can cause undefined behavior with the uncommitted data.
      - Configuring retry for committing approved task group changes
        You can configure the task group approval process to automatically retry committing task group changes to the database. By configuring this setting, you can avoid having the commit of approved task group changes fail when a database timeout error occurs.
      - Enabling the change history for approved and canceled task groups
        To maintain the change history for approved or canceled task groups, configure how the change history is recorded for changes that are made within a task group.
    - Workspaces example scenarios
      Workspaces can be used in a variety of scenarios.
    - Workspace managed assets
      Managed assets are HCL 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.
    - Workspaces locking policies
      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.
    - Publishing workspace data
      Once all workspace tasks are completed and approved, you can publish files and data from the authoring environment to the production environment to view the effects on your site.
    - Workspaces best practices
      When you use workspaces, you should have strong business processes in place to prevent the situations outlined in Workspaces limitations and restrictions.
    - Workspaces limitations
      When you are using workspaces, be aware of known limitations.
    - Workspaces performance tuning
      Workspaces use 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.
    - Workspaces data model
      Content management is achieved through the use of workspaces. Each workspace is comprised of three database schemas.
    - Workspace state flows
      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.
  - HCL Commerce database
    As a site administrator, maintain the HCL Commerce database and ensure that any HCL Commerce utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Dynamic caching
    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.
  - Extracting and loading data
    HCL Commerce provides utilities for preparing and loading data into a HCL Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the HCL Commerce schema.
  - Payment plug-ins
    To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
  - Search
    In keeping with HCL's commitment to current and open standards, HCL Commerce Search uses Apache Lucene as the basis of its Search framework. Lucene powers the Apache Solr search engine. This open-standards approach considerably eases the process of integrating Search with existing and third-party applications.
  - HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce
    HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce is a separately purchased product that provides a light-weight customer service solution that is embedded in the Aurora B2C and Aurora B2B storefronts. Even though this solution is a separately purchased product, it is not a separate application. Stores that are enabled with HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce allow a customer service representative (CSR) to act on behalf of guest customers and registered customers. A CSR can manage customer accounts, cancel and reorder orders, and shop as customer. A CSR can also act on behalf of Buyer Administrators to help complete Aurora B2B tasks from the storefront, without having to access the Organization Administration Console.
  - HCL Commerce configuration file (wc-server.xml)
    Many aspects of the HCL Commerce runtime application are configured in an XML file. This XML file is located inside the HCL Commerce Java Platform, Enterprise Edition EAR.
  - Enabling the SSL Accelerator option
    An SSL Accelerator (or SSL Terminator) strips off HTTPS encryption at or before the Web server tier in a multitier setup. When you use an SSL Accelerator with HCL Commerce, you can use the SSL Accelerator option to configure HCL Commerce to correctly receive requests that require redirects.
  - Managing features
    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.
  - Logging services
    HCL 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
    Business auditing is the capturing of the business logic and objects during a HCL 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.
  - Business events
    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.
  - Business Object thresholds
    Applying limits on business operations reduces the risk of system attacks where unbound conditions might result in system failures.
  - Stores in HCL Commerce
    HCL Commerce supports several different types of entities that are defined as stores. The assets of these store entities may be edited using the HCL Commerce Accelerator.
  - Enabling registered users to access all stores in the Extended Sites business model
    HCL Commerce users can access storefronts by virtue of having the role of Registered Customer in the organization that owns the store, or in any organization above it. The roles a user has access to during registration are defined within the MemberRegistrationAttributes.xml file.
  - Hystrix on the Store server
    The Hystrix framework is used as a proxy for back-end resources such as the Transaction server and Search server by default. This can be disabled, but does have performance implications that must be considered.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
- Tutorials
  HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
  Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage HCL Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
  Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.

Synchronizing an authoring environment with a production environment

If you create your authoring environment after creating a production environment, you must synchronize your production and authoring environment to ensure that the authoring environment accurately reflects your production environment. You should also synchronize your authoring environment and production environment if at any point your production-ready data on the authoring environment does not accurately reflect your production environment. This can be caused by changes made directly on the production environment, either one large change or a series of smaller, incremental changes that cause the information about the authoring environment and production environment to no longer be synchronized.

Procedure

Use the stagingcopy utility to copy all data from the production environment database to the production-ready database on the authoring environment.

For more information, review Staging environment limitations.
Deploy the application you have setup with the production environment into the authoring environment. For more information, see Planning your production environment infrastructure.