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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.
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.
Administration Console
Site Administrators use the Administration Console to control a site or store by completing administrative operations and configuration tasks such as refreshing the registry, and scheduling jobs. You can access the Administration Console at a site-level, or for a particular store.
Message types
HCL Commerce predefines several message types and sets them as active. You can change the parameters for message types.
Configuring validation for No Operation (NOOP) messages
HCL Commerce uses SMTP connection pooling by default. SMTPTransport.isConnected() is used for validation before getting a connection from the pool, and sends a No Operation (NOOP) message. Some firewalls might be configured to introduce a delay after receiving several NOOP messages to protect against Denial of Service attacks. You must either validate the firewall and SMTP configurations for NOOP messages, or set mail.smtp.userset to true.

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 9.1, 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.
    - Administration Console
      Site Administrators use the Administration Console to control a site or store by completing administrative operations and configuration tasks such as refreshing the registry, and scheduling jobs. You can access the Administration Console at a site-level, or for a particular store.
      - Opening the Administration Console
        Users with Site Administrator access can open the Administration Console.
      - Registry Manager
        The Registry Manager maintains a set of registries for caching HCL Commerce runtime data. Each registry provides methods to enable adding, deleting, and refreshing of the registry content. These methods are available to the URL interface by using the ListRegistry and the RefreshRegistry commands.
      - Transport methods
        HCL Commerce provides several transport methods. By default, the e-mail transport method is configured and active. You can also use these transport methods: File, IBM MQ, or a sample adapter. You can configure transport methods for the site, or for particular stores.
      - Message types
        HCL Commerce predefines several message types and sets them as active. You can change the parameters for message types.
        Configuring outbound email notification messages
        Use the Administration Console to configure outbound email notification messages.
        Configuring email activity accounts
        To support sending marketing emails for your store, you must use the Administration Console to configure outbound and inbound email activity accounts.
        Configuring timeouts for SMTP connections
        Configure timeouts for SMTP connections by indicating specific parameters. By not configuring timeouts, the thread can wait indefinitely for an SMTP server to respond, leading to a hang in the HCL Commerce JVM.
        Configuring a different mail Socket Factory
        If you use a third-party mail service like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Office 365, you might need to change the Socket Factory to javax.net.SocketFactory.
        Configuring validation for No Operation (NOOP) messages
        HCL Commerce uses SMTP connection pooling by default. SMTPTransport.isConnected() is used for validation before getting a connection from the pool, and sends a No Operation (NOOP) message. Some firewalls might be configured to introduce a delay after receiving several NOOP messages to protect against Denial of Service attacks. You must either validate the firewall and SMTP configurations for NOOP messages, or set mail.smtp.userset to true.
        Configuring the SMTP connection pool properties
        Ensure that the Transaction server SMTP connection pool properties match the SMTP server timeout to avoid periodic mail failure. These failures can occur due to mail being sent with a connection that is expired on the SMTP server.
        Assigning a message type to a transport method for a site or store
        If you assign a message type to a particular transport, the transport must first be set active. By default, only the e-mail transport is active at the site-level. If the store does not have a message transport assignment, then the site assignment is used.
        Enabling order status notification
        This message is sent to the administrator with "Recipient" listed under this Administration Console configuration. It will not send to the customer of the order. This message assumes that only the Site Administrator is interested in the order status update. HCL Commerce site or store developers can customize the OrderStatusNotifySendCmd command by providing another implementation to send e-mails to either the administrator, or the customer, or both.
        Enabling transports
        Not all transports are enabled by default. If you need a transport that is not enabled by default, you can enable the transport by updating the HCL Commerce configuration file.
        Enabling the Report_NC_PurchaseOrder message
        The Order Create outbound message can be enabled in either XML format, or the legacy format.
        Enabling the shipment notification e-mail
        You can configure HCL Commerce so that a shipment notification e-mail is sent to customers when their order is shipped:
        Configuring the Request_WCS_BE_ProductInventory message
        To enable HCL Commerce to use the send-receive message service, configure the CheckInventoryAvailabilityBE message.
        Activating error notification
        After you have set the system default settings for the e-mail transport method you can activate error notification.
        Outbound messages
        The HCL Commerce outbound messaging system can process different message types. Each message type is sent to the messaging system in response to a specific type of event that occurs within the HCL Commerce system. You specify the message type and settings in the Administration Console. The messaging system processes the message according to the type and settings that you specified, such as mail server, server port, sender, and subject. You change the content of the mail by modifying the JSP file that corresponds to the message type.
    - Organization Administration Console
      The Organization Adminisration tool enables to manage Admin and organization activities. User Management, Approval Management, Member Group Management, and Organization Management was a part of old Organization Administration Console, and is now managed by Management Center tools.
  - 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.
  - 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 and the Elasticsearch search engine. The indexing pipeline is a more open, flexible and scalable and is tightly integrated with the data service. Using the underlying dataflow technology and architecture, you can easily customize the pipelines. 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.

Configuring validation for No Operation (NOOP) messages

HCL Commerce uses SMTP connection pooling by default. SMTPTransport.isConnected() is used for validation before getting a connection from the pool, and sends a No Operation (NOOP) message. Some firewalls might be configured to introduce a delay after receiving several NOOP messages to protect against Denial of Service attacks. You must either validate the firewall and SMTP configurations for NOOP messages, or set mail.smtp.userset to true.

Perform the following steps to set mail.smtp.userset to true:

Procedure

Create a file named JCAEmailConnectionRequestInfo.properties in the WAS_installdir/lib directory.
Include the following parameter in the file:
```
mail.smtp.userset=true
```
For a list of possible JavaMail configuration parameters, see the package description of Package com.sun.mail.smtp.
Restart the HCL Commerce JVM for the changes to take effect.