This Help Center provides documentation on all aspects of the HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server product, from installation and deployment to operating and customization.
The site administrator performs the tasks needed to support day to day operations of the Commerce+ Transaction Server site.
Workspaces provide a powerful and flexible way to manage and preview changes to your e-commerce website without affecting the live production environment.
Workspaces can be used in a variety of scenarios.
Welcome to the HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server overview. Explore these feature overviews to learn how Commerce+ Transaction Server operates. Refer to the related links listed at the end of each topic to access expanded product documentation.
This section provides details on deploying HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server. It explains how to download the Docker images and Git bundles that comprise the product, how to create a minimal environment, and how to plan for a full deployment. It details supported software versions, patches, and configurations to ensure the platform performs well.
The following topics show how to migrate an existing HCL Commerce Version 9.1 environment to Commerce+ Transaction Server.
The topics in this section focus on tasks that are performed by business users, marketers, and customer support representatives to connect with partners and attract and satisfy customers.
A member group is a grouping of members - users, organizations, or other member groups - used for various business purposes. Two kinds of member groups exist: implicit and explicit. An implicit member group contains users that share common attributes and are therefore considered members of a specific member group. An implicit member group specifies criteria or attributes that users must satisfy in order to be considered members of that member group. You can also explicitly exclude certain users although they satisfy the criteria. An explicit member group contains explicitly assigned users, who may or may not share common attributes. A member group can be both implicit and explicit at the same time.
Use the HCL Commerce+ Inventory to manage your inventory and access your Inventory Locations (ILs), where your inventory is physically stored and is delivered or shipped from.
Accurate, secure transactions require that a second individual approve some electronic marketplace actions before they proceed. This individual, called an approver, can accept or reject requests to perform a specific action. During the organization registration process, the organization administrator selects the business processes for which they want to enable approval. This is done by signing up for the appropriate approval member group during membership registration. The organization administrator also populates the approver member groups. Only users within these groups have the authority to accept or reject requests to perform those actions for which approval has been enabled.
Commerce Lab allows you to manage transport, messages, scheduler, Connectors, registries, and security policies.
An Commerce+ Transaction Server 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.
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.
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 environment. The product information must be corrected as quickly as possible on the production environment. 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 Commerce+ Transaction Server 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 Commerce+ Transaction Server site and is not configurable by store.
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.
When you use workspaces, you should have strong business processes in place to prevent the situations outlined in Workspaces limitations and restrictions.
When you are using workspaces, be aware of known limitations.
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 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.
Business users work on catalog-related changes in an isolated environment when you work with workspaces in Commerce Search. They can then preview their changes in the storefront before you submit them for approval. Content approvers or workspace managers then use the Workspace Management tool in the Commerce Lab to preview a workspace, undo submitted tasks, reject, cancel, or approve task groups. A task group is scheduled for publishing after it is approved.
As a site administrator, maintain the Commerce+ Transaction Server database and ensure that any Commerce+ Transaction Server 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 Open Liberty Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
Commerce+ Transaction Server provides utilities for preparing and loading data into a Commerce+ Transaction Server database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the Commerce+ Transaction Server schema.
HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server Search provides the core search capability for Commerce+ Transaction Server, enabling product indexing and retrieval for customer queries across the storefront. It supports guided navigation, landing pages, and dynamic merchandising, helping shoppers quickly find relevant products while giving merchandisers tools to influence search results.
Using Commerce+ Transaction Server's xC programming model, you can use HCL-provided extension points to extend existing Commerce logic. You can implement these extensions with the xC Customization toolkit provided by HCL. Commerce+ also provides Packaged Business Capability integrations that extend the product's reach and functionality.
These topics describe the security features of Commerce+ Transaction Server and how to configure these features.
Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of Commerce+ Transaction Server site performance.
Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with Commerce+ Transaction Server, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
Topics in the Reference section contain all of the Commerce+ Transaction Server reference documentation.