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Documentation
This Help Center provides documentation on all aspects of the HCL Commerce+ product, from installation and deployment to operating and customization.
Administering
The site administrator performs the tasks needed to support day to day operations of the Commerce+ site.
Workspaces
Workspaces provide a powerful and flexible way to manage and preview changes to your e-commerce website without affecting the live production environment.
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.
Publishing to the production environment
Publish production-ready data from the authoring environment to the production environment to propagate changes to your site.

Documentation
This Help Center provides documentation on all aspects of the HCL Commerce+ product, from installation and deployment to operating and customization.
- Overview
  Welcome to the HCL Commerce+ overview. Explore these feature overviews to learn how Commerce+ operates. Refer to the related links listed at the end of each topic to access expanded product documentation.
- Deploying
  This section provides details on deploying HCL Commerce+. 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.
- Migrating
  The following topics show how to migrate an existing HCL Commerce Version 9.1 environment to Commerce+. The process consists of an initial migration of your database contents. This is followed by a code migration. Both are fully described.
- Operating
  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.
- Administering
  The site administrator performs the tasks needed to support day to day operations of the Commerce+ site.
  - Member groups
    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.
  - Inventory management
    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.
  - Approvals
    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.
  - System Administration
    Commerce Lab allows you to manage transport, messages, scheduler, Connectors, registries, and security policies.
  - Staging environment
    An 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
    Workspaces provide a powerful and flexible way to manage and preview changes to your e-commerce website without affecting the live production environment.
    - 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.
    - Workspaces example scenarios
      Workspaces can be used in a variety of scenarios.
    - Workspace managed assets
      Managed assets are 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 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.
      - Committing workspace data to production-ready data
        Approve a task group to commit files and data in the task group to production-ready data, either immediately or at a scheduled time set earlier. If the task group is marked as quick publish, task group files and data are also published to the production environment.
      - Publishing to the production environment
        Publish production-ready data from the authoring environment to the production environment to propagate changes to your site.
      - Task flow: Publishing workspace data
        You can publish changes made to files and data within a workspace to the production server. This task flow guides you step-by-step through the process of committing files and data from the workspace to production-ready data on the authoring environment, and publishing to the production server. After you publish files and data to the production environment, you can begin 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.
    - 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.
    - Workspaces in Commerce Search
      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.
  - Commerce+ database
    As a site administrator, maintain the Commerce+ database and ensure that any Commerce+ utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Extracting and loading data
    Commerce+ provides utilities for preparing and loading data into a Commerce+ database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the Commerce+ schema.
  - Administering Search
    HCL Commerce+ Search provides the core search capability for Commerce+, 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.
  - Logging services
    Commerce+ maintains a detailed set of logs related to a variety of processes and functions. These logs are available upon request.
  - 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.
- Extending
  Using Commerce+'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.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of 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 Commerce+ site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with Commerce+, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the Commerce+ reference documentation.

Publishing to the production environment

Publish production-ready data from the authoring environment to the production environment to propagate changes to your site.

Before you begin

Ensure that the task group that contains the data has already been committed (which means it is merged with production-ready data on the authoring environment); the actual publish involves moving the production-ready data from the authoring environment to the production environment.

Tip: An authoring environment is a staging environment that has workspaces enabled.

About this task

Use the following methods to publish production-ready data from the authoring environment to the production environment:

Quick publish

If quick publish is enabled when a task group is created in a workspace, the files and data in that task group are published to the production environment as soon as all tasks in that task group are marked complete and all approvals are satisfied. When all tasks in a task group marked as quick publish are completed and, if necessary, approved, the task group files and data are committed to the production-ready data. When the task group commit completes successfully, the task group files and data are published to the production environment.

If the task group commit fails, the files and data from the task group remain committed to the production-ready data and are not published to the production environment. You can use the stagingprop utility to immediately correct errors and publish the production-ready data to the production environment.

Quick publish is not supported in Commerce+ Developer.