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ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 26 /PRNewswire/ — Forty-five percent of IBM (NYSE: IBM) Business Partners are experimenting with a social media business strategy to generate new revenue streams; however, three quarters say they still are uncertain how to apply it as an effective sales tool, according to survey results from 1,000 IBM worldwide partners released today.

The proliferation of social media outlets and the potential to capitalize on social networking trends may help boost sales in a challenging economy, the IBM Business Partners report.

Positions IBM to Lead Industry in Cloud Integration

ARMONK, N.Y.- 03 May 2010:

IBM (NYSE:  IBM) today announced it has acquired Cast Iron Systems to broaden the delivery of cloud computing services for clients.  Cast Iron Systems, a privately held company based in Mountain View, CA, delivers industry-leading cloud integration software, appliances and services.  Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition expands IBM’s industry-leading business process and integration software portfolio, which grew more than 20 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

Feature Pack 1 Extends Customer Experience for Version 7

With the new Feature Pack 1 launch for IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7, IBM focuses on extending the brand experience to deliver a smarter shopping experience for customers.

In terms of installation, nothing new, but there are tools for migrating Marketing Campaigns… In V7, should definitely go with Management Center to take advantage of latest Marketing features.

The migration tool for V7 is improved from previous versions.

It is now based entirely on ANT scripts and custom ANT tasks, so it allows customizations.

WebSphere Commerce Build and Deploy (WCBD) is the first tool to be developed by the WebSphere Commerce development team that addresses the build and deployment aspect of a WebSphere Commerce customization project. The tool is aims to provide a standardized, ANTbased, build and deployment framework that is available to IBMers as well as business partners and customers. It is designed based on the best practices documented in the WebSphere Commerce Information Center. WCBD is designed to satisfy most typical build and deployment needs, leaving only few configuration steps for a quick startup. When needs differ from the standard implementation, the framework scripts can be customized.

Business user tool enhancements include the marketing dialog builder for creating and managing marketing and merchandising dialog activities with shoppers over time. Other enhancements include support for dynamically managing customer segments; as well as managing content, e-marketing spots and sales catalog in an extended sites model. The Promotions user interface has also been enhanced; and promotions based on catalog attributes, payment method, choice of free gift and others have been added.

WebSphere Commerce focuses on improving the customer shopping experience with a Web 2.0 Starter Store, which provides an out-of-the-box customizable storefront to get your online site up quickly. The Web 2.0 Starter Store enhances site performance, streamlines the checkout process and reduces the customization cost of the web storefront with the use of Cascading Style Sheets and enhanced Web 2.0 widgets such as: Product Fast Finder, Quick Product Info, Mini Shopping Cart, drag and drop of page objects and more.

New Dataload Tool, To Replace Massload.

Data load means to load the data from external data sources to WebSphere Commerce database. There are typically two scenarios for data loading: initial load and delta load. Initial data loading is the first time you load the data into the database. Usually large amount of data is involved during this loading. Delta load is used for data insert, update and delete. Delta load can happen daily or weekly.

A new data load solution is provided in the WebSphere Commerce version 7. The main purpose of this solution is to reduce the total cost of the loading custom data.

In the last article is about overview of Social Commerce. In the entry, our goals is to share  the basic configuration steps to configure social commerce.

Architecture Diagram

• Social commerce not part of WC EAR, provided separately by sMash
• Rendered Store Page with Catalog Content – provided by WC as HTML
• Static Social Content for Search Engines – viewable in <noscript>, ie: with Javascript turned off
  • WC JSPs will access content directly from sMash
  • gets cached with JSP
• Social Content Widget – provided by sMash, talk to sMash using HTTP + JSON
• Separated widgets from service providers

Social commerce capabilities enable online stores to support product ratings and reviews via integration with BazaarVoice, blogs, photo galleries, and user profiles via integration with IBM Lotus® Connections and Pluck Sitelife. These integrations are provided in a vendor-agnostic manner using WebSphere sMash applications, provided with WebSphere Commerce.