The Take Control Maintenance Plan is a cost-effective way for companies to have 24x7x365 support for e-commerce sites powered by WebSphere. It alleviates the burden of monitoring, maintaining, and tuning to keep WebSphere Commerce running in a continuously uninterrupted and optimized way. Businesses will be able to concentrate on marketing and merchandising initiatives that directly deliver ROI instead of technical site housekeeping chores and support.
Zobrist Software Group Inc. today announced it has achieved certification to become an Authorized seller of IBM Information Management, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli and WebSphere software by meeting the skills requirements of the new IBM Software Value Plus initiative.
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.
With the increased use of mobile devices and technology, WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 enables smart phones as new customer touch points for browsing the online store, conducting side-by-side product comparisons, receiving marketing messages, promotion codes, store location information, inventory availability, and completing transactions. The mobile store model provides out-of-the-box support for smart phones allowing companies to quickly adopt mobile as a new channel for doing business; while seamlessly leveraging the power of the Cross-Channel Precision Marketing Engine in this new customer touch point.