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IBM WebSphere Commerce V7
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  1. Home
  2. User Guide

    The information contained in this section applies to IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0.0.9 and Feautre Pack 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in new editions.

  3. Administering
  4. 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.

  5. Workspaces

    You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.

  6. Enabling Workspaces

    You enable workspaces by creating a new WebSphere Commerce authoring server instance.

  • User Guide

    The information contained in this section applies to IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0.0.9 and Feautre Pack 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in new editions.

    • Planning

      Creating a custom implementation of a WebSphere Commerce store requires a significant amount of planning. From gathering client needs, to deploying the live solution, much work is needed to successfully deploy a custom client store. Use the resources in here to help you plan every phase of store creation.

    • Installing

      Review this section for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.

    • Migrating

      Before you migrate WebSphere Commerce, review this information for an overview of the migration process.

    • Operating
    • Administering
      • Overview of administering a WebSphere Commerce site

        In WebSphere Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains WebSphere 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.

      • WebSphere Commerce instance

        Every WebSphere Commerce installation requires at least one instance to function, and each WebSphere Commerce instance can contain one or more stores.

      • WebSphere Commerce Payments instance
      • 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.

        • Catalogs

          You can administer catalog features such as the attribute dictionary and categories.

        • Marketing

          You can administer marketing features such as marketing activities, statistics, experiments, and e-mail activities. The adminstration tasks differ depending on whether you use WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or Management Center.

        • Promotions

          You can administer promotion features such as creating or deleting promotion folders and configuring the promotions engine.

        • Workspaces

          You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.

          • 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.

          • Enabling Workspaces

            You enable workspaces by creating a new WebSphere Commerce authoring server instance.

            • Creating an authoring server

              You can run an authoring server on a separate system or machine partition from your production server.

            • ***
            • ***
            • Synchronizing an authoring server with a production server

              If you create your authoring server after creating a production server, you must synchronize your production and authoring server to ensure that the authoring server accurately reflects your production server. You should also synchronize your authoring server and production server if at any point your production-ready data on the authoring server does not accurately reflect your production server. This can be caused by changes made directly on the production server, either one large change or a series of smaller, incremental changes that cause the information about the authoring server and production server to no longer be synchronized.

            • Authoring server schema update tool

              The content management solution in WebSphere Commerce introduces multiple database schemas on the authoring server that require each and every table to have a definition within each schema. The definition within the workspaces schemas differ depending on whether the table is considered to be one of the following resources:

            • Updating the quick publish target

              If database information for your production server changes, you must update the quick publish target.

            • Enabling e-mail notification for workspaces

              Enabling e-mail notification in workspaces allows WebSphere Commerce to send e-mail automatically in certain situations.

            • Enabling shopping flow preview for workspaces

              Enabling shopping flow preview in workspaces allows users to preview how their changes affect the experience of a customer when the customer is completing a shopping flow.

            • Changing workspaces locking policy

              Do not change the workspaces locking policy if you have uncommitted data in any of your workspaces. This can cause undefined behavior with the uncommitted data.

            • Configuring retry for committing approved task group changes

              You can configure the task group approval process to automatically retry committing task group changes to the database. By configuring this setting, you can avoid having the commit of approved task group changes fail when a database timeout error occurs.

            • Enabling the change history for approved and canceled task groups

              To maintain the change history for approved or canceled task groups, configure how the change history is recorded for changes that are made within a task group.

          • Workspaces example scenarios

            Workspaces can be used in a variety of scenarios.

          • Workspace managed assets

            Managed assets are WebSphere 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 WebSphere 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 server to the production server 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. These apply to workspaces managed in both the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, and the Management Center.

          • Known limitations in workspaces

            When you are using workspaces, be aware of known limitations.

          • Workspaces performance tuning

            Workspaces use of 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 data model

            Content management is achieved through the use of workspaces. Each workspace in WebSphere Commerce Version 7 is comprised of three database schemas. These schemas are identical whether you are using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or the Management Center.

          • 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.

        • Price rules and price lists

          A Site Administrator must perform a series of tasks to enable and configure price rules and price lists in Management Center.

        • Catalog filters

          As Site Administrator, you might be required to assist business users with certain catalog filter tasks that relate to the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center.

        • Administering store preview functions

          You can administer store preview functions such as enabling and disabling commands and views, and adding a customized business context.

        • Order management

          As a Site Administrator, you can manage various features of the order management subsystem.

        • Auctions

          Before you can run auctions in your store, you must first enable auctions with WebSphere Commerce.

        • Request For Quote (RFQ) trading

          As a Site Administrator, you can enable and disable the RFQ trading mechanism, and enable RFQ notification messaging.

        • Business accounts and contracts

          Some of the store database assets, (business accounts, and contracts) cannot be loaded by the loading utilities. You can publish these database assets by using the Administration Console or from the command line, as part of the Publish process, or you can publish business accounts and contracts using their corresponding commands.

        • User traffic

          Edit the WebSphere Commerce configuration file to set the level of caching performed on user traffic data. The default number of URLs in the cache is 20. If this number is too low for your site, for example, if your site is very busy and you are concerned about performance impacts, you can increase the cache size. User traffic data is used in some operational reports.

        • Collaborative filtering
        • Catalog and marketing attachments
        • Workspace Administration Tool

          The Workspace Administration Tool is a graphical user interface tool used to manage workspaces and workspace-related activities. It provides a single view across all workspaces and all tasks in the workspaces where managers can see how work is progressing.

        • Enabling Management Center client-side logging and tracing

          A Site Administrator can enable logging and tracing for the Management Center to troubleshoot problems that a business user might have while using the Management Center. Client-side logging and tracing refers to tracking all the actions that a business user completes while using the Management Center user interface.

        • ... Management Center

          If you no longer want to use Management Center to manage your catalogs, promotions, and marketing, you can disable the feature. Note that if you disable Management Center, some objects that you created or updated using Management Center might not work properly in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.

      • Logging services

        WebSphere 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 WebSphere 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.

      • Staging server

        The WebSphere Commerce staging server is a part of the production environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production server.

      • Administering the WebSphere Commerce database

        As a site administrator, maintain the WebSphere Commerce database and ensure that any WebSphere 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.

      • Transforming, loading, and extracting data

        WebSphere Commerce provides multiple utilities for preparing and loading data into a WebSphere Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the WebSphere Commerce schema.

      • Inventory sharing in extended sites stores (non-ATP)

        The extended sites business model provides scalability and manageability improvements for WebSphere Commerce sites where there are multiple stores which can share assets including non-ATP inventory. The sharing of non-ATP inventory reduces the complexity of managing inventory assets for all the stores in the site. All stores in extended sites can share inventory from a single asset store with distributed fulfillment centers.

      • Tax sharing in an Extended Site model

        In extended sites store model, tax assets can be shared between the extended site asset store and the extended site store. You can manage the tax assets in an extended site store in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.

      • Payment plug-ins
      • Deploying

        The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.

      • WebSphere MQ

        WebSphere Commerce provides a listener for WebSphere MQ (formerly MQSeries) for inbound requests and an adapter for WebSphere MQ for outbound requests to allow you to integrate back-end and external systems with WebSphere Commerce using WebSphere MQ.

      • IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce

        Today's marketplace includes inbound call centers where Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) manage inquiries from potential customers. The IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce manages stores, customers, organizations, orders, quotes, and payment information. The IBM Sales Center is a rich client interface which is installed on CSRs' systems.

      • WebSphere Commerce integration with WebSphere Portal

        WebSphere Commerce provides integration code and support for WebSphere Portal Server. This integration allows to you aggregate WebSphere Commerce services and other content in a portal interaction environment.

      • Pinterest integration

        You can integrate WebSphere Commerce with Pinterest through Pinterest Buyable Pins that are available through the Pinterest iOS app. Use the WebSphere Commerce Pinterest Integration Accelerator to help with integration.

      • Content management integration

        You can integrate WebSphere Commerce with an external content management system through a punch-out window from Management Center and through the web feed utility. You can integrate WebSphere Commerce with IBM Web Content Manager to provide Management Center users the ability to associate IBM Web Content Manager content with WebSphere Commerce objects.

      • IBM Dynamic Pricing integration

        Dynamic Pricing 16.4 is a cloud-based pricing system that analyzes real-time market data to provide suggestions on how merchandisers can react to competitor pricing and shifts in market conditions. Data can be fed to Dynamic Pricing from multiple sources, including WebSphere Commerce. You can configure WebSphere Commerce to export pricing data to Dynamic Pricing for pricing analysis and adjustment. The adjusted pricing data can then be imported from Dynamic Pricing to WebSphere Commerce, so the prices can be propagated to your live store front.

      • Administering IBM Enterprise Marketing Management

        If your site is integrated with IBM Enterprise Marketing Management applications, such IBM Digital Analytics, IBM Product Recommendations, or IBM Marketing Center, you can administer the application features that your site uses. For example, you can administer IBM Digital Analytics based customer segments and import recommendations for IBM Product Recommendations.

      • Administering WebSphere Commerce search

        For a fully functioning WebSphere Commerce search implementation, you must understand and complete the search administration tasks which include deployment, search index management, and ongoing maintenance.

      • Configuring a cloned WebSphere Commerce environment

        A cloned virtual environment creates a separate copy of the original web server, application server, and database. After you clone a WebSphere Commerce virtual environment, you need to configure the clone to differentiate from the original environment.

      • Deploying a WebSphere Commerce dual cell environment

        Consider deploying a dual cell environment to achieve continuous availability and ensure that shoppers are minimally affected by planned or unplanned outages.

    • Tutorials

      WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials.

    • Samples
    • Developing

      The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.

    • Compliance

      The following section describes how you can leverage WebSphere Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.

    • Securing

      These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.

    • Performance
    • Troubleshooting
WebSphere Commerce EnterpriseWebSphere Commerce Professional

Enabling Workspaces

You enable workspaces by creating a new WebSphere Commerce authoring server instance.

See Creating an authoring server for instructions.

To enable workspaces in your WebSphere Commerce development environment, follow the instructions in Enabling Workspaces in the WebSphere Commerce development environment.

  • Creating an authoring server
    You can run an authoring server on a separate system or machine partition from your production server.
  • ../../com.ibm.commerce.workspaces.developer.doc/tasks/twoconvertingproduction.html
  • ../../com.ibm.commerce.workspaces.developer.doc/tasks/twoconvertingstaging.html
  • Synchronizing an authoring server with a production server
    If you create your authoring server after creating a production server, you must synchronize your production and authoring server to ensure that the authoring server accurately reflects your production server. You should also synchronize your authoring server and production server if at any point your production-ready data on the authoring server does not accurately reflect your production server. This can be caused by changes made directly on the production server, either one large change or a series of smaller, incremental changes that cause the information about the authoring server and production server to no longer be synchronized.
  • Authoring server schema update tool
    The content management solution in WebSphere Commerce introduces multiple database schemas on the authoring server that require each and every table to have a definition within each schema. The definition within the workspaces schemas differ depending on whether the table is considered to be one of the following resources:
  • Enabling e-mail notification for workspaces
    Enabling e-mail notification in workspaces allows WebSphere Commerce to send e-mail automatically in certain situations.
  • Enabling shopping flow preview for workspaces
    Enabling shopping flow preview in workspaces allows users to preview how their changes affect the experience of a customer when the customer is completing a shopping flow.
  • Changing workspaces locking policy
    Do not change the workspaces locking policy if you have uncommitted data in any of your workspaces. This can cause undefined behavior with the uncommitted data.
  • Configuring retry for committing approved task group changes
    You can configure the task group approval process to automatically retry committing task group changes to the database. By configuring this setting, you can avoid having the commit of approved task group changes fail when a database timeout error occurs.
  • Introduced in Feature Pack 3Enabling the change history for approved and canceled task groups
    To maintain the change history for approved or canceled task groups, configure how the change history is recorded for changes that are made within a task group.
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