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User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
Administering
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.
Workspaces
You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
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.
Publishing to the production server
Publish production-ready data from the authoring server to the production server to propagate changes to your site.

User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
- 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 the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Deploying
  The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
- Operating
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
- 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.
  - 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
      To support marketing features in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
    - 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.
      - 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.
        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 server.
        Publishing to the production server
        Publish production-ready data from the authoring server to the production server to propagate changes to your site.
        Stagingprop
        The stagingprop utility propagates staged data and managed files from the production-ready data to the production server. It consolidates the changed data from the production-ready database, and then it propagates the necessary changed data into the production database if the connection is available.
        fileprop
        The fileprop utility sends all new and changed files to the administration node of the federated WebSphere Application Server environment, which later pushes them into the managed nodes, which include the production server. The staging server must be federated using the same deployment manager as the production server. Otherwise, the managed files are not propagated into the production EAR because the deployment manager is not aware of the production node.
        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 server, and publishing to the production server. After you publish files and data to the production server, you can begin to view the effects on your site.
        Changing quick publish post-publish size
        By default, quick publish post-publish processes data from all the resource managers and then propagates them sequentially. If the total amount of data to be propagated is larger than the available memory, this can lead to an OutOfMemory error. You can change how quick publish post-publish processes resource managers to limit this error from occurring. You can either tune the Java virtual machine or edit the quick publish post-publish size.
        Disabling post-publish for quick publish
        Cache invalidation occurs during post-publish for catalog and search. You can disable the post-publish for quick publish for the catalog or search resource managers to avoid duplicate cache invalidation.
        Configuring Quick publish to call EAR Updater for non-federated environments
        If you have a non-federated environment, Quick Publish does not call the EAR Updater. In a federated environment, Quick Publish calls and uses the EAR Updater to publish your changed files to your production server. You can configure Quick Publish to call the EAR Updater in a non-federated environment to help copy your changed files to your production server if the EAR Updater is configured to use FTP prototype.
      - 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.
      - Workspaces data model
        Content management is achieved through the use of workspaces. Each workspace is comprised of three database schemas.
      - 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.
    - Negotiated pricing
      To use negotiated pricing, you must have a nominal cost price list that is defined for your store.
    - 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.
    - Request For Quote (RFQ) trading
      As a Site Administrator, you can enable and disable the RFQ trading mechanism, and enable RFQ notification messaging.
    - 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.
    - Catalog and marketing attachments
      As a Site Administrator, you can manage the catalog and marketing attachments, such as for adding attachment usages, changing managed file updater parameters, or deleting attachments.
    - 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 extended sites stores
      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.
  - 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.
  - 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.
  - Extracting, transforming, and loading 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.
  - Payment plug-ins
    To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
  - WebSphere Commerce Search
    For a fully functioning WebSphere Commerce Search implementation, you must understand and complete the search administration tasks, which include search index management and ongoing maintenance.
  - 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.
  - IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce
    IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce is a separately purchased product that provides a light-weight customer service solution that is embedded in the Aurora B2C and Aurora B2B storefronts. Even though this solution is a separately purchased product, it is not a separate application. Stores that are enabled with IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce allow a customer service representative (CSR) to act on behalf of guest customers and registered customers. A CSR can manage customer accounts, cancel and reorder orders, and shop as customer. A CSR can also act on behalf of Buyer Administrators to help complete Aurora B2B tasks from the storefront, without having to access the Organization Administration Console.
- Tutorials
  WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
- 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

Publishing to the production server

Publish production-ready data from the authoring server to the production server 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 server); the actual publish involves moving the production-ready data from the authoring server to the production server.

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

About this task

Use one of the following methods to publish production-ready data from the authoring server to the production server:

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 server 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 server.

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 server. You can use the stagingprop utility to immediately correct errors and publish the production-ready data to the production server.

Quick publish is not supported in WebSphere Commerce Developer.

Global publish

Use one of the following staging server utilities to publish production-ready data to the production server:

stagingprop utility: Use to publish changes from the production-ready data on the authoring server to the production database. The information in the STAGLOG database table identifies the records in the production-ready data to insert, update, or delete in the production database. Processed records are indicated in the STAGLOG table by a 1 in the STGPROCESSED column. These processed records are not deleted and can be used for future analysis or troubleshooting.
fileprop utility: Use to propagate managed files from the production-ready data on the authoring server to the WebSphere Commerce EAR file on the production server.