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HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
Migrating
Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9.1, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
Planning to migrate WebSphere Commerce
Most businesses treat investments in technology updates and migrations as overhead expenses. Even though you might need to upgrade or migrate to the latest HCL Commerce version to take advantage of the technological offering, providing a business justification to do so requires outlining the business benefits, strategy, and migration plan.
Creating a migration plan
Migrating to a new version of HCL Commerce impacts several aspects of your business. Review the resources that are provided to help create your migration plan.
Migration limitations
While you plan your migration project, be aware of the migration limitations.

Documentation
HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
- Getting started
  HCL Commerce has different advantages for business users, administrators and developers. HCL Commerce targets each of these roles with a tailored set of offerings so that each of your users can get maximum benefit.
- Installing and deploying
  Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9.1, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
  - Planning to migrate WebSphere Commerce
    Most businesses treat investments in technology updates and migrations as overhead expenses. Even though you might need to upgrade or migrate to the latest HCL Commerce version to take advantage of the technological offering, providing a business justification to do so requires outlining the business benefits, strategy, and migration plan.
    - Overview of a migration project
      A migration project for any live WebSphere Commerce site is an activity that must be carefully thought out. There are three main phases to the migration project – the planning phase, the practice phase, and the production migration phase. Each of these phases requires its own skills and resources. Allocating sufficient time for each activity is crucial to ensure that no key tasks are forgotten.
    - Migration diagram
      The following diagram provides a visual representation of your overall migration path when you migrate from IBM Websphere Commerce Version 7 or IBM Websphere Commerce Version 8 to HCL Commerce Version 9, including your development and runtime environments.
    - High-level guideline for a switchover migration
      The following sequence of steps captures the scenario of migrating your version 7 or 8 assets to version 9, then switching traffic from your previous environment to version 9.
    - Creating a migration plan
      Migrating to a new version of HCL Commerce impacts several aspects of your business. Review the resources that are provided to help create your migration plan.
      - Planning and sizing sample template for a migration
        Modify the template to reflect your level of customization, site topology, and business requirements to help plan your version 7.0 or 8.0 migration to version 9.0.
      - Migration limitations
        While you plan your migration project, be aware of the migration limitations.
    - Migrating a legacy store
      From WebSphere Commerce Version 7 and Version 8, to HCL Commerce Version 9, a new store paradigm was introduced in concert with other architectural changes that were made to modernize HCL Commerce. In this new paradigm, the storefront is separated into a micro service, independent from the Transaction server and Search server on which it relies. This architecture increases security, scalability, flexibility in server topology, and improves the ease of development and deployment of stores and store customizations.
  - ... from IBM Websphere Commerce Version 7
    The following section presents the high-level steps that you must complete to migrate from IBM Websphere Commerce Version 7 to HCL Commerce Version 9.1. Select the IBM Websphere Commerce Version 7 Feature Pack that you are migrating from to begin your migration.
  - ... from IBM Websphere Commerce Version 8 to HCL Commerce Version 9.1
    The following section outlines the high-level steps that you must complete to migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9.1. Begin by migrating your development environment, which includes your development database, custom assets, storefront, and search application. With a successfully migrated development environment, you can migrate your production databases, and deploy your migrated assets to your HCL Commerce Version 9.1 production environments.
  - ... from HCL Commerce Version 9 to HCL Commerce Version 9.1
    The following section presents the high-level steps that you must complete to upgrade from an earlier version of HCL Commerce Version 9 to a newer version of HCL Commerce Version 9.1.
  - ... to HCL Commerce Version 9.1 solutions
    The following section presents the high-level concepts and steps that you must understand and complete in order to upgrade from earlier WebSphere Commerce technologies to those introduced in HCL Commerce Version 9.1.
- Operating
  Topics in the Operating category highlight tasks that are typically performed by business users, customer support representatives, to complete their day-to-day tasks in the operation of the HCL Commerce site.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
- Tutorials
  HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
  Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage HCL Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of HCL 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 HCL Commerce site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.

Migration limitations

While you plan your migration project, be aware of the migration limitations.

Operating system and software support

The supported operating systems and software for the development and production environments have changed in version 9.0. For more information about supported software, see Supported software levels, fixes, and settings for HCL Commerce.

Migrated store runs on Transaction server

Version 9.0 uses containerization to deliver a continuous development and delivery cycle. Part of that containerization was moving the Store server to a separate container. Migrated stores cannot be deployed to the Store server. Migrated stores must run on the Transaction server. For more information about migrated your store, see Migrating the store dynamic web project.

Enterprise Java Beans

Enterprise Java Beans are unsupported in version 9.0. You must migrate your EJB beans to Java Persistence API (JPA).

For more information on migrating to JPA, see Migrating IBM Websphere Commerce Version 8 EJB entity beans to Java Persistence API.

HCL Cache

The HCL Cache extends the capabilities and performance of DynaCache by adding remote centralized caching with Redis, and improved operational and monitoring support.

With HCL Commerce Version 9.1, all provided default caches are configured by default to use the HCL Cache provider. By being deployed as a DynaCache Cache provider, the HCL Cache is enabled for DynaCache caches and used through standard DynaCache interfaces, including Servlet Caching (cachespec.xml), command caching, and DynaCache distributed maps.

For more information on HCL Cache, see HCL Cache.

HCL Commerce Version 9.1.3.0 or later

Local Store Preview

In HCL Commerce Version 9.1.3.0 and later, the Store preview feature is supported for Struts 2 migrated local stores, in non-workspace context environments only.

For more information on enabling the Store Preview feature in your migrated local store environment, see step 4.c of Migrating REST-based Search.