IBM WebSphere Commerce Amplify Notes

Having recently attended the 2016 Amplify conference for Commerce; thought I would post a couple notes of interest from conversations and/or sessions.

• WebSphere Commerce V8
• Headless Commerce
• Commerce On the Cloud

WebSphere Commerce V8

General Changes

I jotted a few notes on some of the changes that were discussed in WebSphere Commerce V8.

There are many updates with the purpose of aligning WebSphere Commerce V8 with IBM's current design thinking, "Cognitive Commerce".
Such as:

• Integration with Commerce Insights 
  Targeting merchandiser as user and simplify their work and analysis
  NOTE: Commerce Insights is a separate product offering.
• Marketing cloud transact integration (silver pop) emails, etc. 
  
  NOTE: Separate product purchase
• Common Look and Feel across external IBM Commerce Tooling and WebSphere Commerce Management Center.

Other changes with V8:

• Move to SASS with Commerce On Cloud (coc)
• New Maintenance Strategy
• Stack Update
• Unused or rarely used features/functions have been removed
• Migration tools

VRMFP - New Maintenance Strategy

Following is the strategy that was outlined for maintenance and feature updates for WC V8.

V   Strategy starting with V8 
      New and cumulative enhancements and fixes requiring migration activity

R   Releases delivered as warranted for key enhancements
      New and cumulative enhancements and fixes with binary compatibility with version
      Migration may be required depending on the functionality

M  Mod pack released every quarter
      New and cumulative enhancements and fixes with binary compatibility
      Zero downtime
      No migration required

FP FixPacks released every two weeks
      New and cumulative fixes with binary compatibility
      Zero downtime installation
      No migration required

No individual iFixes for APARS, FixPacks only
No more Feature Enhancement Packs
     FEP's will be replaced with Mods.

Goal is ability  to roll out with out down time 

Stack Updates

The new version, WC V8, brings with it an update to the application stack:

• Rational Application Developer 9.5 with a newer version of the Eclipse IDE (4.4.2)
• WebSphere Application Server 8.5.5
• Java 7
• DB2 10 and Oracle 12.1.0.2.0

Commerce Management Center

• Management Center has been overhauled and no longer uses flash and OpenLazlo 
• The new coding framework for Management Center is now DHTML (HTML 5), JavaScript and Spring.
• V8 provides migration tools to support moving to the new coding framework.

Migration

• V8 provides some migration tooling to support migration from any V7 Feature Pack to V8
• Migration from older versions of WC requires upgrading to V7 first.
• Migration tool provided to help migration V7 OpenLazlo based customizations to V8 DHTML.
• Staging Environment Migration - V7 staging environments can be migrated to V8 with minimal downtime (Includes live production)

Customer Service for Commerce

One new addition to the Aurora sample store is the Customer Service for Commerce feature set.  The Aurora storefront has been extended with a landing page for Customer Service Agents which provides a set of jump off links to provide various CS functionality such as customer lookup and shop for customer.
An important CS related note though is that there is no price override capability yet.

Headless Commerce

Since earlier WebSphere Commerce versions such as V7 FEP3 and especially FEP 8 there has been a surge of REST services.  These services have been grown in WebSphere Commerce V8 to provide a more functional Headless Commerce.

Headless Commerce means that WebSphere Commerce is in a position to act as a service api provider to other systems and/or applications which can then provide the user interface for commerce.

IBM has gone farther and completed an integration of their WICM content management system as well as their Digital Experience system through the use of the WC V8 REST services.

By employing Headless Commerce you can reduce your infrastructure costs by offloading the storefront/presentation to a different server or even platform.

• This helps to support providing the content creator (the business or even consumers) the ability to manage their content with less IT involvement.  
• Content creators can now integrate dynamic product content into other content for a continuous experience
• The presentation can support the need to be multi-channel
• Single sign on for consumers
• Single search using the same search in the separate experience as WebSphere Commerce.
• Supports having 1 WebSphere Commerce engine and multiple (unlimited) experiences.

Integration Patterns

There are at least 3 integration patterns that you can employ with Headless Commerce.  You must decide for your implementation the pattern that you will implement and stick with it.

Headless Commerce

A separate digital experience is the front end to the retail experience.  You can build and maintain your store with 100% flexibility.  Commerce manages the store.

Side-by-Side Commerce

You provide a separate rich digital experience for online researchers (browsers) but provide a full Commerce store catalog and shopping cart. You maintain SSO between storefront and the store.

Commerce Front-end 

The commerce store manages the catalog, shopping cart and layout of the store.  You can enrich the experience by integrating a centralized and integrated web content management system

The integration patterns decide where the hand-off between the Commerce storefront and the separate experience takes place.

WebSphere Commerce Management Center Authoring and WICM

IBM has completed a new integration of WICM, web content management, through the use of the WC V8 REST services.  Each OOB REST service has a DDC definition created with defines an object for WICM based on the REST service.  This allows the WICM interface to work with the DDC object.  This provides the ability for content managers to pull dynamic product data via a service and select attributes from the object to present in their content.

The DDC is XML which can be created for any extended or custom services as well as any third party REST services.

There are other IBM partners also providing Headless Commerce integrations content management systems such as CoreMedia which also provides flexibility in your integration pattern righ down to CoreMedia widgets available to Page Compose to pull in content from CoreMedia.

Commerce on the Cloud

Highlights and Notes to Keep in Mind

You can now host you entire Commerce deployment on the Cloud.  The COC  provides for a development/test and preproduction and production environments.  Here are some notes on regarding the hosting:

• No payments are made on the site through CoC 
• No extra programs/apps etc are allowed to be installed on the Commerce Servers.
• You are allowed to have different servers allocated that you can use to install additional programs.
• There is no Database access allowed in preproduction and production.  You must go through the CoC operations support.
• There are REST services available for you to extract data.
• Use must be authenticated and encrypted.
• Changes through CoC are not done yourself.
• All servers will be kept at the same maintenance levels.  This maintenance is done by CoC operations.  You can opt to hold off on a maintenance but not for too long.
• All servers are initially sized at 4 times what you show as needed based on your load/performance testing.
• Load/Performance Testing is required.
• You will need your own Build/Deploy servers.
• You can opt for IBM to handle it by using IBM DevOps.

These are not in depth technical notes, but have provided a few notes of interest that were not marketing/merchandising focused.   Possibly some deeper dives will come later.