This isn’t “fresh” news, the feature pack has been available for a week or two, I have just been swamped with vacation and work to write about it. There are a lot of great enhancements to WebSphere Commerce in this feature pack, most of which came directly from customer demand so kudos to the lab for executing on these! I highlight some of my favorite ones here.
Aurora Starter Store
Completely redesigned starter store to be more up to date with today’s look and feel. The new store is very fresh looking and will be a great demonstration and starter asset going forward. Aurora has a very nice look and feel and demonstrates the many new features in this feature pack.
Page Layout Tool
One of my favorite new features is the Page Layout Tool. As a Marketing Manager, Product Manager, Category Manager, or Sales Manager you can use the Page Layout tool in Management Center to manage layouts for your store pages. — link here.
Promotion Enhancements
A really great feature for retail store fronts is the new price promotions around fixed pricing. This in my opinion has been a gap in the out of the box promotions – many times customers just extend the product to do this, now it comes for free!
Even though we have supported this integration in the past, this new feature pack has a much tighter integration with in Aurora – meaning much less partner and services in order to get social onto your site. More information can be found here:
Ratings summaries at the top of product pages and item pages.
Listings of ratings and reviews in a “Customer Reviews” tab at the bottom of product pages and item pages.
Review and comment creation through the Bazaarvoice review submission container with support for multiple authentication methods.
The insanity of the Marketing Technology landscape!
Tue, May 14th 2013 7:20a Bob Balfe A very interesting graphic from LUMA Partners (LUMAscape) was recently published. You will notice pretty much all of IBM’s recent acquisitions (in the last 3 or so years) are on this graphic. This is in my opinion a validation of the IBM’s Smarter Commerce strategy as their products become more and more integrated. Having a single company with best of breed technologies integrated and supported by one company makes this landscape a bit more consumable and less daunting.
Many of IBM&# [read] Keywords: ibm
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Why transcoders simply don’t work for your mobile eCommerce solution any longer
Thu, May 9th 2013 9:10a Bob Balfe A very popular approach over the last five years was to hire a company to transcode your commerce site into a mobile experience. While this niche play was warranted five years ago it is no longer viable for a serious mobile channel presence. Today, most vendors, especially IBM and its business partners are building web applications with responsive design technology; so with a single code base you can target the different channels with the appropriate content for the specific device. This is a ga [read] Keywords: ibm
applications
mobile
server
websphere
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Make sure you check out CrossViews booth at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit!
Wed, May 8th 2013 7:50a Bob Balfe CrossView is a premier provider of cross-channel commerce solutions and services that enable a smarter, more personalized shopping experience. You can see their sponsor listing on the Smarter Commerce Global Summit page here. One of CrossView’s customers is Moosejaw - a fast-growing Midwestern retailer specializing in extreme outdoor equipment and apparel. Moosejaw’s site, based on IBM’s WebSphere Commerce is often considered the poster child of social commerce. They have a br [read] Keywords: ibm
community
mobile
websphere
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Book Review: Creating an MP3 Player with HTML5
Mon, May 6th 2013 7:10p Bob Balfe Don’t let the size of this book fool you, the content is extremely well written and while providing the very basics of programming in HTML5 it also highlights many tips and tricks all throughout the book. As the title states, the book is a step by step guide for creating the MP3 player from scratch in HTML5 and JavaScript. It covers a lot of material from page to page but presents it in a very easy to read way. I actually read the book from front to back first and then I went through and a [read] Keywords: javascript
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Creating a custom build with Dojo Toolkit Web Builder
Fri, May 3rd 2013 7:20a Bob Balfe Do you want to use only a small piece of Dojo? Does Dojo have a really cool feature you want but you don’t want to take the entire library?
Then the Dojo Toolkit Web Builder is for you. I recently created a desktop web application where I wanted to use the Swipe function in the Gesture package of Dojo. I am not using a lot of Dojo at all in this application so I really only wanted the dojox.gesture.swipe package. The web builder allows you to select the packages you want and it builds a s [read] Keywords: ibm
application
desktop
dojo
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My second day with the Microsoft Surface – fully loaded
Fri, May 3rd 2013 5:20a Bob Balfe One thing I did not mention in yesterday’s post was when you log into Microsoft Surface and use your Microsoft Id you get all of your cloud settings for your account. So my tablet immediately got all of my pictures, documents, and social network accounts automatically configured. It was literally like I just logged into my Windows 8 Laptop.
Today however, I spent time getting my favorite applications loaded on the tablet. Since this is a work tablet I had to get the IBM connection setup th [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
notes
applications
eclipse
laptop
microsoft
network
office
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My first day with the Microsoft Surface – this is no tablet
Thu, May 2nd 2013 7:00a Bob Balfe I now see the attraction of the Microsoft Surface. While it has been documented, written about, reviewed, etc by many and in a sense does not get the recognition some of the other tablets get I think it is clearly getting short changed. And the reason is…
This is not a tablet, its a PC. It does pretty much everything my laptop and desktop can do and a whole lot more. The “tablet” is very thin and compares nicely against the other tablets on the market. I have the 128GB model an [read] Keywords: desktop
laptop
microsoft
network
skype
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How to add swipe support to your web application
Wed, May 1st 2013 2:10p Bob Balfe Are you creating a web application that you want to be able to be used on a tablet? Then you might want to check out the Dojo toolkit. Dojo provides a very simple way to handle swipe events in your web application. In this post I used the dojox.gesture package. Why would you want to use Dojo? Here are a few good reasons from the documentation:
dojox/gesture has been designed with the following rationale:
Device neutral – The target is to be compatible with most popular devices(single tou [read] Keywords: application
dojo
mobile
widgets
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What are your thoughts on Worklight?
Tue, Apr 30th 2013 1:10p Bob Balfe I have been playing with Worklight over the past several weeks and its definitely a very cool platform to do your development on for web and devices. I am really interested to hear some real world experiences around creating applications based on Worklight. If you care to share them here I would appreciate your feedback. Or if you have a review on your own blog or know of one please share! [read] Keywords: applications
development
