Today I am launching a series of videos to show how flexible and easy extended sites are with WebSphere Commerce.

First a brief introduction to extended sites:

Think of a large company that has many brands – even IBM for that matter, but it is easier to think of a large retailer. Just so we don’t mention any actual companies I am going to use a fictitious company called Madisons. This company is an eBay like store where you can buy many kinds of things. The company wants to launch a separate site called Madisons Wear for a new clothing line. They still want customers to be able to buy Madisons Wear line on the main site but this new site will have a new look and feel and be dedicated to the clothing line.

In this series of videos you will see the original Madisons site and we will use a single database store for things like the catalog, business rules, marketing, and much the user interface code (shared JSP’s). This is where WebSphere Commerce excels. WebSphere Commerce uses tightly integrated business logic, database filters, and inheritance to achieve this. Unlike many of the competing products, WebSphere Commerce does not duplicate things like the catalog across the extended sites – it uses basic database filters to only show content based on the site, geography, or the specific contract for the logged in person. Not duplicating the data insures optimum performance and eases administration and maintenance.

In this first video I show the creation of the extended site. The actually creation of the extended site is only a few clicks in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator so I do not show that part. I show how easy it is to work with the WebSphere Commerce Management Center and how it was designed to be fully utilized by a marketing staff (non IT). The first thing we do is change the logo and set up a catalog filter from the hub store – to only show Apparel. Check it out and let me know what you think:

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