SAP Commerce Cloud 1808 (Hybris Commerce 6.8) Is Released. What’s New?

SAP introduced a new version of SAP Commerce Cloud, previously SAP Hybris Commerce. In this article, I explain the key changes, improvements, and enhancements announced by SAP. The article is based on the official release notes and videos, as well as a bit of experimentation with the new version. After reviewing the materials, code changes, and documentation updates, I have to say that this release is just a minor update. Among the enhancements, only a few deserve to be highlighted: Integration API and, at a stretch, SmartEdit Content Versioning.

Let’s take a deeper look at the new features.

Search and Navigation

For me personally, all the hybris 6.8 enhancements explained below are minor. All of them are mainly UI improvements.

• Adaptive Search Improvements
  • Managing Promoted Items
    • You can promote and exclude individual items with just a few clicks to make your items more visible to, or hidden from, the customer.
    • You can boost items to show them on top, regardless of sorting.
    • You can highlight the promoted items in the search results.
  • Marked Categories with Configurations
    • The category tree navigation has additional icons and other UI enhancements. They are supposed to help you better understand how the categories are configured.
  • Improved Synchronization of Search Profiles
    • You can see the real-time search profile synchronization status directly in the Adaptive Search perspective. If the profile hasn’t been synced, you can synchronize it using the button.
• Multiple Solr Version Support
  • The system now supports more than one version of the Solr server. In 1808, Solr was upgraded to 7.4.x. The configuration files are now in version-specific folders: 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, and so on. You can easily switch versions via configuration.

SmartEdit

From my personal point of view, all the hybris 6.8 enhancements explained below are minor. One of them, Versioning, may look interesting, but it is just a first step. For example, it doesn’t fully protect you from accidental damage to a page. In case of damage, you can restore only the whole page, not individual components to replace the broken ones.

• Versioning Content
  • You can create, preview, search for, and delete a page version. You can also roll back to a page version and continue to edit the content. When you create a version, SmartEdit saves and rolls back content slots, components, and page metadata. Shared content slots, restrictions, and some other information are not saved.
• Managing Homepages
  • You can mark any page as a homepage for a content catalog.
• Managing Trashed Pages
  • You can restore pages that were previously trashed. You can also permanently delete the page.

Personalization Based on SmartEdit

From my personal point of view, all the hybris 6.8 enhancements explained below are minor. These changes are important only for developers.

• Segment Provider
  • Responsible for creating anonymous and registered user segments based on user type. Using this segment provider enables business users to prevent undesirable site behavior. For example, if a registered user was eligible for a promotion and logs out, an anonymous user in that session cannot benefit from the same promotion.
• Refactored Calculation Configuration
  • You can configure periodic calculation actions individually for different types of users, for example, separately for anonymous and registered users.
• Scope Level Security for Web Services
  • Personalization web services support OAuth scope-level security settings.

Promotion Engine and Rule Engine

From my personal point of view, all the hybris 6.8 enhancements explained below are minor.

• Advanced Search Refinement
  • The “in” operator is now supported in promotion rule filters.
• Halt Rule Action
  • This action immediately stops the processing of further rules. This can be used to jump out of processing when the rule is activated, reducing further processing and also stopping any other promotions from being applied.
• Order Threshold Perfect Partner Condition
  • Allows a customer to buy a certain product from within a defined set for a fixed price when the threshold order value is exceeded. It can be used only with one action: Target fixed price on products.
• Drools 7.7 Upgrade
  • A newer version of Drools is now used.

Backoffice Product Content Management

From my personal point of view, all the hybris 6.8 enhancements explained below are minor.

• Classification System in Microsoft Excel Import and Export
  • Classification classes are now supported by Microsoft Excel Import/Export, introduced in 6.7.
• Validation Engine Integration in Microsoft Excel Import
  • The validation engine is now integrated with the Excel import functionality; validation constraints are supported.
• Enhancements in the Assortment and Compare Views
  • The assortment view has now been changed to use Solr search, and the compare view has been enhanced to be more compact by introducing collapsible containers for collections and localized attributes.

Backoffice Framework

From my personal point of view, all the hybris 6.8 enhancements explained below are minor. These changes are important only for developers.

• Solr Hot Update
  • The default strategy for updating the Solr index in Backoffice was changed to a hot update, which allows changes in data to be immediately reflected in the Backoffice Solr index. Previously, updates were not reflected immediately.
• Connection Removal and Access Setting
  • You can remove any widget connection in Backoffice when you no longer need it via widgets.xml.
  • You can specify, remove, or replace access restrictions for particular widgets via widgets.xml.
• Component Blacklisting
  • You can exclude arbitrarily chosen components from being loaded by the framework. This allows quick prototyping using unsafe structures, with the possibility of easily discovering such constructs in pre-production environments.
• Explorer Tree Performance Improvements
  • It now supports wide and/or deep trees. Previously, lookup in large trees was slow.

Commerce APIs

From my personal point of view, all the hybris 6.8 enhancements explained below are minor. The changes relate mainly to GDPR and AJAX/Angular storefronts. These changes are important only for developers.

• New Consent Management REST APIs
  • Getting a list of all of a user’s consents or the details of a specific consent, as well as recording the giving and withdrawal of consents.
• New Countries REST API for Billing and Delivery Countries
  • Provides the benefit of being able to distinguish between countries you deliver to and countries you can bill from. For example, if your storefront delivers only to European Community countries, you can still allow billing from countries outside Europe.
• New Regions (State/Provinces) REST API
  • Getting a list of regions for a particular country. This call is intended for populating address forms, such as billing or delivery forms.

Platform

From my personal point of view, all the hybris 6.8 enhancements explained below are extremely minor.

• Configurable Web Roots in Installer Recipes
  • You can change the web root path of an extension per aspect. An aspect here is a configuration used to create an image for a specific purpose.
• Runtime Configuration Change
  • The system now supports runtime configuration files. It checks the file at regular intervals and updates in-memory properties once they are changed in the file.
• Shutdown Script
  • The script shutdown.sh initiates a graceful shutdown procedure through a REST call. It suspends the node and waits for long-running tasks to complete, until all threads are suspended. It helps avoid abrupt process termination.
• Removal of Deprecated Initialization/Update Code, Extension Removal and Deprecation, and Third-Party Library Upgrades
  • Old stuff was removed. Nobody uses it, although there is nothing interesting here. Third-party libraries, such as Spring and AspectJ, are upgraded.

Integrations

Context-Driven Services Integration

Context-Driven Services is part of SAP Cloud Service. The Context-Driven Services Foundation integration into SAP Hybris Commerce allows you to capture multiple interactions and commerce events from an SAP Hybris Commerce storefront and process them in Context-Driven Services Foundation in real time.

It seems this is a new name for Hybris Profile via YaaS.

• Full Synchronization of Personal Details
• Price Information in Cart Events
• Category Information in Cart and Order Events

SAP Integrations

This announcement looks very interesting. SAP introduced a new integration framework in addition to DataHub and SAP PI.

• Integration APIs
  • “New way of integrating with SAP Commerce Cloud”
  • Can be used with “SAP Cloud Platform Integration” (SAP CPI).
  • New Backoffice perspective for modeling and monitoring integration data: “Integration UI Tool”
  • No restart or recompilation of the platform is necessary.
  • Monitor inbound data.
• SAP Back-End Integration: SAP S/4HANA
  • Ready-to-use SAP CPI “recipes” for SAP S/4HANA ↔ SAP Commerce Cloud integrations.
• SAP Marketing Integration
  • You can use data from the SAP Marketing system to drive the display of entire page variants in the storefront. When a user logs on, SAP Commerce Cloud checks to see if they belong to a target group or an active campaign in the SAP Marketing system. If this condition is met, SAP Commerce Cloud retrieves the target groups or campaigns associated with that user from the SAP Marketing system. SAP Commerce Cloud uses this data to create segments and then stores them, making them available for selection in SmartEdit when defining a customization.
• SAP Revenue Cloud Integration
  • B2C Customer Replication. When a B2C customer registers on the SAP Commerce Cloud storefront, the details are replicated to SAP S/4HANA asynchronously using SAP Cloud Platform Integration.
  • Rate Plan Replication. The usage-based charges — block, volume, and tier — maintained for the products are replicated to SAP Commerce Cloud along with one-time and recurring charges. The usage-based charges are displayed on the product details page.
  • Subscription Management. On the subscription details page, the customer can view the current usage details for the unbilled transactions.
  • Payment Integration. When the customer places an order, payment details are captured using the existing integration with SAP Digital Payments.
• SAP Customer Engagement Center Integration
  • Integration Configuration. A new configuration screen provided in Backoffice allows easier configuration for integrating service tickets with SAP Customer Engagement Center.
  • Service Ticket Priority. Customers can convey the importance of the service ticket by assigning a priority to the ticket.
  • Account Deletion. Accounts deleted in Backoffice are marked for deletion in SAP Customer Engagement Center.
  • Sales Order Deletion. The integration enables deleting sales orders from SAP Customer Engagement Center when they are deleted in Backoffice.
• SAP Product Configuration
  • Asynchronous Order Management (AOM) with Synchronous Pricing. As of this release, the AOM scenario supports synchronous pricing for configurable products in the shopping cart and at checkout. As a result, you can now obtain the latest prices from the SAP backend for orders that are created in the online store. Using this scenario, it is possible to use the SAP backend as the leading pricing system, while at the same time leveraging the performance advantages that AOM offers.
  • Compatibility with S/4HANA Advanced Variant Configurator.
  • Using Rules to Give Discounts on Option Level. As of this release, you can:
    • define discounts for specific characteristic values.
    • base the discount on all the conditions that are available in Rule Engine.
    • create messages that are associated with the discount.

In this version, SAP also fixed a bug with Generic Audit, which is explained in this article on the blog.

Rauf Aliev