Today SAP
officially released a new version of SAP Commerce Cloud, 1905. “05” stands for “May”, today is 30th, so SAP barely made it on time. What is new?
The most important changes are in
Smartedit and
Integration.
Smartedit now
supports Spartacus (an open-source javascript storefront from SAP, read
my overview)
, content authoring workflows and
transactional email pages. The workflow management is a long-awaited feature. Not only for Smartedit, but for the whole content management stream started many years ago. SAP
Commerce provides two sample workflows for content review and approval: Page Approval and Page Translation and Approval. E-mail templates are now available for editing in Smartedit, in the same manner as you edit the pages.
The 1905 platform introduces
new and enhanced integrations:
- the recently announced SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory (Templating for APIs and Events, Redesigned Integration Process, Standardized Event Library, and Automatic Certificate Renewal)
- SAP S/4HANA cloud for B2B,
- SAP Sales Order Simulation module
- SAP CPQ integration (Image Replication)
- SAP Cloud for Customer integration (Customer Replication)
- SAP Marketing Cloud integration (Enhanced replications)
- SAP Customer Data Cloud (Session Management and Consent Template Replication)
- External Providers of Personalization Segments (optimized integration flow for better performance)
Some of these integrations were available earlier. In the new version, they were enhanced.
In the new version, SAP introduced a new way of publishing data to external systems, Outbound Sync. It allows you to configure outbound data replication in
SAP Commerce Backoffice or via ImpEx and publish only new and modified items, so-called “delta changes”.
It also introduces an
Order Management External Consignment Fulfilment Framework for S/4HANA and ERP.
Commerce Web Services API now supports personalization functionality.
SAP introduced a new
Polyglot Persistence feature which helps to relieve the load of the main database or to provide a non-SQL storage for some resource-intensive data, such as shopping carts. To make it possible, the developers need to optimize the data structure and its related types as a single composed structure, or a document. Currently, Polyglot persistence offers a default implementation for the
Cart type (ydocumentcart extension template) and can be used as a reference for other types. Additionally, there are transaction management and caching subsystem, which allows you to cache all modifications performed on a single item and flush them to the persistent storage when the main operation ends. Reading is realized through a query language similar to FlexibleSearch.
There is an important
Generic Audit update. This mechanism keeps track of modifications of attribute values of the auditable set of hybris objects. It now provides a way to configure auditing on a finer level of granularity than type. Such narrowing down prevents unnecessary database size growth.
There are also interesting enhancements in Promotions. By default,
Promotion Engine contains a mechanism called Order Entry Consumption. With it, only one promotion can be applied to each product. However, sometimes you might want to allow your customers to get multiple discounts on the same product. With the latest changes, it is now possible.
SAP also added a new selection strategy for “Most expensive” for bundle promotions and partner-product promotions. To exemplify this, “A multi-buy promotion offers three film rolls for $10. Let’s say the customer has five film rolls in the cart that could qualify for the promotion. With the new selection strategy “Most Expensive,” the most expensive three film rolls are included in the bundle.
The platform supports
- MySQL 8 and Oracle 12c Release 2,
- Java 11 and Spring 5
- Solr 7.7.1
In general, the changes are not dramatic, more evolution than revolution. There are a lot of smaller changes, such as the folder structure, bug fixes, and small enhancements.
Stay tuned!
