
Today, SAP officially released a new version of SAP Commerce Cloud, 1905. “05” stands for “May”, and today is the 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 that started many years ago. SAP Commerce provides two sample workflows for content review and approval: Page Approval and Page Translation and Approval. Email templates are now available for editing in SmartEdit, in the same manner as you edit 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 have been 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, known as “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 on the main database or provide non-SQL storage for some resource-intensive data, such as shopping carts. To make this possible, developers need to optimize the data structure and its related types as a single composed structure, or 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 is a transaction management and caching subsystem, which allows you to cache all modifications performed on a single item and flush them to persistent storage when the main operation ends. Reading is implemented through a query language similar to FlexibleSearch.
There is an important Generic Audit update. This mechanism keeps track of modifications to the attribute values of the auditable set of hybris objects. It now provides a way to configure auditing at 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, this is now possible.
SAP also added a new “Most Expensive” selection strategy for bundle promotions and partner-product promotions. To illustrate 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!