A number of customers have been talking about the upgrade policies defined by SAP for SAP Commerce Cloud and the Composable Storefront. I mentioned the upgrades last year in the hybrismart.com article.
Historically, since I first met hybris 4 in 2009 I have seen clients who did not upgrade their versions of SAP Commerce for years. However, that all changes with latest policy SAP have with the CCV2 environment.
These policies require that the merchant needs to keep on top of the upgrades which are currently being issued each month and therefore factor those upgrades into their development, testing and release cycles. Each release of SAP Commerce and the Composable Storefront has a 6 month validity period after which the release cannot be deployed.
A key question being asked is how onerous is this upgrading process ? and how often ? There are usually two views: 1) the “little and often” approach, a view also recommended by SAP, that upgrades should be factored frequently; 2) the “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” approach where we have seen examples SAP Commerce version they use has passed its long term support date.
In the end, it comes down to priorities and costs and we have experienced upgrade projects taking months because the version being upgraded from is quite old.
In order to get a tangible view of the current upgrading of both SAP Commerce and the Composable Storefront I decided to undertake some sample upgrades on a local version I run. For those who are interested, I use an Oracle VirtualBox VM Debian guest running in a Windows 11 host). I have traditionally built SAP Commerce using the various out-of-the-box recipes and accelerators using the instructions published by SAP. To an extent, what I am doing probably reflects what many project teams have undertaken, in that someone needs to undertake the “upgrade” user story and share with their team.
In this article you will find the detailed walk-through.
Read More » Back in March I wrote about how SAP had released Spartacus 5 in November 2022. I covered how it had been released as a commercial entity and I had analysed the release policy and then estimated that it would make sense for SAP to update the Composable Storefront package to use a newer version of Node.js during 2023 for ensuring a longer term support prospect.
I was partly correct – but I had underestimated what would happen !. In fact as of end-November 2023, there have been 9 releases of the Composable Storefront since 5.0, now being released on an almost monthly basis, and there have been 12 update releases of SAP Commerce Cloud itself, now in the form of the “Continuous Innovation” releases 2211.x, and at time of writing to 2211 updated to release 2211.15 and also released on an almost monthly basis.
I suspect that between the time I write this, and the time you read that at least one more release of Composable storefront and Commerce Cloud will have been released. In this article, I will share some important updates on this topic. Read More »
For those who have been following the development progress of Spartacus, the Angular/Node.js front-end to Commerce Cloud, you may have followed the roadmap information on the SAP GitHub Spartacus repository documentation pages. For many months during 2022 the roadmap statements indicated that release 5 would be towards the end of 2022 comprising a number of user experience and feature improvements, architecture improvements including the need to upgrade the underlying technologies such as the Angular framework.
However, I was a bit surprised (and I suspect other readers also) when SAP announced:
- stopping support on the previous Spartcus versions (4.x);
- that Version 5 would be only available within an authenticated policy to SAP partners / customers; and
- Spartacus is renamed to Composable Commerce.
Read More »
I have been discussing where the merchants have multiple instances of SAP-Commerce (hybris) and they want their non-production environments to be “more representative” of the production environment in terms of the data. In the previous part of this article, I looked at the rationale of why data migration is important and a number of various initiatives that have supported this over the years. In this part, I look at the areas of data for migration and the necessary concerns to consider when data is migrated. Read More »
I want to focus on a requirement I have met on several projects over the years where the merchant has multiple instances of SAP-Commerce (hybris) and they want their non-production environments to be “more representative” of the production environment in terms of the data.Many merchants have 3 such environments typically defined as development, staging and production and as time passes by, the production environment receives multiple BAU changes to core data areas such as web content, products/categories/classifications undertaken by merchandising teams or product management and of course a lot of data is generated through customer registrations and orders placed.
However, the non-production environments are frequently not kept in line in terms of web content, product data or representation in terms of quantities of customers or orders. I’m not referring here to the code and core configuration related data that is included in builds.
Read More »
