ATG10.0-whatsnew

What’s new in atg commerce 10

Technical Reference

A summary of new capabilities and benefits

December 2010

V 20DEC2010 Page 2 of 57

Summary

Reap the Rewards of a Commerce Anywhere World

The term Commerce Anywhere represents ATG’s view of how to effectively serve the “anytime,

anywhere” customer and unify commerce initiatives across channels and devices. With ATG

Commerce 10, companies can move from a model of independent, siloed, multi-channel sales

processes to a unified cross-channel sales model that creates a highly coordinated customer

experience and increases sales. ATG 10 enables you to deliver consistent customer profiles,

product content, promotions, and order information in all touch points.

• Improve the customer experience by empowering customers to shop the way they

want, with the help of other consumers, seamlessly across channels, using their

favorite devices

• Increase agility and empower marketers and merchants with the tools to manage the

customer experience, promotions, and content, and leverage customer-generated

ratings and reviews across multiple sites

• Implement a future-proof commerce enterprise by arming IT with the software and

tools to rapidly build and implement a unified commerce infrastructure and systems

Gain Control, Efficiency, and Speed

Whether your customers are businesses or individuals, ATG 10 gives you the flexibility to adapt to

changing customer behaviors to take full advantage of a dynamic and global marketplace. With

ATG 10, you can:

• Merchandise quickly, easily, and effectively to drive profitability

• Rapidly launch sites for new brands, markets, and even single-purpose campaigns

• Orchestrate seamless cross-channel buying experiences to improve customer loyalty

• Use mobile devices and social media to drive sales

• Expand internationally and target new countries and segments more effectively

• Leverage the web and personalization in innovative ways

• Easily create and manage both simple and complex promotions

Implement and Manage Your Sites with Ease

New features and powerful tools in ATG 10 will speed implementations and reduce operational

costs.

• Simplify the management of commerce software and applications

• Improve administrative and operational efficiency

• Increase technical flexibility and agility

• Drive optimal performance, scalability, and reliability


Table of Contents

ATG MULTI-SITE COMMERCE ............................................................................................................................... 6

ATG PLATFORM ........................................................................................................................................................ 8

NEW .................................................................................................................................................... 8 Site Determination ......................................................................................................................... 8

Site Context ...................................................................................................................................................... 9 Site-Aware Personalization ............................................................................................................................ 9 Multi-Site Shareables .................................................................................................................................... 11 Multi-Site Page Coding ................................................................................................................................. 12 Multi-Site Repository Membership ............................................................................................................ 13

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 13 REST Services ............................................................................................................................. 13

ATG COMMERCE ..................................................................................................................................................... 14

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 14 Cart Sharing ................................................................................................................................ 14 Site-Aware Scheduled Orders ..................................................................................................... 15 Site-Aware Product Comparison ................................................................................................ 15 Site-Aware Gift, Purchase, and Wish Lists ................................................................................ 15

SITE ADMINISTRATION ........................................................................................................................................ 17

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 17 Site Categories ............................................................................................................................. 17 Site Default Catalog .................................................................................................................... 18 Site Pricing .................................................................................................................................. 18 Site Groups and Shareables ........................................................................................................ 18

ATG CONTENT ADMINISTRATION...................................................................................................................... 19

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 19 Catalog Site Membership ............................................................................................................ 19

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 19 Smart Cache Invalidation ........................................................................................................... 19

ATG MERCHANDISING .......................................................................................................................................... 20

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 20 Multi-site Merchandising ............................................................................................................ 20

Search Merchandising .................................................................................................................................. 20 Cross Sells/Up Sells ....................................................................................................................................... 21 Category Assignment .................................................................................................................................... 21

Merchandising UI Redesign ....................................................................................................... 21 More Streamlined and Scalable Browsing ................................................................................. 22 Split-Pane .................................................................................................................................... 22 Drag & Drop ................................................................................................................................ 23 Property Additions ....................................................................................................................... 23

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 25 Redesigned & Improved Editors ................................................................................................. 25 Property Enhancements .............................................................................................................. 25 Add a Product to Multiple Categories ......................................................................................... 26 Updated Messaging Framework ................................................................................................. 26 Toolbar Enhancements ............................................................................................................... 27 Enhanced Project Capabilities .................................................................................................... 29


Improved Promotional Capabilities ............................................................................................ 30 Promotional Templates................................................................................................................................. 30 Folders ............................................................................................................................................................. 30 Tiered Promotions ......................................................................................................................................... 31 Creating Coupons and Associating to Promotions .................................................................................. 31 Multi-Offer Coupons .................................................................................................................................... 31 Site-Specific Promotions ............................................................................................................................... 32 Creating Custom Promotions ...................................................................................................................... 33

Import/Export – Price Lists ......................................................................................................... 34 Multi Edit Moved to Import/Export Feature .............................................................................. 34 Move from ePhox to Flex WYSIWYG Editor ............................................................................. 34

ATG SEARCH ............................................................................................................................................................ 35

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 35 Target Type, Content Labels, Linked Projects ........................................................................... 35 Multi-Site Search, Site Administration Integration ................................................................... 36 File Content Meta Data Addition ................................................................................................ 39

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 39 Improved Load Balancing ........................................................................................................... 39 Content Check ............................................................................................................................. 40

CAMPAIGN OPTIMIZER ......................................................................................................................................... 41

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 41 Multi-Site Enablement ................................................................................................................ 41

OUTREACH ............................................................................................................................................................... 41


ATG COMMERCE SERVICE CENTER (CSC) ....................................................................................................... 42

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 42 Multi-Site Enablement ................................................................................................................ 42 Gift and Wish List Management ................................................................................................. 43 Promotions Browser .................................................................................................................... 44 CSC Reporting ............................................................................................................................. 44

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 45 Refund and Exchange Calculations ........................................................................................... 45 Enhanced Flow of Approval on Appeasements .......................................................................... 45 Performance Improvements ........................................................................................................ 46

ATG KNOWLEDGE................................................................................................................................................... 47

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 47 Link Validation for Solutions ..................................................................................................... 47 Content Set Criteria in Advanced Search ................................................................................... 48

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 48 Improved Solution Editing .......................................................................................................... 48 Owning Group Management ...................................................................................................... 49 Solution Deployment Performance Improvements .................................................................... 50

ATG SELF SERVICE ................................................................................................................................................ 50


ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 51


Updated Root Topic Selection ..................................................................................................... 51

ATG CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE (ACI) ............................................................................................................. 52

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 52 ACI Data Model Extension ......................................................................................................... 52 Commerce Service Center (CSC) Reporting ............................................................................... 52

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 53 Application Site Dimension Reporting ....................................................................................... 53 Cognos Upgrade .......................................................................................................................... 53

COMMERCE REFERENCE STORE ....................................................................................................................... 54

NEW .................................................................................................................................................. 54 CRS Multisite Support................................................................................................................. 54 CRS Promotions .......................................................................................................................... 55

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 56 Improved Usability ...................................................................................................................... 56 Common CRS Use Cases ............................................................................................................ 56 Ease Setup Use for Merchandisers and Implementers .............................................................. 56

CONFIGURATION INSTALLATION MANAGER (CIM) ..................................................................................... 57

ENHANCED ........................................................................................................................................ 57 CIM Batch Mode Scripts ............................................................................................................. 57

THIRD PARTY QUALIFICATIONS ........................................................................................................................ 57

UPGRADING TO ATG COMMERCE 10 ................................................................................................................. 57


ATG Multi-Site Commerce

A growing number of online merchants operate multiple sites, brands, and businesses under a

single parent business. These operations are often the result of mergers and acquisitions, or are

initiatives to expand the merchant’s market presence in their current or new domain. There is a

broad spectrum of possible presentations for many of these businesses and the following is an

attempt to provide a general description of each:

• Microsites are a focused presentation of a particular brand, segment, category or other

unique aspect of a business. Microsites are often temporary in nature, such as holiday-

based sites or sites launched in support of a marketing event. Customers are able to add

products to their cart from any combination of those sites that uses a single check out

and payment, regardless of the site they are on when they check out.

• Affiliated brand sites are a common presentation of unique brands or product lines that

may be marketed under the same brand. A common presentation is used to market each

of these brands, though each has a unique brand identity that clearly separates it from

its affiliates. The common “ownership” of these brands may not be hidden from the

consumer; in fact, the shopping experience could be designed to accommodate “cross

brand” customers. Customers might keep a common user profile on these sites and

shopping carts could be shared across the sites. Similar to microsites, consumers are able

to add product from any of the brand sites with a single check out and payment.

• Unaffiliated brand sites are sites that are marketed as separate businesses. These brands

don’t overtly advertise their common owner and often offer separate product lines to

meet the needs of different demographics. Consumers of these brands may not able to

purchase across brands with a single shopping cart and typically don’t have a single

profile as they navigate the brand sites.

• Mixed implementations are represented by merchants operating a combination of

brands or business units that cross the spectrum of the above categories.

• Country Stores are run by multi-national merchants who usually desire a unique

commerce experience in various regions and who operate these regions as separate

sites. Often the sites are supported by local offices with separate merchandising and

marketing staff, necessitating the need for tighter security in administration and

management tools. While it is possible to localize a single site to meet the needs of each

region, there are often significant differences in business practice that necessitate a

multi-site implementation, including regional differences in:

o Product assortment

o Localization of content

o Currency


o Business operations

o Site administration

o Merchandising operations

o Customer base

o Fulfillment networks

o Payment processors

Several ATG customers have implemented multi-site capabilities with earlier releases of ATG and

required customizations that allowed merchants to operate multiple sites from a single ATG

instance. ATG 10 now provides the business tools and an infrastructure to support a multi-site

environment.

There are several benefits of operating a multisite environment, including:

• Common/shared business user tools such as ATG Merchandising

• Simple re-use of common site content such as catalog items and media

• Simplified IT operations with only one environment to manage

• Single IT infrastructure and shared hardware

• Single instance upgrades, as opposed to upgrading each site individually

Note: As described earlier, there are broad spectrums of sites and customer presentations

a business user may implement with the new ATG multi-site capabilities. While ATG 10

represents a significant step forward, it does not address all of the possibilities in that

spectrum. A few of the specific capabilities that are not addressed in ATG 10 are:

• Site-specific customer profiles: Customer profiles are common across all sites

with no out-of-the-box facility to create site-specific profiles. Business users

may choose to customize ATG 10 to achieve this capability.

• Site-specific repository values: A common use case is to change the default

image or description for a product that is sold on multiple sites. ATG 10 does

not include a facility to create site-specific variants for repository items such as

the product catalog; however, business users are able to customize ATG to

achieve this result if they so desire.

• Site security for business users (internal profiles): The Merchandising,

Promotions, and Commerce Service Center applications include extensive

support for multi-site capabilities, but there is no internal user security to lock

down the sites that specific users are able to work with.


ATG Platform

ATG Platform is the foundation of the ATG solution where the dynamo application

framework (DAF) and the adaptive scenario engine (ASE) reside. DAF is a Java-based

application development framework and programming model, primarily consisting of a

component model, a data-access model, a message-based event-model and a UI/form

development model. ASE is a collection of technologies to enable web-based applications

to learn and store customer behavior with the goal of using this knowledge to present

personalized content and a compelling and relevant web experience.

NEW

Site Determination

The ATG Platform plays a number of key roles as part of the new Unified Multi-site

Architecture™ including the ability to determine the site for which any HTTP request is

targeted. Once the target site has been determined, the platform makes the site context

available to the rest of the applications to allow them to take appropriate action.

By default, site context is determined based on the URL of the requesting page.

Determination may be performed in multiple ways:

• Domain Name: The platform can look for and match against portions of the

domain or subdomain name. For example, the platform can determine the

appropriate site for different domains such as www.company1.com and

www.company2.com. Further, subdomains may be used and allows for sites

such as www.site1.company.com and www.site2.company.com.

• Context Root: Within a given domain, the platform can identify the site based

on the context root (the portion to the right of the domain name). This

approach allows the configuration of sites such as www.company.com/site1

and www.company.com/site2.

In addition to the identifying site context on the production system, a typical ATG

implementation will need to determine the appropriate site on environments that mirror

the production site, such as staging and preview servers. In order to simplify the

configuration of new sites, a set of translation rules can be optionally configured for all

environments. These rules will allow a consistent modification of the production URL based

on desired rules, such as replacing text, or adding a prefix or suffix. This makes it possible

to automatically translate a production URL, such as www.company1.com into an internal

staging server URL such as www.preview-company1.com.


The new framework handles the following:

• Defines an API for sites, site contexts and site management

• Identifies the site from a request URL using configurable rules

• Includes Rule Filters and Site Context Droplets (except Pattern Matching)

• Includes Automatic Site-specific Profile Properties (SitePropertyServlet)

• Includes WebServices updates

• References session recovery utilities

Benefits

The site determination feature is a key element of the ATG Unified Multi-site

Architecture™ and provides the basis for many of the other features of ATG’s multi-site

capabilities. In addition, the translation rules allow site creators to simply configure the

desired production URL and not worry about creating staging and preview URLs for a new

site.

Site Context

A notion of “site context” is introduced to manage site and application behavior as

customers navigate to one or many ATG Sites in a shopping session. This site context is

used to determine several important shopping components:

• The default catalog to be used for the customer (profile) as defined for the site

• The specific catalogs area available to the customer on that site

• The price lists (list price and sale price) to use when pricing carts on that site

• The cart to use for the customer (orders that belong to either the current site or a

site that shares the shopping cart will be used)

Site-Aware Personalization

ATG’s personalization capabilities provide an important and valuable tool for companies to

tailor sites to their customers. Site awareness is available on segments, content groups,

content targeters, and scenarios.

• Segments, content groups, and content targeters have default rules as well as

rules specific to a site or set of sites

• Scenarios have a condition indicating "where site is ...", and allow scenario

authors to choose a site from a picker for use in events, actions, and conditions

• Platform JMS Events updates and Platform Scenario Action updates have been

added


For segments, content groups, and content targeters, in which the function of the asset is

based on a set of predefined rules, the rules are now site aware. Each will have a default

rule that is applied when no other is defined. In addition, each may have a set of override

rules that apply for a given site. See an example of a targeter rule below where the user is

determining the site(s) to apply the rule to.

Benefits

The multi-site personalization feature allows users to tailor their sites appropriately

without having to recode every site and update all the personalization assets. This

translates into easier and quicker site creation and launch.

The business user has the option to share content targeter rules across sites or restrict to a single site.


Multi-Site Shareables

Shareables is a framework that is part of the Unified Multi-site Architecture™. This

framework allows the creation of in-session objects and data that can be shared or not

shared among groups of sites. It also allows the definition and creation of groups of sites

that can the data (or not, depending on the business need). For example, in ATG 10, the

shopping cart ships as a shareable, this allows the cart to be shared among the sites within

a specified site group. It also allows for the definition of a single site that does not share

the cart with any other sites.

The shareable framework is developed in a manner that allows users to define, develop,

and use their own shareables in the multi-site environment. Below is an example of the

Site Administration application where the “Site group US” is selected, showing that “ATG

Home” and “ATG Store” are within the “Site group US” group, and the shopping cart is

shared across those two sites.

Benefits

The shareable framework within the Unified Multi-site Architecture™ allows users to

define key items as being shared or not shared across sites. This enables companies to

align the multi-site solution with their business goals and requirements. Further, the

framework allows users to extend the multi-site solution to handle custom items that may

need to be defined.

The shopping cart shareable is available OOTB; all other determined shareables would be defined in the implementation process


Multi-Site Page Coding

The key to multi-site page coding is having access to important site information at page

creation time. A number of updates have been made to the page coding environment to

support site-aware pages and applications. The key elements that the page code has access

to include the following:

UI Property Name Repository Property Name

Site context As the platform uses its rules to determine which site a given page request is

for, it sets the context and makes it available to the page code. The page

code can then uses the context to adjust its processing and what it wants to

display.

Site objects Each site is defined in the Site Administration interface and is described by a

site object. These objects are made available to the page code such that the

page code can use data stored within the object. For example, the site

creator may wish to define a path to image files that the page code then

uses to insert into the page.

In addition, a number of droplets are provided to assist the multi-site page coder.

Droplet Definition

Site context get

and set

These droplets allow the setting of the site context to override what the

platform has set and the ability to obtain the current context. This can be

useful for displaying information on a page as it would be shown on another

site (possibly for cross sells, or other cross-site activity).

URL Generation A droplet is provided to assist in generating full URLs to pages on the same

ATG instance, but that represent another site. For example, a page such as

www.site1.com\page1 may want to have a link to www.site2.com\page2. A

relative URL (...\page2) would not work, as the platform would not change

the site context. And while a fully qualified URL would work, it would not

work on a staging or preview server. The new droplet allows the creation of

a full URL that varies based on the server its being run on (production,

staging, and preview).

Benefits

The updates to the page coding environment allows page coders to take advantage of the

Unified Multi-site Architecture™ and develop single JSP pages that can be executed on

multiple sites and display different content on each site. In addition, the provided droplets

provide a way to code pages more quickly and in a way that is compatible with the overall

ATG architecture.


Multi-Site Repository Membership

A critical functionality enabled by the Unified Multi-site Architecture™ is the ability for

companies to manage different catalogs across their multiple sites. In order to fully support

this, the platform has added the capability to identify catalog items as being “on” (i.e., a

member of) a given site. The site membership feature supports the overall ATG multi-site

framework by allowing a given repository item to be identified as being appropriate for

specific sites. This supports such features as different catalogs on each site, content groups

that are site specific, etc.

Note: While this is a general capability of the Repository layer and can be extended to any

custom repository, ATG only provides tools to manage it for the catalog through the

Merchandising interface. No other tools are provided to assist users in managing site

membership.

ENHANCED

REST Services

A number of improvements and bug fixes were made to the APIs based on user feedback.

These improvements allow enable integration between the ATG platform and a wide range

of client applications, from mobile to POS to ERP systems. Specific changes include the

following:

• Support the ability to either append a value or replace a value for collection or

maps. In prior versions, it only supported the append function.

• Allow standard JSON input for setting repository values.

• Set property filters at the request level rather than the server level. This allows

more dynamic selection of returned data for each service call.

• Ability to return collection/map contents or complex objects. In prior versions,

implementation of REST would, by default, return a path to any collection or map

properties requested from a repository item or nucleus component. The

improvement allows the returning of the path or the actual object.

• Updated the REST API to return the Boolean and any exceptions resulting from

the method call and properties of the form handler. In prior versions, when

calling a form handler method via REST, the services would only return a Boolean

indicating the success of failure of the call; however, any exceptions occurring in

the form handler were not returned.

• Added a control parameter to service calls that are simply returned by the server.

This is useful if the client is handling service calls asynchronously or has a need for

easily remembering associated data for the service call.


ATG Commerce

ATG Commerce provides all of the necessary capabilities and tools for businesses and

organizations to create a compelling and personalized online experience for customers to

research, shop, and buy products and manage their accounts.

NEW

Cart Sharing

When operating a multi-site environment, retailers may decide that shopping carts should

be shared among two or more sites. As mentioned previously, this functionality is available

in ATG 10 through the shareable framework. With this feature, retailers can decide those

sites that share carts and those that do not.

• Sites that share carts: Customers will have the ability to browse among sites

that share carts without starting a new cart for each site. The cart will be

priced based on pricing rules and pricing defined on the site a customer checks

out on.

• Sites that do not share carts: When a customer browses from one site to

another that do not share carts with each other, a new cart is started on the

site the customer browses to.

Because items from multiple sites may be added to a single cart, and because a checkout

may occur on a different site than the cart was started on, the following properties have

been added to the ATG shopping cart:

• Originating Site: The site from which the first item was added to the cart

• Current Site: The site from which the last activity (add to cart, checkout, etc.)

occurred on

• Line Item Origin: The site from which each line item is added to the cart

Additionally, page developers have the ability to properly display multi-site orders when

creating pages that display a customer’s (profile) order history. This includes providing

filters that allow a page developer to display a list of orders for a customer:

• For the current site only

• Across all sites that share shopping carts with the current site

• Across all sites in the multi-site environment, regardless of whether they share

a cart


When displaying the details of an order, page developers can display all products on the

order regardless of which site they were added from (line item origin). This includes the

ability for the page developer to easily determine which site the item was added from for

the purpose of generating a link to the original item.

Site-Aware Scheduled Orders

Scheduled orders allow customers to save shopping carts as an order template that is

submitted for fulfillment on a regularly occurring basis. Scheduled orders are site specific

just as any other order is when using the Unified Multi-site Architecture™. Multi-site orders

contain three order properties: the site the order was created on, the site each line item is

added from, and the site the order is submitted on. Site-specific scheduled orders contain

the same properties when the scheduled order service creates a new instance of the order.

However, because the original order template is never actually submitted, the site the

template is saved on will be used as the submitted site, ensuring that pricing is consistent

with the customer’s experience when the template was created.

Site-Aware Product Comparison

Users that create new sites using the ATG Site Administration application can determine if

sites in a site group should share product comparison lists. If sites in a group do share lists,

a customer can compare products across all of the sites that belong to that site group, but

not outside of the site group.

Site-Aware Gift, Purchase, and Wish Lists

Gift, Purchase, and Wish Lists keep track of the site each item is added from. Page

developer tools have been updated to allow ATG Application Developers to determine how

to set the site ID as items are added to these lists, as well as the scope of items to include

when displaying these lists.


For example, below is a Wish List in which a product from the “ATG Store” and a product

from “ATG Home”—2 separate, affiliated brand sites selling different types of products—

can be listed in a single Wish List.

Because it is possible for a customer profile to contain more than one Gift or Purchase List,

ATG applications developers can create site-specific Gift and Purchase Lists to manage

separate lists for each site the customer visits.

Benefits

The primary goal for ATG 10 multi-site capabilities is to empower business users to quickly

launch new presentations with minimal help from IT. New user tools enable business users

to create and manage these presentations and development tools are delivered to allow

ATG application developers to create “site-aware” applications.


Site Administration

In addition to the Unified Multi-site Architecture™, ATG Sites™ comprises a new BCC

application called Site Administration. Designed to aid business users in the rapid launch of

a new site, Site Administration allows users to create sites and use the shareable

framework to group those sites and decide which items are shared by sites within a group.

Creating a site allows users to define several important properties of that site.

Users can define the default catalog, price list, sale price list, the site’s URL, and the

opening date for the new site. There are several properties delivered out of the box (in

addition to those listed in the example), and companies may add their own as they see fit.

Additionally, ATG Developers have access to all of the sites an item belongs to when

rendered; so they can write page logic that renders the appropriate version of an item.

NEW

Site Categories

When a site is created in Site Administration, the user is asked what the purpose of the site

is. For example, a site may be a microsite, holiday site, social media initiative, country

store, or other previously defined category. The answer to this determines what category a

site belongs to. The categories are created by the IT group and vary by the list of properties

they contain that define the Site object. Typically, they include properties that answer

questions that a Site Administrator must answer and use to define a site. For example,

these things may include the site’s URL and opening and closing dates or data that are

shared among sites (if any).

These properties should reflect what has been built into the code, outside of Site

Administration. For example, the site's pages would need to be created in a manner that

allows the page elements to be dynamic in order to reflect the configurations specified in

the Site Category. The screen shot below represents a sample listing of site categories that

can be created by IT.


Site Default Catalog

Users have the ability to define the default catalog to use for any given site. This does not

limit the catalogs that are available to that site but does provide a simple way to load the

most appropriate catalog when a customer browses to the site. When working in a multi-

site environment, Merchandisers can specify the site that catalogs, categories, products,

and SKUs belong to; these items can be members of one or many sites. Assigning an item

to a site defines site membership and is used as the basis for site-specific values and page

development capabilities. Assigning site membership does not create a copy of the item; it

“links” the base item to that site.

Site Pricing

The addition of multi-site capabilities in ATG 10 requires that businesses be able to define

pricing for any given site. For companies using price list pricing, this means that they’ll

need to decide which price list is the default price list for a site.

Site Administration allows business users to define a default price list and sale price list for

each site that they create. The price lists defined in Site Administration are used to price

carts that are checked out on that site. It is possible for multiple sites to use the same price

list; it is also possible for those sites to define a sale price list for each site. However, it is

important for users to ensure that sites that share carts can properly price carts with

products from both sites. This can be achieved by having both sites using the same price

list or by ensuring that all products and/or SKUs that are members of those sites have

pricing defined in each site’s respective price list.

Site Groups and Shareables

As noted in previous sections, users can create site groups—which are a logical

organization of sites—by using the shareable framework. A group may contain many sites,

and a single site may belong to more than one group. Once a group is created, the user can

determine what in-session data (if any) is shared among the sites in that group. When ATG

10 is first implemented, the ability to share shopping carts and product comparison lists is

available out of the box. ATG developers have the ability register other components as

shareables, i.e., any Nucleus component can be coded as a shareable and made available

for a user to share among sites in a site group.


ATG Content Administration

ATG Content Administration (CA) is a comprehensive web content management solution

that supports personalized web sites throughout the entire content process including

creation, version tracking, preview, editing, revision, approval, and site deployment.

NEW

Catalog Site Membership

Catalog site membership capabilities include: query able property derivations for

product.sites and sku.sites properties, modifications to VersionRepository’s checkout to

speed up bidirectional multi-property cloning, prevention of a sites property from getting

modified as a side effect of versioning operations, and conflict resolution.

Benefits

Minor changes were made to ensure that Content Administration performs well in

conjunction with the new Unified Multi-Site Architecture™.

ENHANCED

Smart Cache Invalidation

The Smart Cache Invalidation (SCI) feature improves the method used for invalidating

caches after a CA deployment. Prior to ATG 10, after new assets are deployed to a target,

the entire cache is invalidated, requiring the cache to be reloaded over time as customers

visited the site.

The SCI feature tracks which assets have been updated and deployed with the CA

deployment. It only invalidates the cache for those items that have been deployed, leaving

the cache valid for all other assets. To prevent excessive overhead, the feature has a

configurable threshold for number of items that have changed; when the number of items

exceeds the threshold, the entire cache is invalidated.

Benefits

The SCI feature improves site performance by leaving unchanged portions of the repository

cache valid after a deployment. This results in better performance for companies, reduced

slow page load times, and a reduction of load on the database due to reloading the cache.


ATG Merchandising

ATG Merchandising enables merchandisers to directly manage the online storefront,

including catalogs, products, search facets, promotions, pricing, coupons, and special

offers.

NEW

Multi-site Merchandising

Search Merchandising

Search Merchandising is multi-site enabled and allows the user to create a different

configuration for each site. The Search Merchandising configuration can be varied

by three factors out of the box: site, segment, and language. It is important to note

that the user must define a single folder structure that is nested as the three

dimensions all overlap (multiple parent folders cannot be created). Best practice is

to create the root folder as the first dimension (the least specific) and then get

more specific with added configurations.

For example, the nested folder structure could be

Language

Site

Segment

Or

Site

Segment

Language

In the first example (Language | Site | Segment), the actual set up may look like

this: Language = English

Site = ATG Store

Segment = Fashionista � config 1

Segment = Soccer Mom � config 2

Segment = others � config 3

Site = ATG Home

Segment = Fashionista � config 4

Segment = others � config 5

Language = Spanish

Site = ATG Store

Segment = ….. (repeat as above)


Users can change the hierarchy of the dimensions, depending on how the

configurations will be managed.

Cross Sells/Up Sells

With the introduction of the multi-site functionality, it is likely that merchandisers

will cross-promote products that belong to separate sites. To facilitate this,

merchandisers can define cross sell and up sell lists that include products from

multiple sites, regardless of the site the merchandiser is currently working on. This

includes the ability to define “static” cross/up sells as well as those defined as a

content group.

Category Assignment

With the introduction of multi-site, ATG 10 now supports the assignment of

categories to multiple catalogs.

Merchandising UI Redesign

Over the last two and a half years, the ATG product and design teams have met with

merchandisers in an effort to understand the merchandising role and to identify the

merchandiser’s most commonly performed tasks. These conversations and visits were used

to guide the product development efforts that have resulted in a tool that closely aligns

with the business processes of its users.

The Merchandising UI has been redesigned using the Flex framework. This framework was

chosen because of the cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, which causes the

Merchandising application to act more like a desktop application rather than a web-based

application, as well as for the business user tools and functionality that could be delivered

using the Flex framework. The chart below summarizes the areas that were redesigned

using Flex, as well as those that remain in JSP.

Flex JSP

Merchandising Catalog X

Media X

Promotions X

Coupons X

Price Lists X

Site Administration X

Search X

Personalization X

Search Merchandising X

CA X

The remaining JSP applications will be redesigned as part of future releases.


Benefits

ATG 10 provides advanced merchandising features and capabilities such as split pane, drag

& drop, filter as you type, that have become industry standards and have become central

user expectations. The design is task driven, designed to work the way the users want to

work and provides increased transparency. The redesign increases efficiency and

productivity and significantly reduces errors. This new version also provides the ground

work for future expansion and extension of the ATG product suite.

More Streamlined and Scalable Browsing

The redesign includes an update of the catalog navigation that was driven by ATG

customer feedback, as well as our own testing. The new navigation seeks to improve

performance with large catalogs where, in earlier releases, the navigation did not scale as

well and to more closely align with the merchandisers’ frequently performed daily tasks of

managing catalogs, categories and assets.

Benefits

ATG Merchandising’s new navigation, search, and filtering greatly improve the

merchandiser’s ability to quickly and effortlessly work with categories, products, and SKUs

in large categories.

Split-Pane

The split-pane feature allows a user to open up two workspaces in one browser window by

simply clicking on a toggle. Each workspace comprises two sections: the left pane and the

right pane, which are adjustable so users can have a customized view of their working

environments.

The right and left panes function independently of each other and offer the user greater

autonomy for navigating the catalog and making changes. As a result, the user has the

ability to work on unrelated activities across panes. Refreshes occur only as needed and

the user is able to navigate through the catalog without being prompted to “Save”.

Benefits

The split-pane feature potentially quadruples the user’s knowledge and visibility of the

workspace, reduces time, increases efficiencies, and allows the user to be in multiple

contexts at the same time.


Drag & Drop

As the name implies, the Drag & Drop feature allows users to drag items from one location

and drop them into another within the Merchandising UI.

Benefits

Drag & Drop complements the split-pane functionality and enables users to make the most

of the increased workspace. It’s intuitive and maps closely to the merchandising tasks that

users perform and offers them alternative and efficient ways to perform those tasks.

Property Additions

There were various additions to properties in ATG 10. The following table provides

a summary of the work done.

UI Property Name Repository Property Name Asset Type UI Tab

Sites

siteIDs.name Catalog General

Catalog Folder n/a

Category General

Product General

SKU General

Parent Categories for

Catalog

parentCategoriesForCatalog Category Advanced


Below is a screenshot of the new Merchandising UI and a summary of new terms

Name Definition

Split Pane Provides two working views: Browse/Find Pane and the Asset

Editing View

Split Screen Allows a user to open up two workspaces within one browser

window, allows two assets to be open at the same time for editing,

drag and drop between workspaces

Browse/Find Pane Provides 2 different views to locate assets, flip between views

Browse View A navigational structure of the assets for the functional area

Find View A search query and results area

Asset Editing Pane Displays an asset and its property editors

Tool Bar Enables users to perform common actions such as sort, link, move,

edit, delete, etc.

Header Counter Indicates number of assets shown in the Find view

Badge An icon associated to assets, project modals, asset editor header,

property editor to show changes or status

Split Pane

Split Screen

Browse/Find Pane

Asset Editing Pane

HeaderCounter

Find View

Badge

Tool Bar


ENHANCED

Redesigned & Improved Editors

The property editors have been redesigned and enhanced so that users can more easily

understand and follow where they are in the UI. Editors can be in one of the following

three states:

Passive

Mouse-

over

Active

Users can Save, Create, Cancel, Review Changes, and Preview assets, with buttons enabled

or disabled depending on the state of an asset. To further assist users as they merchandise

the catalog, visual badges have been introduced to indicate actions that have been

performed in the editors such as “Required”, “Changed”, “Error” and “Locked”.

Property Enhancements

There were various additions and enhancements to properties in ATG 10. The

following table provides a summary of the work done.

UI Property Name Repository

Property Name Asset Type

UI Tab

Parent Categories

(Editable)

parentCategories Product Categorization

Price list pricing tab Pricelists


Add a Product to Multiple Categories

In ATG 10, the Parent Categories Property Editor for products has been added, which

appears on the Categorization tab. Through this property, users can select multiple

categories and add them to the product at one time. This reduces time and creates

multiple efficiencies. Users can modify the values of the parent category property by:

• Drag & Drop

• Link/Unlink

• Move

• Duplicate

• Create a new Fixed Child Product

• Create a New Product

• Add Existing Product

Benefits

In prior releases, for each category in which the user wanted a product to appear, the user

navigated into each category and selected the product to add to it. Now, the Parent

Categories Property Editor enables a more product-centric workflow and makes it

significantly easier for users to add a product to multiple categories. This saves time and

more closely models the way merchandisers think about their work.

Updated Messaging Framework

The messaging framework was revised and enhanced as part of the ATG 10 release to aid

the user during their merchandising tasks.

The following types of messages are used in the new UI:

Message Definition

Activity Displayed to indicate that an action is currently underway (e.g., spinner and a curtain).

Growl Temporary message that appears when information needs to be delivered with

minimum interruption to the user. (success!)

Modal Used when an action requires user input to complete (e.g., error, save, or confirmation

messages).

Tooltip Appears on hover and provides extended information or instructions to the user.


In addition, project badges have been improved and updated. The badges are icons that

indicate the status of assets in the project. Badges have been designed to indicate the

following:

Message Definition Badge

Asset edited in project the item has been added to the current project or has

been edited in the project.

Conflict Detected the item is in project, but since the time that it was added

to the project, it has been edited and checked in by

another project

New asset in project the item is created in the current project

Asset deleted in project the item was deleted in the current project

Asset locked the item is locked and cannot be edited or deleted

Benefits

The updated messaging framework communicates necessary and helpful information to

the user without interrupting workflow.

Toolbar Enhancements

The Merchandising UI includes a new toolbar that extends the functionality of the existing

toolbar. The various components of this toolbar are configurable, and the toolbar is

displayed on the following:


Toolbar elements include the following:

Element Action

Find/Browse view

switcher

Use to toggle from Find to Browse view

Create New Asset menu Use to create a new asset and within the current context; opens a new

asset form in the right pane

Action(s) Menu Based on the context, performs actions on assets:

• Link (Link, Unlink, Unlink from All)

• Move (from selected location)

• Export

• Duplicate

• Edit

• View children

• Add to project

Sort/View menu Changes the display of asset information such as sort order (available

by alpha or by id). The default order for all assets in Merchandising is

Alpha ascending by display name. This is a change from prior releases

in which the default sort is Natural List Order.

Filter Hides assets by attribute

• Enter strings in the text field to narrow the list

• Clear the text field

• See the count of how many assets are in the list

• Select items in the list using different status criteria

o All: selects all the items in the list

o None: deselects all the items in the list

o Conflicts: selects all conflicts

Benefits

Toolbar enhancements were implemented to improve performance and to make the

overall functionality of the Merchandising UI easier to use


Enhanced Project Capabilities

Users can add assets and make changes from various ATG applications (e.g.,

Merchandising, Site Administration, and Personalization) to a single project.

Benefits

Enhanced project capabilities allows a site object to be created in one application (i.e. Site

Administration) and then be worked on in another (i.e. Merchandising) within the same

project. This breaks down the divisions among ATG applications and their assets within the

BCC, and enables users to navigate and add items from both the JSP and Flex areas of the

BCC to a project. This greatly enhances usability and decreases time to complete activities.

Within a single project, the user can navigate across several applications


Improved Promotional Capabilities

A major improvement to ATG 10 is a new user interface to work with promotions. It

provides a straightforward way for business users to create and manage promotions.

Promotional Templates

Promotion templates are a mechanism to allow users to construct “forms” for

business users to create common promotion types. Several out-of-the-box

templates are delivered by ATG; however, technical users can create their own or

modify those delivered. Templates are capable of constructing “static” portions of

those promotions, allowing users to provide variable values. For example, the

Spend Y, Get Shipping Discount template allows users to enter Y, while the

template is configured to construct the rest of the promotion.

Templates delivered OOTB include:

Item Discount Order Discount Shipping Discount

• Get Item Discount

• Buy X, Get Item Y

• BOGO

• Spend Y, Get Item Discount

• Buy Within a Time Period, Get

Item Discount

• Tiered Quantity Item Discount

• Get Order Discount

• Buy X, Get Order Discount

• Spend Y, Get Order Discount

• Spend Y in X, Get Order Discount

• Tiered Cost Discount

• Buy Within a Time Period, Get

Order Discount

• Get Shipping Discount

• Buy X, Get Shipping

Discount

• Spend Y, Get Shipping

Discount

• Buy Within a Time Period,

Get Shipping Discount

Folders

A common problem that users express with the

current promotions interface is the inability to

organize long lists of promotions. Many users resort

to archaic naming conventions to capitalize on the

filtering capabilities of the BCC. To make organization

easier, the new promotions UI includes the ability to

organize promotions by folders. Users have the

ability to create, edit, and delete folders and

organize their promotions with them.


Tiered Promotions

Many retailers offer tiered promotions to encourage customers to increase their

order size. Typically, the target of a tiered discount is the order total or a specific

quantity of products to purchase from a specified group. In either case, a greater

discount is applied to the order or all items in the group as each tier is met.

Discounts generally offered include dollars off the order, percentage off of an

order, and fixed item price.

Using promotions capabilities in earlier releases, retailers were required to set up

separate promotions for each of these tiers. Managing groups of tiered promotions

was cumbersome and difficult to report on as a single promotion. This new feature

allows retailers to create tiered discounts as a single promotion rather than as a

separate promotion for each tier.

Creating Coupons and Associating to Promotions

The new UI simplifies the creating of coupons and attaching promotions to them.

Additionally, users have the ability to view, sort, and filter existing coupons. The

coupon perspective also simplifies the ability for users to quickly view and edit the

promotions that are attached to a coupon as well as allows them to attach new

promotions (existing or newly created).

Multi-Offer Coupons

A common type of promotion that retailers use is a combined offer, often granted

via a coupon code. For example, a retailer may offer a discount and free shipping in

the same promotion, asking customers to use a specific coupon code when

checking out. In earlier releases, coupons were limited and granted only a single

Users can quickly build tiered promotions and include or exclude products for eligibility


promotion. This new feature allows retailers to grant multiple promotions with a

single coupon code.

Site-Specific Promotions

With the introduction of multi-site capabilities, it’s important that promotions

include the ability to be “site aware”. Business users are now able to define which

sites a promotion can be used on, as well as include sites in the definition of targets

(offers) and qualifiers (conditions).

• When running in a multi-site environment, users may decide that a given

promotion is “valid” on a specific site or on multiple sites. In that event,

the user is able specify which sites the promotion is valid on in the UI.

The promotions engine will only consider that promotion for a cart when

the customer is on one of those sites.

• Users may decide to include site criteria when defining targets and

qualifiers.

o Targets: A common use case is to define a set of items that

belong to a specific site as targets.

o Qualifiers: A common use case is to define a site that must be

purchased from to qualify for a promotion.

Each promotion allows the capability to identify validity for sites and/or site groups


Importing and Exporting Promotions

Many ATG customers operate (or plan to operate) ATG Commerce in a multi-

channel environment (web, brick-and-mortar store, catalog, etc.) where many

disparate systems are integrated to support the overall business. It is not

uncommon for a retail environment to contain several complex back-end systems

such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), Point of Sale (POS), Retail Back office,

Order Management, and others. In many of those cases, ATG is often not the

“system of record” for promotions (among other repositories). Because of this,

several ATG customers have written integrations between other enterprise systems

and ATG Commerce to import promotions from another system.

A common challenge experienced with the integrations is mapping to the

integration to the ATG PMDL language. The purpose of this feature is to expose a

standard interface that simplifies the ability to import promotions. ATG customers,

partners, and ATG Professional Services will be able to use this API to “map”

promotions from other applications to ATG without having to learn the intricacies

of PMDL.

Conversely, in scenarios where ATG Commerce is the system of record for

promotions, developers can use this feature to export promotions for the purposes

of importing into another system. In doing so, developers will have the ability to

export a single promotion or group of promotions by ID, type, created/updated

dates, and other promotion properties.

Creating Custom Promotions

ATG Commerce strives to deliver a robust set of promotional capabilities that

support many common types of promotions. However, there will be times when an

ATG customer has unique promotion requirements that are not supported out of

the box. On those occasions it becomes necessary to extend the promotion engine,

often with support from ATG Professional Services or an ATG development partner.

Adding support for promotion extensibility provides a straightforward path for ATG

customers, Professional Services, and partners to add support for custom

promotions. This feature facilitates the creation of new promotion types, new or

revised qualifiers and targets, discount calculation rules, rules for prioritizing or

resolving other conflicts between promotions, exclusion rules, scheduling

capabilities, or applicability limits. Additionally, ATG developers will have the ability

to expose these extensions through the new Promotions UI so that business users

can use the new capabilities.

A secondary objective to this feature is streamlining ATG’s ability to quickly add

new promotion types in future releases and for Professional Services and partners

to share promotion extensions in a common, straightforward way (e.g., through the

ATG Catalyst program).


UPDATE

Import/Export – Price Lists

As in earlier releases, the import of price lists is not officially supported in ATG 10.

In 9.1, the import of price lists was possible but was not a documented or officially

tested feature.

Multi Edit Moved to Import/Export Feature

In ATG 10, the multi-edit feature button has been removed from the Merchandising

tool bar (in 9.1) and multi-edit is now handled through the import/export utility.

ATG 9.1 Merchandising ATG 10 Merchandising

Move from ePhox to Flex WYSIWYG Editor

As part of the redesign, ATG 10 Merchandising now uses the RichTextEditor, a

standard Flex component, as its out-of-the-box WYSIWYG editor. This is a change

from ATG 9.1, which used ePhox EditLive! as the WYSIWYG editor. The primary

difference between the two editors is that the RichTextEditor does not alternate

between code view and WYSIWYG view.


ATG Search

ATG Search is a dynamic, integrated search solution that incorporates natural language

technology into the web storefront. It enables customers to quickly and efficiently navigate

commerce sites with features like faceted search results to find the exact merchandise

they want. This product is tightly integrated with ATG Merchandising.

NEW

Target Type, Content Labels, Linked Projects

Two new logical constructs have been added to allow better and easier control over

accessing the correct search engine and index. In earlier releases, developers had to code

and configure each system (production, staging, etc.) to use the appropriate Search

environment. This required the matching up of the target system configuration with the

exact name of the environment as created in the Search Administration Interface. In cases

where the application had multiple indices to access, there was an even greater need for

correct configuration and room for error.

In ATG 10, two new constructs have been added: Target Type and Content Label. Target

Type is a logical label for a target system, such as “production” or “staging”. Content Label

is a logical label for the type of data to be queried, such as “catalog” or “articles”.

The Routing component can use the Content Label from the web application, combined

with configuration of target system with one of the Target Types to determine the correct

environment.

In addition, to simplify multi-site configuration, projects may be linked together to

represent the same logical data on different target systems. Search ensures that linked

projects have the same content sets, which helps ensure that target systems are kept in

sync.

An example of the above will assist in clarifying.

Project 1 – Project1-Name Target type – “production” Content Set 1 – content label = “catalog” Content Set 2 – content label = “articles” Project 2 – Project2-Name Target type – “staging” Content Set 1 – content label = “catalog” Content Set 2 - content label = “articles”

In the above example, Project 1 and Project 2 are linked, as they represent the same data,

but on two different targets, production and staging. Further, each project has two


different content sets: one that contains the catalog content and one that contains a set of

articles.

The web application can simply and consistently access either the “catalog” or “articles” in

its query requests. Routing will take that query with, for example the Content Label

“catalog,” and look at the local system’s configuration, for example “staging,” and

determine that it must send the query to Content Set 1 in the environment that Project 2

created.

Benefits

This new approach allows a single search form handler to operate on all target systems

without having to specify the name of the search environment. Applications can be written

generically, and target systems named generically, thus minimizing errors.

Further, the linking allows easier setup of sites in a multi-site environment. Finally, this

takes a step closer to replicating the structure used for Content Administration and

Merchandising, where a data is kept consistent across deployment targets.

Multi-Site Search, Site Administration Integration

As part of the overall multi-site capabilities, ATG Search has been updated to better

support a multi-site environment.

The first area of change is the integration with Site Administration so that ATG Search can

obtain key information about sites without requiring changes to Search Administration.

This information is a mapping from sites to content sets for each Content Label type of

data.

Within Site Administration, the user has the ability to store or assign a new site’s data in a

particular content set, allowing the partitioning of content between different content sets,

and ultimately between hardware if desired.

For example, the Search Administration could create the following:

Project 1 – Project1-Name Target type – “production” Content Set 1 – content label = “catalog” Content Set 2 – content label = “articles” Content Set 3-Micro sites – content label = “catalog” Project 2 – Project2-Name Target type – “staging” Content Set 1 – content label = “catalog” Content Set 2 – content label = “articles” Content Set 3-Micro sites – content label = “catalog”


Site Administration users will see two different Content Labels, “catalog” and “articles” and

will present the user the option of all production target content sets available for each.

Thus, the Site Administration user will see:

Catalog : <options> Articles: <options>

The above “Catalog” will have options to place that site’s data into Content Set 1 or

Content Set 3-Micro sites, and for “Articles” will have only one option to place the content

set into “Content Set 2”.

See the Search Administration picture below, which highlights the ability to select the

specific site content.

This approach allows the Search Administration to partition a group of sites’ data onto its

own hardware. All the Site Administration user has to do is to put the new Micro Site’s

data into the “Content Set 3-Micro sites” content set. Search Indexing will key off that and

place this new site’s data into that content set.

The second area updated for multi-site is the indexing process. The search indexing process

will access data from the Site Administration objects and use that to determine which data

to incorporate into each index and content set.

Benefits

The integration of Search Administration with Site Administration will allow users to add

new sites using only Site Administration and not have to enter into the Search

Administration interface. Further, it allows configurations that can partition searchable

data from one or more sites onto its own hardware and if the site search only their own

data, then they thus partition search traffic for the site.


Concurrent or Parallel Indexing

There are certain applications and uses of ATG Search that allow for content that is

logically very different to be indexed in the same project and index file. In earlier releases,

it has led to certain limitations in terms of what can be indexed. For example, Search only

allowed a full index of all content in the project, or an incremental index of selected

content sets, and it was not possible to conduct a full index on a subset of the content sets

for indexes with content sets that were logically separate.

This new feature adds the ability to index different subsets of a project (content sets)

separately and in parallel. Cases where the content sets within a project would fall into this

category are:

• In a multi-site situation, a user may want to include content from different sites

within the same index. If the content is extensively different, it may be

identified by different content set. This will allow users to execute a “full index”

on one or more content sets within a given project. The user can select the

content sets desired from those in a given project, and perform a full index on

that content.

• With Service applications (Knowledge/Self Service), different types of content

(articles and solutions) are often indexed together. However, the frequency of

indexing is desired to be different for the two. More specifically, the frequency

of incremental indexing for solutions is much higher versus the frequency for

everything else. This is a problem when large collections of non-solution data

need a full index which happens quite regularly for most users. In earlier

releases, while the full index is running, frequent incremental indexing on

solutions (in parallel) causing delays in publishing solution content. Likewise,

the content cannot be divided into multiple indexes, as the searches need to be

executed across all data.

Parallel indexing alleviates these problems by allowing multiple indexing jobs and running

the jobs concurrently. This includes checks to ensure indexing jobs don’t overlap and are

scheduled appropriately, etc. Likewise, it allows the selection of different “types” (full,

incremental) of indexing. Finally, the UI has been updated to see the index job queue and

manage it (delete jobs, etc).

Benefits

Where multiple indexes or multiple content sets in a given index are configured, ATG

Search can quickly index them by allowing each set to index in parallel instead of serially.


File Content Meta Data Addition

New capabilities have been added to the Search Administration interface to assist with

adding Meta tags to file data at indexing time. For example, the user can tag a set of files

with a given site membership Meta tag.

Benefits

This feature provides greater ability for users to index and search on file content by

allowing them to add meta data to the file at indexing time. The Meta tags can then be

used as search criteria, which allow the narrowing of results based on the tags.

ENHANCED

Improved Load Balancing

In earlier releases, the routing component of search routed requests to search engines

based on a simple round robin approach with no awareness of each engine’s current load.

In situations where the hardware was not homogeneous, or if a sequence of more

intensive searches went to the same engine, one engine could become overloaded well

before others. In the case of heterogeneous hardware, this essentially limited the total

load that could be processed by any engine to that of the slowest engine.

This feature allows Routing to monitor the load on all engines and send queries to the least

loaded engine which results in more queries routed to more powerful hardware engines,

or engines that are simply able to process the queries faster.

Benefits

This feature allows better utilization of all hardware and the proper loading of engines on

heterogeneous hardware.


Content Check

This feature looks at the IOC and indexing process to determine if the results are out of

what ATG would generally consider “normal”. A number of checks are provided, and

results are provided to the user as a report. The types of checks that are performed include

average string length, average properties per item, and average field count.

Benefits

This feature takes many of ATG’s best practices for indexing data and makes them available

to users directly in the Search Administration UI. Users can quickly see detailed information

on how their indexing may be configured incorrectly and can make changes before going

live on a site.


Campaign Optimizer

Campaign Optimizer, ATG’s A/B testing product, supports a methodology that lets business

users test various elements of their web site or other marketing vehicles (e.g., email

campaigns) to measure the impact of specific campaigns on target metrics like click

throughs, orders, or time spent on the site.

NEW

Multi-Site Enablement

Users can select the specific site they want an A/B test to run on by choosing from the list

of sites that have been defined in Site Administration. If no sites are selected, the test runs

on all sites [Global]. A “Site” column has been added to the View Test screen so that users

can see which site(s) a test is running on.

Note: The site elements are NOT filtered by site, nor are the participants. So, users must

know if an element or a participant “exists” on a particular site before they assign it to a

test for that site.

Benefits

Campaign Optimizer joins the other applications in the Business Control Center that have

been configured to be site aware within the Unified Multi-Site Architecture™.

Outreach

With the ATG Outreach campaign management system, users create relevant, personalized

outbound marketing, and service campaigns using web-based tools to manage

segmentation and targeting rules.

NEW


Users can select the site they want a campaign to run on and a “Site” column was added to

the Browse campaigns screen so that users can view which site(s) on which a campaign is

running. Segments created in Outreach are site aware; however, Click events are limited to

a specific site. The Site dimension was added to the Campaign Overview and Campaign

Revenue ACI Outreach reports.

Benefits

Outreach joins the other applications in the Business Control Center that have been configured to be site aware within the Unified Multi-Site Architecture™.


ATG Commerce Service Center (CSC)

A web-based contact center application, ATG Commerce Service Center (CSC) enables sales

and service agents to assist customers over the phone, on the web site, or via e-mail. CSC

provides a single system for order administration, sales support, and customer care with

automated access to account, interaction history, and other personalized information.

NEW


CSC now enables the agent to select a site from which to work, as well as the ability to

select the appropriate catalog for that site and pricelists for the cart sharing group.

The CSC agent also has the ability to search for products across all sites that share a cart

with the selected site, and the catalog browse is limited to the current site. This tailors the

agent catalog search and browse to closely match customers’ ability to select products.


Benefits

CSC provides the same benefits as before, but does so in the context of a multi-site

environment, and allows agents to work efficiently in such an environment.

Gift and Wish List Management

Agents in centers that are focused on sales, as opposed to service, must have the ability to

assist customers who are working with gift lists and wish lists. Now, agents can assist a

customer in searching for and purchasing from another person’s gift list; assist a customer

in creating, editing, or deleting his/her gift list; and assist a customer in editing or

purchasing from his or her wish list.

This feature allows the agents to search for a list using the owner’s name, an event name,

or event date; select an item from a list and add to the current cart; and create, modify, or

delete a list.

Benefits

This feature offers new capabilities to sales-focused agents. Agents are able to quickly

identify items of interest to customers and use that data to influence their sales approach.

For example, looking at a customer’s gift list may show that they are very interested in a

particular brand or that they like a certain type of product or service. It provides key

background information to assist the agents in helping select cross sells, up sells, or in

selecting the most appropriate item for a given customer.


Promotions Browser

This feature gives agents visibility into and control over promotions in the CSC interface. Agents have the ability to:

• Delay the use of a qualifying promotion until a later order

• Select the promotion to apply to a given order when multiple qualifying

promotions are available

• View and grant a non-global promotion to a customer

• View all promotions granted to a customer

Benefits

This feature allows agents to have greater control over the use of promotions and assist

customers with a number of complex issues they might experience with promotions.

Agents are able to select which promotions are used on a given order or delay the use of

promotions until a later order. Likewise, agents can see available promotions and use that

information to guide customers towards a finished sale.

CSC Reporting

Please refer to the ATG Customer Intelligence Section


ENHANCED

Refund and Exchange Calculations

The methods and algorithms for calculating refunds and exchanges have been updated to more accurately determine the correct values to refund to customers. The new calculations improve the accuracy by taking the following into account:

Definition

Price changes The new calculations will use the pricing used at the time of the order to calculate appropriate refund amounts. This approach allows for the price to change over time, without affecting the refund calculations.

Promotions Promotions that were in effect at the time of the purchase are used for calculating refunds and processing exchanges, rather than what is in effect at the time of the return or exchange.

Benefits

A number of ATG customers have had to customize the refund and exchange calculations to meet their needs and accurately reflect their policies. The new algorithms will match retailer policies more closely and result in fewer companies who require customizations in this area.

Enhanced Flow of Approval on Appeasements

This feature adds fixed price appeasement limits for price overrides and manual

adjustments in an order. The approvals feature allows ATG customers to add a single-level

approval process to their order submit workflow. The total of an order’s price overrides

and manual adjustments will be checked against an appeasement limit. If the appeasement

limit is exceeded, an approval by an authorized supervisor is required.

Benefits

This feature allows call center managers to apply some controls to the appeasement

process and ensure that agents do not abuse the capability. This can be used in situations

where specific agents are of concern, or when as an overall goal the company desires to

obtain better control of appeasements.


The picture below represents the view of an appeasement process for a customer order.

Performance Improvements

CSC pages are made up of a large number of tabs, panels, and sets of panels. The overall

design of the UI has led to each page requiring a large number of HTTP requests from the

client to the server. By bundling multiple page elements into a single HTTP request, the

number of requests and responses from the client to the server feature has been greatly

reduced.

Benefits

The reduction in the number of HTTP requests will increase CSC page load performance,

reduce the amount of data sent back and forth, and reduce page load times. This is

expected to be more visible to those whose network connection between the client and

server is not of high quality.


ATG Knowledge

ATG Knowledge extends the ATG Commerce Service Center to streamline and improve

customer service, combining knowledge management with customer and incident

management into a single solution

NEW

Link Validation for Solutions

Knowledge has added a schedulable service to validate the solution links and hyperlinks

embedded in solutions. This service periodically validates the links both internally

(Knowledge server) and externally (Self Service server).

The validation process will verify the following types of links:

• Hyperlinks

• Links to deleted solutions

• Links to merged solutions

• Links to non-existing solutions

• Links from external solutions to internal solutions

• Links from internal solutions to external solutions

• Links to disabled internal solutions from external solutions

Benefits

When solutions are merged, deleted, or modified, the links embedded in other solutions

may become broken. External links may also become unavailable. The link validation

service provides the Administrator with a list of the broken links, in a new tab in the

Service Administration. The Administrator no longer needs to depend on broken link issues

being reported by agents or users. From this list, the Administrator can navigate to each of

the solutions and update the inserted links as needed.


Content Set Criteria in Advanced Search

Frequently, corporate content assets from disparate content sets, such as product

specification or installation guide PDFs, are made available in ATG Knowledge. It is now

possible to constrain solution research queries based on these content sets.

Benefits

In deployments with large and varied content collections, search constraints based on

content sets allows agents to focus their searches on subsets of the collection. The agent

receives faster and more focused search results.

ENHANCED

Improved Solution Editing

The editor in Knowledge is used for both solutions and for email responses to customers.

The original proprietary editor has been replaced by the 3rd party FCKEditor that conforms

to standards available with other editors, such as MS Word. The updates include the ability

to work with tables properly, insert anchor tags, and apply style changes in a typical MS

Word manner. The Knowledge-specific functions such as inserting a link to a solution have

been maintained.

The toolbar is now located within each editable area instead of only once at the top of the

solution. Agents can make formatting changes close to the editable text instead of scrolling

back to the top of the solution for the toolbar.


.

The picture below illustrates the new editor available within a solution.

Benefits

The FCKEditor provides enhanced editing and formatting functionality as well as increased

stability and performance. The FCKEditor addresses several limitations, including the

inability to configure tables, difficulties with formatting, the location of the toolbar in

solutions, and problems working with the style picker.

Owning Group Management

Each agent may now set a default owning group that will be selected when authoring a

solution. When the agent navigates to the owning group selection, only the groups to

which the agent belongs will be displayed. The remaining owning groups can be viewed by

opening a toggle. The features to set a default owning group and to display owning groups

to which the agent does not belong may be disabled by the Administrator

Benefits

The owning group updates allow faster and more accurate selection of an owning group

for a solution. For agents who focus on solutions for a single owning group, the default

feature takes care of the one required property outside of the solution itself. When an

owning group needs to be explicitly set, the agent no longer needs to scroll through a long

list of groups to find those to which the agent belongs.


Solution Deployment Performance Improvements

The publishing deployment performance for internal and external solutions has been

dramatically increased by decreasing the number of assets associated to a single solution.

All data is now reduced into a single asset which reduces the amount of data that needs to

be deployed as well as reduces the Content Administration overhead of deploying assets

including versioning check in/out and dependency checks.

Benefits

In previous releases, a single solution was comprised of many assets in Content

Administration. The reduction of the multiple assets into a single asset per solution

decreases deployment time and increases the productivity of agents, allowing agents to

publish more solutions with greater frequency.

ATG Self Service

ATG Self Service is an automated customer service application that combines an answer

repository with multi-lingual natural language search and navigation capabilities into a

single online help system.

NEW


Self Service has been updated to replace the brand-based multi-site support with site

objects to coordinate with the overall ATG multi-site solution. Service Administration will

allow configuration of all Self Service type sites added in Site Administration. A set of

default settings will be provided, from which each Self Service site can inherit. Any setting

not overridden in the site definition will use the default setting.

In addition, Self Service sites can be personalized based on user segments. Part or all of the

related site settings may be overridden in the user segment configuration layer.


Benefits

Using the site objects instead of brands allows Self Service to use the new URL parsing

provided by the platform. ATG customers with both Self Service and Commerce have the

option of configuring the same site to be used with both products or setting up different

site configurations for each product. ATG customers who have organized the Commerce

sites by brand can use the same site objects to define Self Service information specific to

each brand. An ATG customer who has Self Service information that applies to multiple

Commerce sites can setup a separate Self Service site, allowing the Self Service information

to be configured only once.

ENHANCED

Updated Root Topic Selection

The root topic editor in Service Administration enables the Administrator to select a

starting topic for defining a Self Service site or segment topic tree. This editor has been

updated to allow the Administrator to select multiple topics and topics that are not a top-

level topic. For example, top-level Sports Articles topic has an English branch and a French

branch. The Canadian Baseball site can be assigned the Baseball topic under the English

branch and the Baseball topic under the French branch. Based on the front-end language

selection, the customer will see the Baseball articles either in English or French.

Benefits

This enhancement allows customers to filter the topic tree both by Self Service sites and by

other parameters such as language, instead of limiting the customer to only 1 type of filter.

By allowing multiple root topics and topics other than top-level, the Service Administration

can enable the sharing of topics between related sites. Sites will be able to share some

topics, yet keep other topics separated.


ATG Customer Intelligence (ACI)

ATG Customer Intelligence is an integrated set of data mart and reporting capabilities that

allow monitoring and analysis of commerce and customer care performance. It combines

key data from the ATG product suite, such as purchases, use of promotions, and searches,

with behavioral data from customer on-site behavior and available demographic data, such

as age, gender, and geography, to provide actionable data.

NEW

ACI Data Model Extension

The ATG data model has been extended to store site data. This allows ATG’s out of the box

reports to take advantage of site information and allows for users to write custom reports

that are site aware.

Commerce Service Center (CSC) Reporting

Prior releases of CSC made key data available to the ACI data warehouse in order to allow

for reporting of CSC activity. This feature adds seven new reports to provide key

information on CSC usage to the users.

• Call center sales and

number of orders

• Call Center versus all

sales and units

• Average call center order

size and value

• Call center order

conversion rate

• Call volume and average

call time

• Number and value of

returns

• Number and value of

discounts by agent or

group


Benefits

The new reports provide key metrics to call center managers and commerce managers to

track and gauge overall performance of the call center. The reports can be used to

highlight areas for improvement and key initiatives that need to be implemented to

improve overall performance of the center.

ENHANCED

Application Site Dimension Reporting

Outreach, Search and Commerce reports were updated to support site indication. Where it

makes sense to split out the data by site, ACI now allows the user to run the report for one

or multiple sites and break the data in the report out by site.

Cognos Upgrade

The upgrade to Cognos 8.4.1 adds additional features to the ATG Reporting Center. For a

complete list of new features you can reference the following Business Intelligence New

Features 8.4.1.

Some highlights include:

• The Firefox browser is now supported in Report Studio and Analysis Studio.

• The following new chart types are available in Report Studio

o Micro charts

o Marimekko charts

• Mashup Service gives you a simplified programmatic access to ATG Reporting

Center content via REST or Web Service


Commerce Reference Store

The Commerce Reference Store (CRS) leverages built-in best practices for user experience,

personalization, merchandising, multi-site management, multi-language, technical

architecture, and code structure. Some benefits of leveraging CRS are jumpstarting

implementations, reducing customizations, displaying sample code using best practice and

ensuring optimal success of an ATG implementation.

NEW

CRS Multisite Support

With ATG 10, CRS (ATG Store) has been extended to include examples of ATG’s multisite

capabilities. This is achieved via the introduction of a new branded site, ATG Home. ATG

Home is a sample online store offering home goods; some products are shared with ATG

Store and the remainders are unique to ATG Home. ATG Store and ATG Home contain

examples of the following multisite functionality:

• Shared site elements between ATG Store and ATG Home, including shopping

carts, cross-site search, pricelist, order history, profiles, wish lists, gift lists,

product comparisons and JSPs.

• Cross-site cross-sells, showcasing the ability to merchandise products across

sties

• Site/country/language support through the offering of ATG Store for the US and

German markets and ATG Home for the US market. ATG Store US and ATG

Home US are offered in both English (default) and Spanish. ATG Store Germany

is offered in both Deutsche (default) and English.

• Multi-language support for images, with examples that use translated text

stored in the repository, which allows for a single image to be served to

multiple languages as well as examples of language-specific images.


The pictures below represent a view of the Commerce Reference Store: the ATG

Store site and the ATG Home site.

CRS Promotions

The promotions examples within CRS have been extended in accordance with the new

promotional capabilities offered in ATG 10. Specifically, CRS now showcases examples of:

• Site-specific promotions (“Free Shipping with ATG Home Checkout”)

• Tiered promotion (“Buy 2 Hubbard Chairs, get 10% off, buy 4 Hubbard Chairs,

get 15% off, buy 6 Hubbard Chairs, get 20% off”)

• Multiple promotions per coupon (“Receive 10% off order and Free Shipping

with promotion code: TENSHIP”)

• Discounts applied to highest priced item (“Receive 20% discount on highest

priced ATG Home product”)


ENHANCED

Improved Usability

ATG has redesigned the ATG Store site with an updated look & feel and improved customer

experience. Improvements were driven through usability testing and direct ATG customer

feedback. Key areas that were addressed as part of the redesign include updated look and

feel to the entire site and a revised checkout workflow, including shipping, billing and

confirmation screens.

Common CRS Use Cases

With ATG 10, CRS has been extended to include additional examples of common use cases

employed by online commerce sites. Specific enhancements include:

Name Definition

Product Detail Page templates

for Multi-SKU vs. Single-SKU

In the BCC for the CRS application, business users can specify which

template to use when creating new products. This illustrates sites

that contain products where some products are available in multiple

SKUs and some are not. Templates can be designed to present only

the relevant information and any selection criteria for the user.

SKU-level Product information

example

In the UI, product detail pages now display sku-specific information (e.g. price) when selecting a SKU within a product detail page.

Multi-ship Specify Shipping Method. During checkout, customers can specify a shipping method per shipping destination.

Ease Setup Use for Merchandisers and Implementers

With ATG 10, several modifications have been made to CRS improve general ease of use

for merchandisers and implementers.

• Sample preview page configuration links, reducing the need for the

merchandiser/implementer to configure at time of install.

• As part of the CRS install, implementers can choose during the CIM process

whether or not to load the CRS sample data. Bypassing the CRS sample data

load can be useful when implementers are ready to begin development that

leverages CRS.

• CRS sample data includes gift list and wish list samples, allowing merchandisers

to see how gift lists and wish lists operate in practice in the context of the CRS

sites.


Configuration Installation Manager (CIM)

ENHANCED

CIM Batch Mode Scripts

CIM batch mode scripts have been updated to support the use of variables. Variables can

be set from within the batch script, via system environment settings, or via java system

variables.

Benefits

Using variables in batch mode scripts allows a single CIM batch script to be utilized for

setup and configuration on multiple machines without changing the script.

Third Party Qualifications

ATG 10 has been certified for updated versions of common third party integrations including

application servers, databases, operating systems and browsers. After the release date of

December 22, 2010, Please refer to http://www.atg.com/en/products-

services/commerce/supported-environments/ for the latest information on supported versions.

Upgrading to ATG Commerce 10

The migration to ATG Commerce 10 can be separated into two steps: upgrading the release and

enabling multi-site. Customers will be able to run their existing 9.n apps on ATG Commerce 10

with little effort and will not be required to enable multi-site. If and when the decision is made to

take advantage of the multi-site capabilities, the applications will need to be multi-site enabled.

The Commerce Reference Store will ship with examples of best practice multi-site

implementations to help with that effort.

About ATG ATG (NASDAQ: ARTG) provides the most advanced cross-channel commerce software and services to fuel the

growth of the world’s best brands. Offering the industry’s leading commerce solution, ATG enables its clients

to drive sales via a personalized customer experience — unifying and optimizing interactions across the Web,

contact center, mobile devices, social media, physical stores, and other key channels. ATG powers the most

innovative and successful commerce experiences, with results that outperform industry norms.

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