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WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 4

IBM WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 4 brings to you several new enhancements to improve your ecommerce sales. The new WebSphere Commerce feature pack 4 includes powerful new storefront capabilities to deliver a smarter shopping experience for your online customers.

These functions are performed using a customized and integrated package to create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog and merchandising across all sales channels, allowing you to centrally manage your multi-channel marketing strategy.

The new WebSphere Commerce Feature pack 4 includes new features such as:

• Mobile Commerce Extensions
• Facebook Integration
• Precision Marketing Enhancements
• RESTful Services

Here I would be explaining you these new features in more detail:

Mobile Commerce Extensions

With the increasing usage of shopping over mobile and smart phones, WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 4 brings Mobile Commerce extensions which enable your users to browse your online store, view side by side product comparisons, promotion codes, check product availability from the inventory, receiving marketing messages and store location information online via online maps, all from their smart phones. They could also check status of their orders, track orders and make money transactions.

Facebook Integration

Facebook is the most powerful platform for social marketing used by millions of people around the world. A product or a service recommendation by a friend affects buying behavior of millions of potential customers. Realizing this importance, WebSphere Commerce new feature pack includes Facebook integration that includes a ‘like’ and ‘send’ buttons on the home and product pages, ‘activity feeds and an option to Connect to Facebook to use Facebook protocol for user authentication and authorization.

Precision Marketing

Precision Marketing allows you to create, execute and analyze your marketing campaigns across multi-channels through powerful analysis tool that enable you to create and measure your marketing strategies across segments, products, channels and brands. It automates your marketing strategies by allowing you to create personalized content based on location, customer behavior and preferences. It allows you to influence your customer purchases and recommend promotions. See IBM Unica for more.

RESTful Services

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a framework used by WebSphere Commerce to develop RESTful applications on web, mobile, kiosks and social applications. These services are used for data mapping, code generation, creating and retrieving user data and generating representation for explicit media types such XHTML and ATOM feeds.

Author Bio

Zeeshan Valliani joins Royal Cyber Inc as a leading consultant in marketing. He has vast experience with IBM WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Commerce, Java, XML, JavaScript and HTML. Prior to joining Royal Cyber, Zeeshan was a senior consultant for Reliable Accounting Solutions, where he led corporate business development and new client systems. He managed a diverse project portfolio, including market analysis studies, technical writing, product feasibility profiles, and customer satisfaction measurement. Zeeshan is currently pursuing his MBA degree from Institute of Business Management and holds a Master of Arts in Economics degree. He is fluent in several Asian-Indian languages and is an active member of IBM DeveloperWorks.

IBM Unica for Precision Marketing

Integration and Cross-channel marketing are the words you hear from every marketer in the world. Either you are an offline marketer or in the online world, developing integrated, cross-channels marketing campaigns is now a critical element of planning and strategy building, but the know-how and skill-sets to be able to do this effectively are often lacking.

Realizing this importance of enterprise marketing management solutions, IBM has acquired Unica in 2010, the global leader in marketing software solutions providing enterprise level software and cloud-based marketing solutions to help businesses simplify and automate their entire marketing processes for a consistent cross-channel insight to global brand strategy to improve their customers experience and provide satisfaction.

Unica is a recognized leader in enterprise marketing management and is the only vendor recognized as ‘leader’ by both Gartner and Forrester in key areas including campaign management, web analytics, and marketing resource management.

It allows users to plan, create, execute and analyze their marketing campaigns across multiple channels through its powerful and feature rick campaign management tool which enable marketers to accurately measure marketing activities across segments, products, channels, and brands in accordance with time. It also allows marketers to reduce their expenditure by offering sophisticated analytics and process improvement capabilities to help businesses optimize marketing activities throughout their selling cycle.

Unica tools provide powerful management features including central repository offers for promotion reuse and consistency. You can also create promotions based on template custom attributes that can be dynamically generated for campaign target.

Unica Campaign is not only about designing and execution of the campaigns but also provides powerful features to track campaign responses. In Unica Campaign "response tracking" refers to the process of determining whether events or action taken by individuals are in response to offers they have been given.

It also complements extensive reporting enhancements and besides that Unica campaign can also be integrated with other Unica products like IBM Unica Customer Insight, Unica Marketing Operations etc for a more seamless insight to consumer behaviors.

More than 1,500 organizations around the world have utilized Unica for better analysis about their customer’s preferences, trends, predictions and buying needs to execute and measure relevant cross-channel marketing campaigns.

Author Bio

What’s new in IBM WebSphere Portal 8.0

IBM has recently revealed a newer version of WebSphere Portal Version 8, offering its users a more seamless, personalized and richer user experience, distinct for each user across a single access point.

With several new features from better analytics, social media integration, more affluent content management and search engine optimization, WebSphere Portal version 8 offers everything you need for deploying and developing a multi channel and exceptional web experience.

The newer IBM WebSphere Portal Version 8 provides a variety of benefits that will not just enhance your user experience but would also boost your productivity and performance.

The latest version also supports signing in to your portal from Google, Yahoo or Facebook id via Open id authentication and provides easy access to your portal from any hand-held device like smart phones such as iPhone, Android and BlackBerry to tablets and iPad – all from a single source code.

Another interesting feature is IBM Forms which empower you to build website forms for collecting and analyzing structured information from your customers, partners and employees and keeps them engaged with dynamic and interactive interface that provides them personalized user experience.

Other features include:

IBM Installation manager to install, update and uninstall applications
Managed pages, site area templates, new menu, navigator options and enhanced projects
Simplified Business Process Management and integration with SAP & external identity providers
CMIS support for federated documents & content templating enhancements
Web Content Manager authoring homepage & RESTful Service

You can also enrich your WebSphere Portal using various tools and technologies from IBM Web Experience Factory (formerly WebSpherePortlet factory) that accelerates portal deployment by leveraging latest Web 2.0 technologies including Java, AJAX and advanced Dojo/Mobile Dojo toolkit widgets which aggregate data, content, processes, presentation requirements, and organizational structures from existing applications.

WebSpherePortal Guru provides complete solutions for WebSphere Portal development and administration including troubleshooting support. Their experts can handle complex web projects without any difficulty and can easily help you switch from existing versions to the new version 8, ensuring a successful portal deployment and development.

Author Bio

Innovate Buyers Experience with IBM WebSphere Commerce

E-Commerce is not merely just about exhibiting and merchandizing products online through web but about creating a delighted shopping experience that is all-in-one across all customer touch points. It is about offering an enriched, germane, tailored experience across several supply networks of your business and exploiting the power of your brand and its value unswervingly to your customers.

This blog is not about telling you the advantages of setting up another ecommerce website but focused on how you can use IBM WebSphere Commerce to innovate buyers experience by delivering them products and services at their convenience, with brand new features that’s not just limited to online but can also be used in-store and across all physical and digital touch points.

IBM WebSphere Commerce empowers you to create a powerful customer interaction platform across all digital touch points including mobile, social media and in-store. It’s easy to use tools create and manage precise marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog and merchandising through contextually targeted content and public promotions across multiple sales channels, allowing you to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy.

Some of its key features which could be of great benefit to its users are listed as follows;

Helps you compete more effectively with several features
Lets you drive customers for making purchases on each visit
Employs paid and organic search marketing to increase customers traffic to your site
Makes your average order size grow significantly
Comprehensive integration from fulfillment of order to customer services
Makes easier estimation of potential of online channel with a true e-commerce platform
Offers wide collection of features like catalog, selling, marketing, trading and order management
WebSphere commerce offers tailor-able and integrated package to its clients.

Built on Java EE platform using open standards such as XML and web services, WebSphere Commerce is a single and unified customer platform supporting all business models including B2B and B2C,offering online commerce and collaboration with existing and new customers, and partners through effective management of online trade relationships.

IBM WebSphere Commerce, when used with WebSphere Commerce Express and WebSphere Commerce Professional also provides you additional features such as workspace, empowering you to customize your entire selling process that includes everything you need to develop and test an entire e-commerce website. Its integrated development environment allows developers to build and test customizations to any extent including changing the appearance of your site.

Author Bio

Secure Connectivity with Reliable Messaging Infrastructure

Organizations today are crowded with number of challenges and threats to keep their business continued successfully and keep up consistent growth. Among those challenges data security issues assume pivotal area of focus as it’s a point of make or break for the organization. It is critically important for organizations to have a foolproof, and reliable messaging infrastructure in place that protects their critical data, proprietary and confidential information and provides absolute security against attackers and intruders.

Messaging infrastructure may include but not limited up to internet and intranet emails, instant messages and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) that have now become necessity of every enterprise. No one would have ever thought about terms like spams, scams, viruses, hacking, government mandatory archiving and other such things when the email systems were first emerged. Now above mentioned factors have become a critical parameter while planning and designing communication system for an organization.

This evolution has led IBM WebSphere MQ becoming the backbone for an enterprise wide, mission critical messaging infrastructure. According to one figure 70% of the today’s world enterprises employ WebSphere MQ to initiate and finalize orders, convey and accept proposals and conduct many other such type of official and non official correspondence and business transactions every day.

WebSphere MQ provides a range of link-level security services, including support for the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) designed to allow the transmission of protected data over an insecure network. These systems offer an added benefit of written proof of communication between two parties which may be used later for any purpose.

Numerous research studies have shown that employees of an organization may surrender their liberty to use phone lines freely rather giving up access to their email accounts.

These days the use of IM system is gaining attention and popularity among most of the enterprises – particularly consumer IM – for business communications is growing on fast pace. The typical user mostly spends two or more hours each day interfacing with some aspect of a messaging system. In short, instant messaging has become a battery to the vast majority of enterprises for their functionality.

Your messaging infrastructure may be victimized by many unidentified errors and flaws during its implementation which may become threat to organizational security leading to performance collapse. Web Sphere MQ Guruis the best solution to such errors providing health check facilities to maintain integrity and security intact throughout communication channels.

Author Bio

Why Migrate to Application Server v8?

WebSphere Application Server v8 also referred as WAS v8 is the newest addition to IBM Application server versions, offering ultimate new features and changes compared to existing WAS v7 and widely used WAS v6.1 such as comprehensive open standard-based programming models, flexible and granular security controls and support for hand held devices.

In this blog I will help you understand the benefits of version 8 for your smoother transition from WAS v7 or v6.1 to WAS v8 quick, fast and easier by providing you an overall overview about what’s new, the pros and new features offered by WAS v8.

What’s New?
The WebSphere Application Server v8 provide developers with a richer user experience through fast delivery of innovative applications allowing you to better align your project needs with wide choices of open standard-based programming models - OSGi, XML, SCA, CEA, SIP and Web 2.0 enhancing application installation, maintenance testing, and problem determination with high availability, transaction integrity using extensible logging.

The v8 delivers complete Java EE 6 support and simplifies directory-based Java EE application installation and maintenance. Further it tightens security controls and extends the reach of your applications to any hand-held devices such as smart phones and iPad.

Pros of WAS v8
With WebSphere Application Server v8, you can increase your data center efficiency through effective workload consolidation by leveraging your developer skills as they can choose from wide array of open standard-based programming models including geographically dispersed applications.

The WAS v8 proven transactional support will help you maintain transaction integrity and minimize the possibility of losing a business prospect due to failed transactions or system down time. The flexible and granular security controls further protect customer sensitive information and help administrator’s productively secure application environments.

Developers can also reuse and extend legacy and packaged applications using the optional WebSphere Adapters v7.5 and through integrated WebSphere platform that is reliable and scalable.

The best is that you can migrate to advanced WebSphere Application Server v8 configurations without any cost of re-architecting and re-programming using IBM Installation Manager (IM) that has significantly reduced product installation time by 15%, large-topology server creation time by 69% and large-topology cluster-creation time by 31% saving your valuable time and money.

Author Bio

Zeeshan Villiani joins Royal Cyber Inc as a leading consultant in marketing. He has vast experience with IBM WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Commerce, Java, XML, JavaScript and HTML. Prior to joining Royal Cyber, Zeeshan was a senior consultant for Reliable Accounting Solutions, where he led corporate business development and new client systems. He managed a diverse project portfolio, including market analysis studies, technical writing, product feasibility profiles, and customer satisfaction measurement. Zeeshan is currently pursuing his MBA degree from Institute of Business Management and holds a Master of Arts in Economics degree. He is fluent in several Asian-Indian languages and is an active member of IBM DeveloperWorks.