Optimized Business and User Experience

This pillar is one that will be receiving ongoing focus throughout the next few years, because the business user tools represent the “face” of the product, and are the main way that our customers interact with it. No matter what capabilities we have, if our tools don’t expose them properly, it’s effectively unavailable to our customers. We want to ensure that our customers who are interacting with the product day to day, are able to leverage and make full use of the features we’ve worked so hard to include in the product.

For those of our customers who have been with us for a while, you’ve already seen the complete rewriting of some of our oldest tools: the Accelerator, Admin Console, and Org Admin Console. Now we’re turning our attention to some of the capabilities that have been inside the Commerce Management Center (CMC). To that end, in our next release, we will be launching the first phase of two new tools: Search and Commerce Composer.

Search is one that we’ve had some tooling for, but it’s been buried inside of two other interfaces – Catalog and Marketing. However, search is definitely a large enough focus area that it needs its own set of tooling, and with the introduction of our new ElasticSearch engine and the new capabilities that come with that, the time is right to provide a Search tool. To start, we will focus on exposing the new functionality that ElasticSearch gives us. In follow-on releases, we will fold the existing capability into the new tools – things like SEO, search rules, and synonyms.

The second new undertaking will be a re-implementation of our Commerce Composer tool, rewritten in our new architecture, enabling control of the layout for the React sample stores, Emerald and Sapphire. For the first phase we aim to cover similar ground to the existing tool – to support the browsing flow, as well as content pages such as the Home page and landing pages. In later phases we intend to expand on this to cover pages that were never supported in the original Commerce Composer, such as the Cart page and Checkout flow.

It’s an exciting time for tools here at HCL Commerce, as we work toward refreshing the toolset. I’ll keep you updated as we tackle upcoming rewrites, as well as introducing new ones like we did with the Analytics tool.

If want to see a live demo of these capabilities or anything else, Schedule a Demo now!