In this video I show how you can edit web activities directly from site preview in WebSphere Commerce. I created a new customer segment that only has shoppers who have purchased something in the past 30 days. When I preview the site as that segment I see the new advertisement.
So you are at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit and you are seeing all kinds products and services from IBM and Business Partners. If you are asking yourself questions like this:
If you didn’t get these answered during the sessions, meeting with our executives, from a business partner or even from your IBM sales team then you should know this:
My team is a team of Smarter Commerce architects responsible for all products in the Industry Solutions portfolio specific to eCommerce for all of North America. We specialize in Smarter Commerce Strategy and architecture. We can help you find your gaps and help fill those gaps with an IBM product and service or through a Business Partners products and services. If we don’t know the answer we can quickly find the answer. Hit me up if you have any questions here at the Summit. I am @bobbalfe on Twitter, direct message me or simply Tweet me for a meeting.
So I had the pleasure of sitting next to and meeting Drew Neisser (@DrewNeisser), CEO of Renegade LLC on the plane to the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit today. We had a lot of great exchanges and he gave me a tip I should I have known already and that was having an email subscription form on my blog. I guess I thought that was “the old” way but Drew convinced me many people use his so I figured I would give it a try.
So in conference fashion you should see some pictures and posts about what I am seeing here at the conference, stay tuned. And make sure you check out Drew’s Blog.
I was in a discussion the other day about automation, which in itself is an extremely broad term, but we were talking around quality assurance and the importance of having some kind of automated process when the “product” was ready. Whether this be spreadsheets, reports, commercial products, applications, system builds, etc. At some level you should have automation to verify that at least at a high level the product is consumable.
Test driven development and agile development have played a huge role in the quality of software over the past 10 years and it shocks me to know companies are simply not doing this today.
My side of the discussion was around the work I did when I joined Iris Associates – which changed to Lotus, then ultimately to IBM Collaboration Solutions. While this was around software quality, the story I was in discussion about was data integrity in spreadsheets. We had several layers of automation following a build. Once the build completed (on five different platforms) a series of automated tests were run for build verification. Once the automated tests ran there were some manual tests run if the automated tests had passed. We then had what we called “automated system tests”, also known as DNA (Domino Notes Automation). These tests were much more functional in nature and not at a single API level. So you can imagine these tests using many (if not hundreds or thousands of API’s) to complete what would normally be done by a human. I remember talking to a QA person about automating Event Admin (a Domino Server feature) and he said the hundred or so tests run by DNA would take me three months to do manually – and DNA did it in about 20 minutes – every day, on every build, on every platform. At the end of the day, and I am not sure of the exact number, but there were literally 10′s of thousands of tests run every single day on almost every single supported platform for both client and server. The results of the tests were of course published to a Lotus Notes database and notification emails were generated.
Why is this important?
So on any given day you could see exactly what and who broke the build. This was a huge leap forward in terms of quality because you no longer introduce a problem into the build and find out two months later during feature testing or even worse after the code is shipped. Resolution was often fast because we could isolate the exact submitted code from the ClearCase source control system.
Having a “clean” build meant any developer could synchronize the latest binaries and start work on “the next thing”. This allowed over 1200 developers to not be dependent on a single build model. A single build model is, we do builds on Fridays. That would mean if you wanted to start working on “the latest code” you would have to wait until Friday or use last Friday’s build. Over time this could kill a development cycle, especially if Friday’s build was bad. And remember, if you do builds once a week that’s 1200 developers checking code in every day – unchecked. By the time Friday roles around you may have merge conflicts and even worse – run time conflicts.
Today, much of this is done in the form of Unit Tests – like JUnit or our custom internal unit test suite called DLLTest for C/C++. Many members on my team had patents around this process and some of the small utilities we wrote in order to accomplish this. See below for the two patents I received for my automation work.
Patent References: (patent profile)
| 2006/0070,034 | 2006 | System and method for creating and restoring a test environment | |
| 2005/0289,517 | 2005 | System and methods for client and template validation |
A very interesting graphic from LUMA Partners (LUMAscape) was recently published. You will notice pretty much all of IBM’s recent acquisitions (in the last 3 or so years) are on this graphic. This is in my opinion a validation of the IBM’s Smarter Commerce strategy as their products become more and more integrated. Having a single company with best of breed technologies integrated and supported by one company makes this landscape a bit more consumable and less daunting.
Many of IBM’s products will be showcased at the two Smarter Commerce Summits being held in Nashville and Monaco, make sure you get there and learn why IBM is the leader in this space!
A very popular approach over the last five years was to hire a company to transcode your commerce site into a mobile experience. While this niche play was warranted five years ago it is no longer viable for a serious mobile channel presence. Today, most vendors, especially IBM and its business partners are building web applications with responsive design technology; so with a single code base you can target the different channels with the appropriate content for the specific device. This is a game changer for companies taking their mobile presence seriously. The latest WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 6 is now compatible with Worklight. Meaning the responsive design and source code are being re-used on top of a services layer for optimal code re-use and content management.
Here are some key differentiation’s between a transcoder model and a responsive design model like Worklight.
Content
Performance
Management
If you want to learn more about this make sure you sign up for the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville or Monaco. There will be many demonstrations about the latest mobile technologies in the Smarter Commerce space.
CrossView is a premier provider of cross-channel commerce solutions and services that enable a smarter, more personalized shopping experience. You can see their sponsor listing on the Smarter Commerce Global Summit page here. One of CrossView’s customers is Moosejaw - a fast-growing Midwestern retailer specializing in extreme outdoor equipment and apparel. Moosejaw’s site, based on IBM’s WebSphere Commerce is often considered the poster child of social commerce. They have a brilliantly integrated rating system and you immediately get the sense of a “community” on their site. As you can see from the screen shots below, Advanced Auto Parts uses a mobile implementation also based on WebSphere Commerce.
Some key things you will see at the CrossView booth:
Check out these screen shots of the Advanced Auto Parts mobile solution:
Don’t let the size of this book fool you, the content is extremely well written and while providing the very basics of programming in HTML5 it also highlights many tips and tricks all throughout the book. As the title states, the book is a step by step guide for creating the MP3 player from scratch in HTML5 and JavaScript. It covers a lot of material from page to page but presents it in a very easy to read way. I actually read the book from front to back first and then I went through and actually wrote the code and skimmed back through the book. The entire process took less than a couple of hours, if that. I am a pretty experienced programmer so much of the information was not new to me but I really liked the way the author has written this and I actually learned a few tips around the HTML5 player object. If you are trying to learn HTML5 I think books like this are excellent. Any book that is written in the “by example” format is a great way to learn programming.
Do you want to use only a small piece of Dojo? Does Dojo have a really cool feature you want but you don’t want to take the entire library?
One thing I did not mention in yesterday’s post was when you log into Microsoft Surface and use your Microsoft Id you get all of your cloud settings for your account. So my tablet immediately got all of my pictures, documents, and social network accounts automatically configured. It was literally like I just logged into my Windows 8 Laptop.
Today however, I spent time getting my favorite applications loaded on the tablet. Since this is a work tablet I had to get the IBM connection setup through the VPN and then of course I copied Lotus Notes to it. Lastly, I got GIMP, Eclipse, and started getting my MS Office suite over to it.
I will say if you plan to use these applications you will definitely need a keyboard and possibly a mouse. While the stylus works well, it takes a lot of getting used to, especially with re-sizing sashes and side bars. I may go and get the video adapter and keyboard this weekend. I can easily see this replacing my laptop for customer presentations, plane rides, and demo’s. I am not ready to take a leap and claim it will completely replace the laptop eventually but right now it is very close.