Introduction of Advanced Catalog Management

IBM® WebSphere® Commerce provides a powerful customer interaction platform for cross-channel commerce. It can be used by companies of all sizes, from small businesses, to large enterprises, and for many different industries.

Advanced Catalog Management provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels. WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified platform which offers the ability to do business directly with consumers, directly with businesses, and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models).

Advanced Catalog Management for WebSphere Commerce is a InfoSphere® MDM Collaboration Server solution accelerator. InfoSphere MDM Collaboration Server solution implementation team can leverage the asset for implementing a retail solution for catalog management with customization and extensions quickly.

Advanced Catalog Management complements the catalog management capability of WebSphere Commerce to help retailer to efficiently manage the catalogs on the eCommerce sites.

InfoSphere MDM Collaboration Server provides capabilities like workflows to represent business processes, fine grained access control and audit logs, category level attributes and inheritance and flexibility to model catalogs and hierarchies.

The Advanced Catalog Management solution provides a pre-configured environment for quick and easy implementation of the solution. The solution has a pre-configured data model in InfoSphere MDM Collaboration Server which mirrors the data model of WebSphere Commerce, it has some sample workflows (like New Product Introduction, Manage Catalog Entry), predefined user roles with appropriate access privileges as well as integration with WebSphere Commerce to export the catalog entries. These features can be extended or modified as per an organizations requirement.

This asset includes a pre-built configuration of InfoSphere MDM Collaboration Server and ready for integrating with WebSphere Commerce. It includes a pre-defined business object and business process model. With a common integration framework, it also provides a WebSphere Commerce Server extension for publishing catalog data remotely.