IBM SG24-6320-00 Overview, Structure of the book, Part 1, Introduction to WebSphere Commerce

6320ch_intro.fm Draft Document for Review July 28, 2004 7:33 pm

1.1 Overview

Migrating complex applications as WebSphere Commerce always demands a lot of effort and preparation. In this book we used a WebSphere Commerce Suite V5.1 customer application as the starting point, a sample site, for the version-to-version migration scenario.

This book covers all the steps we followed to migrate that application as well as the development environment from WebSphere Commerce Suite V5.1 to WebSphere Commerce V5.6.

Some things were changed from the original customer scenario, some extra customization has been done in order to make that application more generic and to cover more topics during the migration process. The following chapters will provide details about the application as it is today and how is was migrated.

For a real WebSphere Commerce Suite V5.1 customer environment we choose Carrot Bunch Companies, Inc. We will refer to this customer from now on as Carrot Ink. This customer is already a success story implementing WebSphere Commerce Suite V5.1 in 2002, the following URL provides the details of this implementation.

http://www.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/CDIR-5GRNK9

Changes done from the original customer environment (just for the purposes of this book) and the differences from the default (out-of-the-box) implementation in terms of WebSphere Commerce customization, Catalog, Database and shopping flow are described in detail in Chapter 4, “Commerce Application used during the migration” on page 55.

1.2 Structure of the book

This book is organized in parts and it is designed to easily identify the general concepts for the migration planning, then proceed with the actual migration procedures for both production and development environments.

Part 1, “Introduction to WebSphere Commerce V5.6”

Part 1 of the book describes how the book is laid out, what is new in WebSphere Commerce V5.6, strategy and planning as well as a description of the customer application we migrated. This part of the book is organized as follows:

Chapter 1, “Introduction”

Chapter 2, “WebSphere Commerce V5.6 Overview”

Chapter 3, “Migration Strategy and Planning”

4Keeping Commerce Applications Updated WebSphere Commerce 5.1 to 5.6 Migration Guide