AEM - IBM Websphere Commerce (WCS) Integration

Hi Martin and all,

Appreciate you video. It is very informative indeed.

It is your video, that made me to start thinking and visualizing about this integration end to end.

Kindly address the following queries from me.

1. If the packages are not WCS, what do these packages contain? How could it act like a WCS?
Is it a scaled down version of WCS? Is it a WCS simulator?

2. I see that a similar packages are there for Hybris integration also. Are these two similar?

3. Although you are not concerned, how different is Hybris integration from that of WCS?

4. Is a Payment Gateway a part of WCS? or it integrates with an external one like Billdesk?

    Even it has to integrate, as AEM professionals, probably it will not be in our scope.

5. For AEM to interact WCS, they should look like (by virtue of redirect rules on IHS) or actually be

residing on the same domain for any AJax call to happen between them, else cross-site scripting error

will occur because of security constraints. Pl comment.

6. If we want to connect with Hybris, what changes are required from this approach?
    
7. What do we mean by API Mapping? Ref P#5 of 150909_AEM Gems IBM Websphere Commerce Integration.pdf.

8. For this demo, On WCS side, no customization/configurations are required, except to create Catalog?

9. What is the difference between Product Data and Catalog?
    When we import products will it import catalog also?

10. For this demo, what is the clear delineation of what data is stored in WCS/AEM and UI?
    What data is stored in AEM and what in WCS?
    Similarly, what UI is used from AEM and what from WCS in this demo?

11. When we take a look at shopping cart in AEM, the demo says that this UI is stored in WCS.
How could UI stored in WCS comes in to AEM?

12. Samething is truue for Preview on the top nav in AEM.

13. After checkout, info is passed from AEM to WCS, WCS stores all this info and sends Order Number to

AEM?

14. How are images created and managed? Does AEM import images from wcs and store in dam during

product import?

15. Thus it helps to know end to end flow for each functionality.
    For example, if I want to estimate efforts, I need to know the flow and the screens to be

built. Based on that info, I will be able to determine number of AEM templates and components, etc.

16. If we need to customize some screens in AEM, could we start with Geometrix package and customize

them?

17. All the five interfaces are specific to WCS? Then where is ECommerce Framework?
Again it helps to understand the delineation between what eCommerce Framework offers and what we need

to do on top of that to integrate with any specific eCommerce engine like WCS or Hybris.

18. Checkout was not demonstrated completely correct? Payment options etc were not shown.

19. You were mentioning about workflow in your demo, but did not cover it. What kind of wf is it?
    Please offer a few details about it.

Apologies for this many number of queries, but they will make your demo complete in many respects.

Thanks,

Rama.