Announcing ECinteractive, is.D-Force2 8.1.0
This message covers the following timely topics:
What’s New In This Release?
Find Out What's Coming Soon And More
What’s New In This Release?
Friday, Feb. 13, 2009 — ECi is loading Version 8.1.0 on your live ECinteractive® and is.D-Force® 2 Web servers this weekend.
This software update will take place during the standard maintenance window between 9 PM CST Saturday, Feb. 14, and 6 AM CST Sunday, Feb. 15. Since this falls within ECi's Standard Weekly Data Center Maintenance timeframe
(www.DDMS.com/support/massfax/dcMtceWindow.htm), it does not require any changes to your Site Maintenance schedule.
Version 8.0.0 is one of our biggest major releases yet, with new features including:
Custom Items Integrated With S.P. Richards Enhanced Content
ECi has enhanced your Admin Control Panel's Custom Product Management (CPM) pages so that you can authorize a custom catalog to be synchronized with Etilize for display in S. P. Richards Enhanced Search.
Your custom item information (description, image, part number, category, manufacturer) is uploaded to Etilize once every 24 hours or when required. (6009)
Note: If you are implementing S.P. Richards Enhanced Content for the first time, the new custom item features require you to obtain your Site ID from S.P. Richards.
(For dealers who had S.P. Richards Enhanced Content as of Jan. 7, ECi pre-populated the Site ID to ensure continuity of service.)
To request your S.P. Richards Site ID, use the online form at iteminfo.com/eci.
Your ECinteractive or is.D-Force2 Site ID should be entered into your Site Preferences when you select S.P. Richards as your Enhanced Content Provider.
(S.P. Richards' iteminfo.com form may let you request Site IDs for Dealer Station or the original is.D-Force. However, those sites do not yet require it. A Site ID field is part of an upcoming software update for those sites.)
See Setting Up S.P. Richards Enhanced Content
(www.DDMS.com/resources/support/faq/ecommerce/ecSPRContent.pdf).
For updated instructions on using Custom Product Management, see
Setting Up Custom Items and Catalogs
(www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/ecommerce/ecCatalogs.pdf).
Note: We are working with Etilize to investigate issues with the new optional Mapping Manufacturers feature. If you map manufacturers to your custom items, the ECinteractive system will save your settings and queue them to be synchronized with S.P. Richards' Etilize. However, your end users may not immediately be able to see your custom items' Manufacturer detail on your storefront. We will notify you via email when this is resolved.
S.P. Richards Enhanced Content Allows Custom Dealer Rankings
S.P. Richard’s third party Enhanced Content Provider (Etilize) allows a numeric rank value for each product so that the dealer may place items in an explicit order. As a result, you have much greater control over the way items are displayed on your end-user’s Search Results, Contracts, Laundry Lists, Web Specials and so on.
ECi has enhanced your Admin Control Panel's Merchandising Products pages (in the Marketing Tools menu) by adding the ability to upload a list of ranked items to S.P. Richards' Etilize service. (8448)
Your list can include your custom items and/or wholesaler items. You can assign your ranking priorities to either default icons or custom images that you upload (ideally no bigger than 20px square).
Once you have products mapped to Ranking icons, click Enable and Synchronize Existing Ranked Products Now. The screen will then indicate progress details, elapsed time, and any exceptions that occur during this process. The ECinteractive server uploads these product rankings as a separate ranking list, and logs this process in the Ranking Log.
- For details on not only custom items and catalogs, but also the Ranking Log, see Setting Up Custom Items and Catalogs
(www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/ecommerce/ecCatalogs.pdf)
- For details on ranking your items within ECinteractive Standard Content and S.P. Richards Enhanced Content, Customizing Item Ranking and Sorting
(www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/ecommerce/ecItemIconRank.pdf)
Catalog and Enhanced Content Synchronization Troubleshooting
Any time you add, remove, or edit custom items, item rankings, category or manufacturer mappings, or contracts and laundry lists, affected lists are queued for the nightly Catalog Combination Indexing and Enhanced Content Provider synchronization. The server logs details of the activity.
Effective in version 8.1.0 and higher, you may view the logs for your site. We've created three log pages to display Enhanced Content Product Synchronization Log information: ECP CCI Log, Contract and Laundry List Log (only United Stationers at this time), and Ranking Log. You'll find these pages in the AdminSite menu under ECP Sync Logs. (8956)
For instructions on navigating, sorting, and limiting these log pages, see your online help or Setting Up Custom Items and Catalogs
(www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/ecommerce/ecCatalogs.pdf).
Additional Admin Control Panel changes:
- Enhanced by adding an Email Format Type parameter to the Administrative Customer Parameter Maintenance page. This enhancement lets you mass change a set of customers to receive either HTML or Text-only confirmation email format. (8459) For detailed instructions, see Customizing Site Text and Messages
(www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/ecommerce/ecSiteText.pdf).
- Corrected Current Time in the Site Maintenance Admin Web page under Site Config to use the proper time. After ECi's data center migration, the Current Time displayed was one hour behind, which potentially created problems when scheduling backend proc files. (9032)
- Corrected the logic behind categorizing custom products, so that custom items do not remain under the "miscellaneous" category after the dealer maps a specific category to them. Previously when viewing the custom catalog on the end user's Browse page, mapped items would appear under both the specified category, along with the miscellaneous category. (8949)
Additional End Customer Storefront changes:
- Enhanced by adding the ability for the end user to add multiple items at once to the Shopping Cart when using Favorites Lists, the Machine Matching Tool, Product Showcase, Specials, and Contracts and Laundry Lists. This tool is included with United’s SmartSearch Web service feature. (8900)
- Enhanced by adding the Attention's name to the Approval Edit page for an order. The Attention's name has been added between the Submitted By and Department text. (8924)
- Corrected so the end user can only specify a maximum of 50 alphanumeric characters when specifying the denial reason in the Order Approval page. Previously the Reason box allowed the user to enter an unlimited number of characters which could lead to distorted pages in Internet Explorer and Firefox. (8906)
- Corrected to notify the user through an email that the credit card used has been denied. Previously the user received a confirmation email, indicating that the order was properly processed when it actually wasn't. (8550)
- Corrected so when the Expand Category Display on Home and Browse Catalog Pages parameter setting in the Administrative Site Preferences page is activated for end user sites, the user does not have to select a sub-category twice. Previously when the end user selected a subcategory from an expanded category list, the system displayed a Browse Category page, at which point, the user was forced to re-select the identical subcategory before the contents opened. (8901)
- Corrected so after upgrading from previous software versions of Firefox, the end user does not receive an unexpected error message when attempting to open the Order History Web page. This error only affected end users who upgraded from using Firefox 2 to Firefox 3.0.1 software. Shoppers using Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7 were unaffected. (8196)
- Corrected so the system properly attaches header and footer information when sending end users confirmation emails. Previously the system was not sending existing headers or footers nor any new ones that were added. This applied when using Plain Text and HTML Capable email confirmations. (8838)
Also see Program Updates
(www.DDMS.com/updates/searchresult2.asp?swversion=269&search=Search).
For more details about your Web storefront, see also ECinteractive FAQs
(www.DDMS.com/support/doc/ecInteractive.htm).
Find Out What's Coming Soon And More
In the next few months, the ECinteractive team has an aggressive schedule to release more hot priority features to make your Web presence more competitive and efficient. We have made significant strides in implementing advancements vendors make in content. We continue working with our trading partners, our mutual goal being a better experience in searching and shopping for your customers. Log into your Admin Control Panel for more details on the Home page.
To find out more about the ECinteractive family of products, see our ECinteractive Product Information (www.ecisolutions.com/products/ecinteractive/), where you can access a demo site, marketing tools, and color themes. You can compare Dealer Station® and ECinteractive features for both your Administrative control panel and your end-user Web storefront.
We hope this information is helpful!
Sincerely,
ECi Product Management & Technical Support
http://support.ECiSolutions.com |
