We have recently launched an innovative website for The Cheesecake Factory using IBM Web Content Management. It was a successful project that only a few days following launch, the client received a surprising number of positive response from visitors.

The web site redefines the boundary of user experience that web technology is capable of delivering. Our collaborator Automatic Partners has published a sensational article that details the dynamics of the restaurant experience we attempt to convey. (more…)

Someone raised a great question the other day -  “How does WebSphere Commerce compare to (open sourced) Apache OFBiz eCommerce?

I thought about that. Indeed, this is an interesting question. I have been playing with open sourced software for more than ten years (this dates back to my college days). I have heard a lot of argument for and against open sourced software.  There are numerous battles: OpenOffice vs. MS Office, Windows vs Linux vs Unix, Firefox vs IE….. Somehow most of them have Microsoft involved. Sure, Microsoft is the biggest, but it is far from Standard Oil of the software industry (for these who don’t know, Standard Oil once control 90%+ of the oil market). What happens to other guys? IBM? Oracle? CA?  SAP? These are big names in the business software world.

My two cents is: It is very difficult for open sourced software to match up against proprietary software  in the business world. That is why they never really mattered. The sole exception is Linux. I, however, would argue that Linux is NOT a normal open sourced software. It receives tremendous backing from everyone other than Microsoft because no one else is making operating systems. Yes, I know there are i5/OS, AIX, Solaris, HPUX…… None of them is really that important to their owner as Windows to Microsoft, not even close. Not only that, Linux has become a strategic platform for everyone to avoid a total domination of Windows, and everyone chips in money and technical resources. Another reason that it almost appears to be Open Source vs Microsoft Only is that Microsoft largely target consumers, and consumers as a whole is very different from business users. For most of them, total cost of ownership = acquisition cost.  How many people are paying Microsoft for 24×7 live support of Windows Vista? Not many, I assume.

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Many sites use dynamic content to streamline their maintenance and data management processes. With dynamic content, data is retrieved from back-end databases, so URLs are built with a number of parameters, represented by special characters such as %, ?, #, etc. When search engine spiders see these special characters, they stop crawling the site and rank these dynamically driven sites very low in terms of content relevancy. This means that your unpaid, natural search results will appear lower (or not at all) in search engine results. (more…)

IBM Lotus Web Content Management (WCM) 6.1 has been on the market for a while and it features numerous  improvements over its predecessor WCM 6.0 .  I just recently completed a  project with WCM 6.1 and I would like to briefly share my experience of the product , as an experienced WCM developer, and what I hear the users say about it. (more…)

I was working on KLF (Key Locater Framework) a few days ago for a client. KLF is part of the PCI Compliance requirements. It consists of two parts:
1.    Merchant key should be separated out from the main configuration file (i.e. the instance xml)
2.    Merchant key should be split into two parts, and should be held by two people (i.e. No one knows the entire key)
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A few years ago, TJX, one of the biggest retailers in the nation, revealed in 2007 that tens of millions of credit cards in its database were exposed to security. It was probably the most reported payment card security breaching event in the last few years. Predictably, TJX was sued. Today, it has reached a multi-million dollars settlement.

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As indicated in the part 2, most merchants belong to level  2, 3 or 4. At these levels, especially level 4, the requirements are not nearly as demanding as level 1 merchants. For example, there is no Report on Compliance (ROC) needed. As anyone ever worked on this report can tell you, this report is painful to the IT.  In many cases, it requires completely re-architecturing of the Commerce infrastructure. (more…)

In the previous blog post, we discussed the needs for PCI.  The obvious extension to that is who needs to be in compliance?

The answer is, depends on how big a business you are. Below is a list of requirements taken from Visa’s web site.

1 Merchants processing over 6 million Visa transactions annually (all channels) or Global merchants identified as Level 1 by any Visa region

* Annual Report on Compliance (“ROC”) by Qualified Security Assessor (“QSA”)
* Quarterly network scan by Approved Scan Vendor (“ASV”)
* Attestation of Compliance Form (more…)

Ever since the commercialization of the Internet in 1990s, eCommerce has been a honey pot for hackers. Some of them were looking for fame, at least in the early days, some of them were bored, and a few of them were merely looking for a job … at the companies they hacked. It was not an uncommon practice for companies to hire the people who broken into their network to be their administrators. After all, a couple of hundreds of thousands dollars a year seems to be a very cheap price for a good hackers. Information stored on the network could easily worth millions of dollars for the business, and money paid to the hackers-turned-administrators was peanuts in comparison. (more…)

On April 2009, Vans’ re-launched their Custom Shoes feature. Custom Shoes allows customers to personalize almost all aspects of their ideal shoes such as specifying the style of their shoes to picking colors for every detail of the product.

Custom Shoes goes beyond typical online shopping experiences – the feature gives consumers the ability to create and view their own finished product with efficiency and ease. The enhanced Web 2.0 experience for online shoppers does not stop with customization. Not only are consumers able to interact with their product, they are also able to interact and share with others through other virtual means via chat, email, and mobile.

Please visit Vans Custom Shoes to build your own personalized Vans shoes.