Scholastic

Shared Vision Group was actively involved in eCommerce Application migration process for Scholastic, a global children’s publishing and media company providing products and services that have fostered children’s intellectual, personal and cultural growth for the past 80 years. 

Scholastic’s eCommerce application was powered by WebSphere Commerce v5.4, utilizing WAS 4.0 (in a clustered configuration) and IBM DB2 v7  It comprised of the Teacher Store, which is meant strictly for educators and the Scholastic Store, meant for the general public.  Both stores were based off of the B2C sample store, Consumer direct.

The project initiative was to migrate the existing application from WebSphere Commerce 5.4 to WebSphere Commerce 5.6.1.  The tasks performed by SVG resources on site were initially centered on migrating the customer CSR tool Scholastic had developed,termed WOI (Web Order Interface).  This tool was an integral part of Scholastic’s business aiding to improve the customer experience, through product and order searches, order adjustments and order processing.

Summary of tasks performed:

• Migration of EJBs
• Migration of store front assets
• Migration of business logic
• Ensured the CSR tool provided the same functionality as it did in WC54
• Fixed bugs observed from WCS 54Production and performed enhancements to the CSR tool
• Rewrote the Product Search component to integrate with Verity, a 3^rd party search Application, through a SearchBean API.
• Optimized the Order search functionality to perform quicker and more accurate searches

Other tasks

• Integration of WCS561 with an AS400 back end system using WebSphere MQ for messages relating to order processing, inventory updates and customer information lookup
• Enhancements of the Teacher and Scholastic stores

SVG resources are currently providing maintenance support for the WC561 environment, performing enhancements as requested by the Business group and fixes as requested by QA.  In addition to this, SVG is also playing an integral part in the design phase of a new Scholastic store, Scholastic Home, that will be leveraging the power of the extended sites model available in WCS561.  This new store is to serve as a platform to spawn future Scholastic stores.

Go Live

• New Production environment running in a clustered WC setup consisting of 2 application nodes (WAS 5.1.1) ,IBM DB2 v8.2 utilizing WC Payment Manager with the Payment cassette.
• New production environment  integration with WebSphere MQ 5.3 for order, customer and inventory message processing
• New Production environment integration with SPS (An internal WAS based application) responsible for handling user information through LDAP
• Stores (Scholastic and Teacher Store) integration with Verity for optimized and efficient searches.  The new Production is purely driven by Verity Search.