Backoffice is the principal tool used by business users to interact with SAP Commerce Cloud. It offers a general user interface with the potential to access any data on your site, depending on access privileges. It also offers a number of specialized user interfaces (UIs) for given roles.
Understanding Backoffice Tools and Customization
Objective
After completing this lesson, you will be able to describe the high-level purpose and functionality of key SAP Commerce Cloud Backoffice configuration tools, such as the Orchestrator and its different Perspectives, and explain the reasons for customizing the Backoffice to meet varying business needs across different organizations.
Introduction
Typically Used Backoffice Cockpits
In addition to the general-purpose Administration Cockpit, here are some cockpits used to perform common tasks for particular roles within your business:
- Product Cockpit
Used by the Product Manager to administer products offered by your website, configure bundles, assign products to categories, and compare product properties.
- Adaptive Search perspective
- Used by the Search Manager to define facets, and affect how search results are sorted.
- Individual products can be explicitly promoted by having them appear first.
- Multiple products, selected based on their property values, can be prioritized over others.
- Customer Support Cockpit
- Used by Customer Support Agents and their manager to manage support tickets, approve/reject product reviews, manage customers and orders, and initiate product returns.
- Order Fulfilment Cockpit
- Used by the Warehouse manager to view current fulfilment tasks, identify consignments, manage stock, and validate customer returns.
- Integration UI Tool
- Used by the Integrations Manager to configure integration APIs, manage outbound synchronization and webhooks, as well as monitor inbound and outbound streams.
Let’s take a walk around the cockpits and perspective available out of the box in SAP Commerce Cloud.
Customizing Backoffice
Customizing Backoffice is all about streamlining your workflow. After all, you could accomplish everything using the Administration Cockpit, right? The other cockpits and perspectives exist to make your life easier and help you complete your tasks more quickly and reliably. And while each cockpit is specialized in the tasks of a particular role, that specialization doesn’t consider any peculiarities in how you manage data.
Backoffice is highly customizable. It consists of a framework that displays widgets, each a small application that does one thing on the page, such as display a list of products, show the navigation tree, or provide a search box. These widgets are connected to each other, so they can share data. So if you select the Categories entry in the navigation tree, the navigation tree widget tells the item list widget to show a list of categories. And when you select a particular category, the list widget tells the details widget to show the particulars of that category.
If you want to tackle your team’s unique way of managing data, the Backoffice’s customizability will be a real asset. Your developers can tweak any of the widgets your existing cockpits and perspectives are using, or assemble a whole new set of them in a custom cockpit.
Custom Views for Other Business Users (Perspectives)
In most cases, sites like yours use the cockpits and perspectives that come with SAP Commerce Cloud, sometimes with minor tweaks to how each one behaves to suit your workflow. And that’s great if you’re the product manager, or a customer support agent.
But what if your task doesn’t quite fit those roles? You may have very specific data management needs, and that’s an opportunity for developers to create an entirely custom cockpit or perspective. And that’s where Backoffice really shines, because its widget-based nature greatly facilitates setting up the kind of custom tool that helps users with less common roles efficiently carry out their daily tasks.
Introducing the Orchestrator
The layout and widgets present in every perspective available in Backoffice are configured in text files in a format well suited to that task, XML. Most of those XML files ship with SAP Commerce Cloud, but some may have been written by your developers to customize what you see inside Backoffice.
All these files are combined when Backoffice launches to determine both the functionality and layout offered to you.
If your developers notify you that they have updated these configuration files, you can tell Backoffice to reload them on the fly, giving you immediate access to these updates.
And that’s where the Orchestrator comes in. The Orchestrator is a Backoffice UI available to certain users so they may customize Backoffice itself. It allows developers to test layout and functionality changes by manipulating the framework itself, adding or removing widgets, and connecting them so they can share data. And it allows you, the end user, to reload the Backoffice configuration on the fly, without system downtime.
Below is a screenshot of the Orchestrator invoked on the Products page in the Administration Cockpit.
Use the Application Orchestrator mode to change the layout of Backoffice and its functionality by creating, modifying, and rearranging application widgets – all without writing any code; even drag-and-drop functionality is supported. This can be done on the fly and doesn’t interrupt the server, with results visible immediately.
The good news:
If you dislike the changes, the Orchestrator allows you to reload the original and unmodified XML-format files that define its initial layout.
On the other hand, if you like your runtime changes and want to persist them, a developer is actually needed to save your modified files to the system. After a restart, your modifications become the new initial layout, which you can change again without any risk.
Widget configuration can be reloaded by invoking the menu item Reset to Defaults located just below Show widgets.xml.The cockpit layout can be reloaded by selecting theReset to Defaults item found below Show cockpit-config.xml.You can also reload both with Reset Everything.
Let’s go rummage around inside the Orchestrator in the following video.
Summary
SAP Commerce Cloud Backoffice offers a wide-ranging set of cockpits and perspectives that allow users fulfilling certain roles, such as the Product Manager or the Fulfilment Manager, to carry out their tasks with a UI tailored to their activities.
Backoffice is highly customizable. Developers can tailor existing cockpits and perspectives to your site’s idiosyncrasies, or create entirely new cockpits or perspectives tailored to the activities of those roles that must currently use the Administration Cockpit to perform their work.
The Backoffice Orchestrator is a UI that allows developers to test new layouts at runtime. Persisting these changes also requires developer efforts.