SAP Commerce Cloud provides specialized tools to support certain user roles, for instance the Product Cockpit for the product manager or SmartEdit for the web content manager.
Users whose role aren’t fully supported by a specialized user interface primarily turn to the Backoffice Administration Cockpit, a general-purpose tool offering a wide range of features to help business users of all stripes to complete their daily tasks. This could include order and inventory management, website configuration, marketing campaigns, promotions rules, access control, and many more.
The business users assuming responsibility for these configuration tasks fall under the general umbrella of Backoffice administrators. Furthermore, while they spend most of their time in the Administration Cockpit, administrators do have one special-purpose UI at their disposal to handle one of their responsibilities, search configuration.
The Adaptive Search perspective greatly simplifies configuring of SAP Commerce Cloud’s powerful search functionality, from facets to category-specific configuration and re-ordering results.
We will look at that perspective in a later lesson. For now, let’s examine some of the useful features of the Administration Cockpit, starting with the particulars of its user interface.
The Backoffice User Interface
This interface is designed for business users managing the online store's operations.
It all begins with the explorer tree, which lets you select a specific area of your site’s functionality.
As shown in the following screenshot, there are currently up to twenty functional areas; each can be expanded to show the features it comprises. For example, expanding Marketing displays its many features, including promotions and coupons.
Note
The functional areas and features you can view depend on the access rights assigned to the user you used to log into Backoffice.
When you select a feature, a collection browser displays its database entities. Simple and advanced search filters help you narrow down the results.
When you select one of these entities, a tabbed editor pane allows you to view and edit that entity’s properties, depending on your individual or group permissions.
In the following screenshot, the business user is viewing the list of catalog version entities, and clicking on one, the Staged version of the Electronics Product Catalog, has brought up the editor pane for that item.
Backoffice Administrator Tasks
While the Backoffice administrator will use the Administration Cockpit to configure many SAP Commerce features at the start of a project - for example, currencies or localization, most of those configurations will only occasionally be revisited.
However, on a day-to-day basis, the administrator will use the Administration Cockpit for various tasks, which we will cover in a later lesson describing a typical day for Alex.