Business Catalyst Blog

We are announcing a new Business Catalyst releases scheduled to go live on Wednesday, December 14.

R170 focuses on security improvements and bug corrections. The release includes a major change in the way we handle CRM passwords and a long list of bug corrections, mainly in the payment gateways area. Along with these changes, we have continued to improve UI V3 to make it ready for a larger roll-out early next year.

Security update - CRM passwords

Effective December 14th 2011, we will be updating the way we handle CRM user passwords - for security reasons. In order to achieve a greater level of security, we are going to modify some of our Admin Console user interfaces and CRM APIs. Existing customer reports will also be altered during the update.

For more details please read the update announcement - Important Security Policy Updates - Effective December 14th

Issues fixed by R170 release

• Issue 2821789 - Payments are processed differently for different countries for several payment gateways
• Issue – 2776267 & 3054570 - PayGate non-3D secure transaction does not record a return error in BC if such an error existed; instead it returns a generic error message if the transaction wasn't processed.
• Issue 2792959 - Card Number was not masked correctly when processing credit card with web forms
• Issue 2654380 - Secure PDF sent via 'Process offline' payment gateway was not using correct currency symbol for sites other than $
• Issue 2826099 - The digital signature sent by RealEx did not match with the other values included in the request.
• Issue 2815782 - When a payment is sent in a second attempt to pay, with RealEx, the buyer is received "Order ID has been processed" error
• Issue 2757946 - Business Catalyst was not supporting AU as country code for PaymentExpress PG
• Issues 2821789 & 2875942 - The supported currencies/country for several payment gateways were incorrect
• Issues 3028716 - orders paid for PayGate 3D Secure ended up as not being paid
• Issue 3055166 - Sending campaigns to saved reports doesn't work
• Issue 2986635 - Reset password from Partner portal no longer works
• Issue 2871177 - Campaign is wrongly set to "Awaiting content approval" when you edit a scheduled campaign and only click Save and Send without clicking Send again in the pop-up window
• Issue 3061663 - [PG] Realex Payment Gateway -If an order amount is less than 1 pound e.g. 0.50 pence, the amount on Releax will be displayed as 005 and the order will fail
• Issue 3064597 - [PG] DIBS payment gateway displays English page when coming from a Danish website because we don't pass DK as language parameter
• Issue 3006024 - If a customer fails an order and than return to the shop, all the products will have no tax codes calculated
• Issue 3048896 - Poplet images aren't rendering if the file name contains spaces at the beginning of the file or new lines
• Issue 3051419 - Cannot Save custom fields - there's no Save button
• Issue 3051418 - Cannot use tag Insert dropdown on the webapp layouts - it throws a message when trying to insert a tag
• Issue 2982619 - <div> is no longer changed to <p> in the WYSIWYG editor, when Partner Portal setting is to create <p> at enter
• Merged Email Me & Email others functionality into Send Test Email. The logged in user email address is prefilled by default but users can specify additional email addresses separated by semi-colon
• Undo Import functionality has been deprecated.

UI V3 improvements and beta fixes

We continue our track of improving UI V3 and take it closer to a public customer beta. 

• We've made significant improvements on the way pages are loaded, to reduce in half the number of HTTP requests by using modern CSS and JS techniques, and sending improved HTTP headers to better cache static assets loaded by the AdminConsole. This also includes a new loading indicator that should improve the experience of loading pages.
• Fixed a bug that caused a "Bad request error" when trying to insert an image using the r.a.d. Editor image manger
• Updated tasks list to match the new visual guidelines
• Removed filters from Pages > Tree view user interface
• Fixed a bug causing Customer Service Ticketing to be displayed outside viewport and forcing users to scroll
• Fixed a bug that causing a redirect to a wrong page after successful web app item import
• Fixed a bug causing a JS error when adding page to a secure zone
• Fixed a bug causing charts to not load in Dashboard
• Fixed a bug causing loading indicator to remain on screen right after using Export Report feature for all CRM areas customers, cases, orders...
• Added "Show all" link in the Upcoming Tasks pod in Business Dashboard
• Link manager does not open the correct dialog when triggered from within rad editor Hyperlink Manager
• Added Icons for items displayed in Recent items menu: admin users, templates, cases, orders, event bookings, opportunities, CRM forms, gift vouchers
• Fixed a bug generating a negative value for the number of trial days left
• Updated title in the Import blog posts screen
• Updated title in the Web App item import page
• Updated breadcrumbs for import customers basic and advanced screens
• Fixed a bug preventing users from opening image image manager from within module manager links
• Added a close button to the Recipient list modal window
• Fixed a bug causing a js error when trying to add a user picture in Site Users -> User details screen
• Fixed a bug causing Live Feed to display dates without corresponding feeds
• Updated breadcrumbs for Email campaign details page
• Fixed a bug causing folder management buttons to not be displayed in the r.a.d Editor Insert image popups
• Updated button and label alignments on Web App Items and Pages screens
• Updated scroll behavior on multiple screens
• Updated title on CRM -> Orders ->select an order from the list -> from Bulk Actions select Print -> Print invoice screen to "Preview"
• Fixed a bug preventing users from visually selecting Modules->News-> Details tab when arriving from the Usage tab
• Fixed a bug preventing users from editing a page in Firefox 8
• Fixed a broken link for the Upgrade site button
• Removed unnecessary scroll bars from Insert image screen
• Updated styles for "Add folder" popup from Web Pages
• Updated filter styling for affiliate program -> usage page
• Fixed a bug in Products -> Attributes -> New option screen causing button overlapping
• Fixed a bug causing incorrect styles to be used in Customers, orders, cases, events, opportunities lists when using Internet Explorer 9
• Added a "No upcoming tasks" message in Upcoming Tasks pod when the list if empty
• Fixed a bug in Cases/order details screen causing Related file section to collapse after uploading a file

What's next

We are expecting a web serving performance improvement release in mid-January where we will start deploying new origin server caching across most Business Catalyst static asset requests.

Our next major release is tentatively scheduled for the beginning of February and will include a larger roll out of  Business Catalyst v3, improvements to the FTP server and additional changes to the CRM password workflows.

• Business Catalyst V3 roll out - starting with the February release, UI V3 will be made available to all customers; current interface will remain the default one for existing customers, but they'll have the option to switch to the new version; for new customers, V3 will be the default user interface
• Major FTP improvements - We've embarked on a large effort to completely rewrite BC FTP access. When completed, you'll see better performance and reliability when using Dreamweaver or any other FTP client to manage your site content.
• CRM passwords - starting with the February release, passwords in emails will be replaced with a link to set/reset password page.

Enjoy!

Cristinel Anastasoaie
Adobe Business Catalyst Product Manager

BC Evangelist Adam Broadway recently sat down with Brent Weaver to discuss how they've grown their business using Business Catalyst.

Brent also shares his tips to help the rest of the Partner community increase their profits and grow client referrals.

It's a great interview, so don't miss out:

Listen to the interview on the BC Evangelist blog.

Meet Partner Leo Estevez, get a run down of everything included in last week's system update and learn more about the much anticipated Business Catalyst v3!

Listen to this month's podcast:

Simply click the play button below to stream the podcast via your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the podcast in .mp3 format for offline listening.

To subscribe and receive the BC Podcast each month, you can find us on the iTunes store here or by simply searching "BC Podcast" from iTunes.

In November's episode:

• Meet Partner Leo Estevez
• Learn the history of his agency Small Green Door
  
• Hear what inspires him in the creative space
• Listen his philosophy for being successful in the industry
• Read his article "Stay honest. Be creative. Work hard." on the BC Evangelist blog
  
• New features in the latest system update
  • Special characters in product/catalog names
    
  • Send email campaigns to multiple recipient lists
  • ...plus a range of improvements and bug fixes
    
• A HTML brain-teaser - be the first listener to chime in with the correct answer in the comments, and we'll give you a special shout out in next month's episode!

Related Links

• Read Leo's "Stay honest. Be creative. Work hard." article on the BC Evangelist Blog
  
• Learn more about our latest system update
  
• See how you can preview Business Catalyst v3 today
• Read about Business Catalyst's involvement in Adobe's Creative Cloud

Updated - Friday, 25 November: to reduce the amount of work required to update existing websites, we are keeping the {tag_recipientpassword} functional until our January release. All the other changes will be released as planned on December 14th.

Effective December 14th 2011 we will be updating the way we handle CRM user passwords, for security reasons. In order to achieve a greater level of security, we are going to update some of our Admin Console user interfaces and CRM APIs. Existing customer reports will also be altered during the update.

Below is a list of user interfaces and APIs impacted by the change:

• BC Admin > Customers > Customers > View customer details: CRM user password will be obfuscated
• BC Admin > Customers > Customers > Edit customer details: CRM user password will be obfuscated; site admin or partner will still be able to update the password
• BC Admin > Reports > Customer Reports > New Customer Report > Step 2 - Select fields: Password field will be removed from the list of available fields, making the password field unavailable in Customer Reports
• BC Admin > Reports > Customer Reports > Saved Customer Reports > View data: Password field will be removed from ALL saved reports; customer sites will be altered
• BC CRM APIs > ContactList_Retrieve, Contact_RetrieveByEmailAddress, Contact_RetrieveByEntityID, Contact_RetrieveByExternalID, Contact_RetrieveByUsernamePassword, Contact_Retrieve, Contact_Retrieve (message name Contact_Retrieve2), Contact_Retrieve (message name Contact_Retrieve3) - Password field will return an empty value.
• Moved in our January release: BC Admin > Email Marketing > Create campaign - {tag_recipientpassword} will be deprecated and customers will be unable to send the password in email campaigns; when running the campaign, the tag will return an empty value.

December security update FAQ

Q: Can a Partner or Site Admin still update a CRM user password in the Admin UI?
A: Yes, Site Admins and Partners can still enter a new CRM user password through the Edit Customer UI. The new value will be saved and used to login to secure zones.

Q: How can a Partner or Site Admin help CRM users recover their passwords?
A: Since the CRM user password is no longer readable by Site Admins or Partners in Report or in Manager Customer UIs, we encourage Partners to use the following methods to help customers retrieve their passwords:

• Use "Email Login Details" from Customer Details > Manage Customer Subscriptions screen
• Update login pages to include a "Forgot Password" form which customers can use to retrieve their secure zone passwords; Read the Allowing Customers to view and update CRM details article on the Business Catalyst Knowledge base for more information on how to help secure zone customers retrieve their passwords.

Q: What happens when password field is left in the import file?
A: We will update the import functionality so that it does not overwrite the existing password with a blank password. Starting with next release, leaving the password field blank, will keep the existing password. The following uses cases are going to apply when updating or inserting customers through import & API:

• If contact exists in CRM and password field is left blank in the import file, the system will keep the value existing in the database
• If contact exists in CRM and password field includes a value in the import file, the system will update the password with the value provided in the import file
• If contact does not exists in CRM and password field is left blank in the import file, the system will create a new contact and will not generate a password for it
• If contact does not exists in CRM and password field includes a value in the import file, the system will create a new contact and create a password based on the value provided in the import file

Q: Following the January release, can Partners or Site Admins still automate the Secure Zone login by appending username and password to an URL?
A: No. Starting with our January release, site customers will have to enter username and password when accessing a secure zone. To avoid entering login credentials the next time they access the site, site customers can check the "Remember me" checkbox.

Q: Following the January release, can partners send the login details to contacts created using import or APIs?
A: Starting with our January release, we will replace the existing workflow used to send login information with a more secure one. Partners will be able to include in the email a one time token which will redirect first time users to a screen where they can enter their password.

We will send a separate email communication to all Partners whose sites are using customer reports or APIs to retrieve CRM user passwords.

Please make sure that your customers and team members are aware of these important updates.

Thank you for all of your help and support,

Cristinel Anastasoaie
Adobe Business Catalyst Product Manager

Last update: Tuesday, 16 November, 9:30 PST

UPDATE: The new user role interface has been removed from this release and it's going to be launched at a later date.

We're announcing a new Business Catalyst release, scheduled for next Monday.

R169 includes lots of enhancements, bug fixes and overall improvements. Three highlights of this release are the partner preview for Admin V3, and some wish list requests that will help customer better manage their online business: special characters in product & catalog names and the ability to send an email campaign to multiple lists. In addition to these great improvements, we've streamlined various user interfaces, added extra overage packages and fixed many critical bugs. 

Admin V3 UI partner preview

With R169, we are launching a public preview (for partners only) of our new user interface for the Admin section (link available in the upper right section of the Admin).  

For more details on how we're approaching releasing BC improvements, please read the “Business Catalyst V3 - Partner preview” article on our blog. As we are soon going to start transitioning customers to the new version, we encourage everyone to take a look at this new user interface, use it and help us make it better by giving us feedback.

Special characters in product and catalog names

With this release, we're sticking to our commitment of fixing top wish list items and will be releasing one great enhancement that will help customers achieve better SEO and save time while creating and managing products or catalogs.

You are now able to add catalogs & products containing special characters in their names, directly from the BC Admin interface. In addition, we've also updated our import/export and API functionality to make sure customers can take advantage of this feature outside the Admin UI.

The product URL will automatically be generated based on the product name having the special characters replaced. To take full advantage of this feature, users will need to have SEO friendly URLs turned on, otherwise the system will use the dynamic product URL (CatalogRetrieve.aspx)

Send email campaign to multiple lists

This enhancement is another wish list request that will give customers using our email marketing feature more flexibility when managing mailing lists.

We've updated the email campaign wizard so that customers can now choose to send the campaign to all customers, one or more existing mailing lists, or to a new list. When selecting to send to multiple lists, customers will simply mark the check box next to multiple existing lists or customer reports.

Upon sending, the system will automatically search for contacts present in multiple lists, remove any duplicates and make sure that each subscriber receives the email once.

Updated training

We have updated the Training section in Partner Portal. Besides a better organization of the videos, we're proud to announce the inclusion of valuable free and paid content provided by BC Partners. Check it out, and let us know your feedback!

Spam moderation workflow - preview

To help customers reduce spam and unwanted posting on the forums, we are starting to test a spam moderation workflow for forums. Thus, in this release we're enabling this feature for websites with more than one forum (to be extended to all sites in an upcoming release).

Partners can update forum layouts to include a report spam link (using a system tag) to allow forums visitors to report a thread or comment as spam. Site Admins can then moderate these reports from the forum Adminconsole user interface and delete unwanted comments.

Minor enhancements

• For all existing and new sites, we enabled APIs and removed the option to disable them. This has no effect on the site behavior, and now APIs are readily available on any site in case you'd like to use them.
• Based on customer requests, we've added new overages packages 2000 MB w/ 10% discount at $18 and 5000 MB w/ 20% discount at $40.

Issues fixed by R169 release

• Fixed a series of encoding problems causing web app items, web app, forum, email lists, affiliate programs and gift voucher names to be displayed incorrectly in Admin user interface
• Fixed a problem causing multi-screen templates to not render correctly for web app items (bug id: 2963406)
• Fixed spelling errors on the overage engine and multi screen feature (bug id: 3017345 & 3010433)
• Corrected a problem preventing product attribute cost to be added to order total (bug id: 3010227)
• Updated the list of users receiving payment failed email notification. Starting with this release, the email goes to Partner and the payer of the order if the invoice method is Partner or, it goes to Partner, the payer of the order and to the site Admin users if the invoice method is Customer. (bug id: 3011040)
• Fixed a problem preventing Support users to change a site's Partner when the Partner name contains " ' " character (bug id: 3018276)
• Updated the cart behavior so that it adjusts the prices for products in cart when a wholesale customer logs in or logs out (bug id: 2567277)
• Fixed possible vulnerability in Business Catalyst Admin login form (bug id: 3017298)
• Fixed a problem with our shopping cart generating an invalid order status and preventing the system from triggering workflow notifications (bug id: 2650309)
• Fixed a bug causing an incorrect currency display on multi-currency websites: (bug id: 3011662)

Enjoy!

Cristinel Anastasoaie
Adobe Business Catalyst Product Manager

We're launching a public preview for our new V3 admin user interface next Monday, including a "try" link at the top of the BC Admin interface  (for Partners only). This is primarily an UI refresh, as we continue to develop a very clear and intuitive UI framework that should significantly improve usability in the future.

BC UI v3 Alpha Overview from Business Catalyst on Vimeo.

Allow me to explain the philosophy behind how we see BC being launched more gradually in the future. I'll start with a story :)

When I joined BC 6 months ago, the team were in the process of building BC V3 from the ground up using a new .NET framework, based on some designs provided by our XD team. I found 3 problems with this approach:

1. The new UI, while involving a lot of change, was not validated with many customers. We feared that we would throw away everything good in v2, and build something that you might have not liked or found usable when launched.
2. The estimated timeline from engineering to rebuild BC was more than one year. It was too much, and I feared that we might lose our momentum if going down that route.
3. Lastly, the framework we used for rebuilding the backend, while a modern framework, was completely different from what we're exposing Partners - modules, tags and BC webforms. This was not the right approach, as we believe BC is a platform and we should be eating our own dogfood.

1. We began prototyping and validating a lot with Partners and end customers. In the last 3 months, we've met hundreds of Partners and business owners, showed them our direction, gathered feedback, incorporated it, and changed our product vision based on this feedback.
2. We conducted a large Partner survey that was answered by almost 2000 people to understand what you like/don't like about or product - and what your needs, and your customer needs are.
3. We've introduced an NPS survey - and even if this might have been annoying for a little while as it was triggered too often - told us exactly what your problems were, and what do we need to fix
4. We looked at our product and realized that you need a more powerful markup language - and we came up with Liquid Markup. That you need more powerful Web Apps - and we're reinventing them completely. We've also started a long journey to improve the usability of our application.
5. And in the meanwhile, we've solved tens of bugs and wishlist items

Regarding the V3 release - as BC is feature rich and has a long learning curve, we wanted to show a preview of what’s coming, without waiting until everything is finalized. Gradual improvements and releases are the way to go, to help Partners and customers learn the system gradually and provide feedback.

When we look at our Admin interface, we see a collection of modules and Web Apps - and we want to implement it this way - to open up our platform and allow anybody to write a new module for BC, that will allow frontend rendering and backend lists and forms to manage data. This will be combined with a Web App marketplace, where you will be able to search and install Web Apps for various niche needs - real estate, better blogging, better photo galleries, etc.

We're still working on creating this very extensible infrastructure for BC, but we hope you will enjoy the evolution of the product until we're ready with the new vision. Just append /Adminconsole/ to any BC website.

http://yoursite.com/Adminconsole

Feel free to report problems using the small "Feedback" tab on the right side of the UI (you can also vote on other people's feedback to bring something to our attention). We'll do our best to solve most problems before we launch the new Admin console in beta for all customers, including your clients.

In terms of roadmap, we'll release the new UI when it will be better than the current one, after validating it with partners and customers, and give an opportunity for customers to learn the new UI. We plan to have a transition plan in place while the two UIs will work in parallel:

• This release – Partner beta
• Early next year – Customer beta
• Early next year – new customers get v3 by default
• Spring next year – all customers get v3 by default
• Spring next year – V2 gets decommissioned

And, as always, we're committed to re-inventing BC to be the best platform for building online businesses.

Enjoy!

Alexandru

As you may have read over on the official Adobe blog, Adobe Business Catalyst is set to be a key component in the upcoming release of Adobe's Creative Cloud offering.

The industry is in the midst of an exciting transformation around content creation, distribution and monetization. The Creative Cloud initiative marks a huge investment from Adobe in the future of the Business Catalyst platform, as the primary vehicle for publishing to the web.

We're pleased to announce that as part of each Adobe Creative Cloud membership, customers will receive their very own Adobe Business Catalyst site, running on our popular "Starter" plan. This is a great starting point for anyone new to the platform, whether for a personal site, promoting a small business or for simply distributing the work you've created using Adobe's range of tools.

As part of this initiative, you'll see increased investment in the enhancement of existing Business Catalyst integrations with widely used tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Muse (codename). We also hope that further down the line we'll be able to bring you additional value through potential integrations with recently acquired web technologies such as Typekit and Nitobi PhoneGap.

With the range of new users entering the Business Catalyst ecosystem, we're building the platform to effectively scale, meaning existing Partners can expect an even better Business Catalyst - with performance and stability improvements across the board, be it connecting via FTP, navigating your Admin Console, or serving content on a client's site.

Adobe Creative Cloud brings amazing value to customers, including our entire suite of desktop and touch tools all for a convenient fee of just $49/mo. Membership enables customers to express their creativity across a range of devices, then easily publish and share their work via rich services such as the Digital Publishing Suite and Adobe Business Catalyst.

We're excited to play such an important role in the Adobe Creative Cloud offering, further empowering web designers like you to build beautiful, functional websites, and we look forward to having you on-board for the ride!

To ensure the highest reliability and performance levels for our services, we've scheduled a database server upgrade on our Asia Pacific datacenter. The upgrade is scheduled for Saturday, November 12 at 1:00 AM AEDT time (check local time) and will take one hour to complete.

During the upgrade, customers of our Asia Pacific datacenter (including the Business Catalyst website) will experience 3 windows of 5 minutes each of service interruption. 

Please find below the maintenance schedule and the list of affected services:

• Start of maintenance: Saturday, November 12, 1:00 AM AEDT time (check local time)
• End of maintenance: Saturday, November 12, 2:00 AM AEDT time (check local time)
• Duration: 2 hours
• Systems affected: Site front-ends, Admin console, Partner Portal, FTP services, API services
• Customer impact: 3 windows of 5 minutes each of service interruptions

We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences generated by these service interruptions.

The Business Catalyst Team

Go in the running to win a copy of the first official Business Catalyst book, hear a recap from Adobe MAX 2011 and learn more about the much anticipated Business Catalyst v3 - listen in today!

Listen to this month's podcast:

Simply click the play button below to stream the podcast via your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the podcast in .mp3 format for offline listening.

To subscribe and receive the BC Podcast each month, you can find us on the iTunes store here or by simply searching "BC Podcast" from iTunes.

In September's episode:

• A recap of BC @ MAX 2011
• Hear what Partners had to say about this year's event
  
• Catch full recordings of all our great sessions and Unconference presentations
• The future of Business Catalyst
  • Find out what to expect from Business Catalyst v3
  • Learn how you can begin using the new and improved UI and Liquid markup today
• A HTML brain-teaser - win one of three copies of the official Adobe Business Catalyst book! Simply be one of the first three commenters to answer correctly

Related Links

• Learn about the official Adobe Business Catalyst book
• Read the BC @ MAX 2011 Recap
• Find out more about Business Catalyst v3

We are planning to update our database and server infrastructure between 31 October and 2nd of November. For each datacenter, the update will take up to 6 hours and will cause two downtime sessions of up to 15 minutes each, one at the start of the update and another one at the end. During the downtime, the following Business Catalyst services will be unavailable:

• Admin Console Access
• Partner Portal
• FTP
• Dreamweaver extension
• Muse
• Business Catalyst APIs
• Partner registration
• Trial site creation

Additionally, the during each of the planned downtimes, the Business Catalyst front-end service will experience up to 1 minute of service interruption that will display a "Site under maintenance" page for site visitors.

Please find below the schedule and expected downtime hours for each of the data centers.

Monday, October 31st, Asia Pacific datacenter update:

• Duration: 6 hours and 15 minutes
• Start time: Mon, 21 Oct, 21:00 Sydney time (check local time)
• Downtime (affecting all sites): up to 15 min, starting 21:00 and ending 21:15 (check local time);
• End of maintenance: Tue, 1 Nov, 3:15 AM (check local time)
• Downtime (affecting all sites): up to 15 min starting 3:00 AM and ending 3:15 AM (check local time)

Tuesday, November 1st, North America datacenter update

• Duration: 6 hours and 15 minutes
• Start time: 1:00 AM PDT (check local time)
• Downtime (affecting all sites): up to 15 min, starting 1:00 AM and ending 10:15 AM (check local time)
• End of maintenance: 7:15 AM PDT (check local time)
• Downtime (affecting all sites): up to 15 min starting with 7:00 AM and ending 7:15 AM (check local time)

Wednesday, November 2nd, Europe datacenter update

• Duration: 4 hours and 15 minutes
• Start time: 18:00 GMT (check local time)
• Downtime (affecting all sites): up to 15 min, starting 18:00 and ending 18:15 (check local time)
• End of maintenance: 22:15 GMT (check local time)
• Downtime (affecting all sites): up to 15 min starting 22:00 and ending 22:15 (check local time)

If you have any questions, please contact Business Catalyst support team.