BC Blog

Standard/Premium Partner? Register for access to our new paid Partner forums!

Mon, 14 May 2012 02:18:00 GMT

We're excited to announce the launch of a new, private venue for paid Partners to discuss Business Catalyst in confidence and stay in the loop with the latest news direct from the BC team. This is part of the on-going value offered as part of your paid partnership with Adobe Business Catalyst.

In contrast to LinkedIn or the public community forums, this forum is not visible or accessible by your clients - meaning you can have open discussions without the worry of customers reading the thread. We also benefit from the new, intuitive user interface of the redesigned forums, which we hope everyone enjoys.

If you're a Standard or Premium Partner, we highly recommend you sign up for access to the forum. Simply fill out the form at: https://adobeformscentral.com/?f=wjpWUORXEsvNO7jzgUr9Cw, and we'll grant you access as soon as possible. Once you have access, you can browse and participate in the discussions at: http://forums.adobe.com/community/business_catalyst/partner_forum

Looking forward to seeing you on the new private forum,
Jackson.

Dublin Data Center Power Upgrade from May 12, at 7:00pm IST to May 13, at 8:00am IST

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:14:00 GMT

Business Catalyst European Union Data Center will undergo electrical maintenance on Saturday, May 12, from 7:00pm IST to Sunday, May 13, at 8:00am IST.

Even though there are no other expected interruptions, electrical maintenance always carries an increased risk for service interruption.
If problems do arise at any time during the weekend, BC will have staff on-site to address them and ensure that all systems are brought back online as soon as possible.

FedEx Scheduled Maintenance - May 26 and June 9

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:20:00 GMT

Please be advised that the FedEx production environments will undergo a planned system update on May 26 and on June 9, which will result into up to 6 hours of downtime for each day. During the downtime, the FedEx Rating, Shipping, Tracking and Pickup services will be unable to process transactions for all customers.

Start Date and Time	End Date and Time	Duration	Functionality Affected
Saturday, May 26, 2012 9 p.m. CT	Sunday, May 27, 2012 1 a.m. CT	4 hours	Rating Shipping Tracking Pickup
Saturday, June 9, 2012 9 p.m. CT	Saturday, June 9, 2012 11 p.m. CT	2 hours	Rating Shipping
Saturday, June 9, 2012 9 p.m. CT	Sunday, June 10, 2012 3 a.m. CT	6 hours	Tracking Pickup

Please notify your customers about the scheduled maintenance.

Listen to Episode 18 of the BC Podcast!

Sat, 05 May 2012 03:48:00 GMT

Meet BC Partner Richard Harbutt, hear the latest on BC's inclusion in Adobe's Creative Cloud, get the scoop on our upcoming San Francisco and Sydney Partner events, and of course listen out for a fresh HTML quiz question in Episode 17 of the BC podcast!

Listen to this month's podcast:

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

player

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 April/May's Episode :

Meet Partner Richard Harbutt:

Hear the backstory of this seasoned web veteran
Learn how he's used PHP to manipulate and work with the BC product feed XML
Read the full article on the BC Evangelist blog >>

BC + Creative Cloud, what does it mean?
- A new and streamlined website
- Improved platform infrastructure and site performance
- Updated BC Blog layout
Book your spot at our upcoming San Francisco and Sydney Partner events:
- Learn about our San Francisco event
- Learn about our Sydney event
Our monthly quiz - 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!

May release - New partner support, Infrastructure updates, Site templates and bug fixes

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:34:00 GMT

We are announcing a new Business Catalyst release, scheduled to go live on Thursday, May 3rd. With this release, we are continuing our investments in system performance and stability by increasing our web servers capacity, enabling HTTP acceleration to provide faster site loading times, and improving the site creation speed by using pre-generated sites.

On the product side, we have completely revamped our partner support workflow taking advantage of the Adobe support infrastructure and tools, enhanced the site templates workflow for partners, and included lots of bug fixes and improvements. Read through the following sections to get detailed information about this release:

Partner support
Infrastructure updates
Features and enhancements
Issues fixed by this release
What's next

You can jump to the corresponding section by clicking the above links.

Partner support

Updated Help & Support partner experience

Following Adobe ID support, we have upgraded BC support tools (cases, chat, documentation) with standard Adobe tools. As a partner, you can now benefit from the same support tools as the rest of Adobe Creative Suite, and can track your support cases with Adobe BC, Dreamweaver, Muse or Photoshop in a single place.

Partners with more than 100 paid sites will get 2nd level chat support, which includes a higher priority, by default. If you have more than 100 paid sites, but spread across different Partner Portals, please ask support to enable 2nd level chat for you.

Support experience for your Small Business owner clients can now be owned by partners (see below).

Custom Help & Support URL for your clients

As a partner, you are probably already offering various additional services to your clients besides building & maintaining their BC site. Support, tailored specifically to your client needs, is usually one of these value-added services. We are now enabling you to take your Support service to the next level. In Partner Portal Settings, you have the option to set a custom URL for what will open when your client clicks on Help & Support inside Admin Console:

If you have multiple partner accounts, for different verticals, you can specify a Support URL for each of these.

The default Support experience provided by BC for your clients will be updated in a few releases to be similar to the partner support experience. This includes BC-branded support cases and documentation. If you'd like to keep a white-label experience for your customers, please set your own Help & Support URL in Partner Portal.

For more details please read the Improved support workflow and new forums announcement on our blog.

Infrastructure updates

Between our April release and the following infrastructure updates have been enabled

Limited trial sites for free partners – starting with our May release, the number of trial sites a Free Partner can have will be limited to 100. Once the limit is reached, Free Partners that need to create a new trial site have the options to upgrade to a higher partner plan, upgrade some of the trial sites to paid or delete unused/expired trials.
Automatic trial expiry extension - with this release, trial site expiry date will be automatically extended with 30 days every time an admin user logs in the system through the admin interface or through FTP.
Installed additional hardware - we have installed additional web servers on all our data centers, that translate into an increase of the existing capacity with over 70%.
Updated DNS infrastructure - we have improved the DNS resolution for email delivery so that we can increase the rate at which we're sending the system operational emails
HTTP acceleration – all sites static assets are served from a new cache engine (images, CSS and JavaScript files, together with improved headers that should allow the browser to cache them better for a browsing session). This update has been turned on along with our April release, and has made all the BC sites load faster on first and on subsequent loads.
Accelerated site/partner creation – we've changed the way new sites are created for faster speed, pre-creating them and reusing pre-created sites when needed, and have also improved the creation process for new partners, minimizing the impact of new CCM customers on the existing datacenters.
Adobe ID for partners - in order to support an integrating experience between the various Adobe tools a partner may use (Dreamweaver, Muse, Support forums) we have added Adobe ID support for Business Catalyst partner accounts. Starting April 19, partners are asked to merge their current Business Catalyst account with their Adobe ID accounts. For more details about the transition process and FAQ please read the Introducing Adobe ID blog post.
Updated Terms of Use - Along with several other changes in our processes in the past few months, we also revamped our Terms of Use and the signature process by requesting every admin user to sign a TOU. We have completed the rollout for partners, and we might be pushing an updated partner Terms of Use version within the following weeks. For more details and questions about this change, read the New Terms of Use for Business Catalyst blog post.

Features and enhancements

Site templates

To support the increasing number of partners building, sharing or reusing templates to create new sites, we're extending our site templates support from our partner portal with a new template type and improved management support. The update is going to enable partners to mark sites as templates and choose between making them available in Online Business Builder and keeping them private in their partner portal. A template site will not expire and has the same limits as any other trial site.

Based on your partner level, you can create private or public templates using the Site Details screen or the Tools>My Site Template section from your Partner Portal. Standard partners can only create private templates, while Free Partners can only view site templates that have been transferred to their accounts by other partners.

The number of templates a partner will have will be limited and will vary based on partner level: free partners can store up to 5 templates in their partner portal, standard partners have up to 100 site templates while Premium Partners might have up to 200 templates. Paid sites marked as templates are not counted against these limits.

Business Catalyst Partner fixes

While we are really focused on making the Business Catalyst integration into Creative Cloud a smashing success, we are slowly resuming our efforts to deliver fixes that have been requested by our partners. This release includes the following partner fixes:

Improved product custom fields - we have increased the maximum number of characters for product custom fields to 1024 (previous limit was 256); this gives partners and customers additional space to use when working with products
Improved Secure Zone subscribers list - we have added the customer email address in the Secure Zone Subscribers list to enable partners better filter and manage customers
Better experience when exporting data - to prevent customer confusion when exporting data from Mac computers, we have removed the export to excel option and exporting in CSV format by default.

Social plugins integration updates

Starting with our May release, we are updating the social plugins support to require users to get the plugin code from the third party provider and saving into his Business Catalyst website. The module tags and configuration will remain unchanged, but will render an empty tag until the partner or site owner will update the module template to include the corresponding module code snippet from the third party platform provider.

For more information about how you can enable the Social Plugins on a Business Catalyst websites, read the Social Media: Integrating Facebook and Twitter knowledge base article.

Other changes

Updated weekly emails - Starting with our May release, the information in the site weekly emails has been filtered based on the site's plan. For example, webBasics site reports will no longer include the sales report.
Localization - we improved and increased the coverage of the admin interface translations into German, French and Japanese
Site Settings -> Ignored IP addresses has been relocated under Reports -> Visitors -> More.
BC-Dreamweaver integration performance improvements
Development Dashboard has been removed, as it didn't provide a clear useful, ongoing benefit. The information present in the development dashboard has been integrated into our new Help & Support section.
Payment gateway settings - for more privacy and data protection, we have updated the Payment Gateway configuration screens to obfuscate the sensitive login information. Fields that have been obfuscated are now requiring confirmation.
Report abuse badge on trial sites - for compliance reasons, a "Report Abuse" link has been added to the front-end of all trial sites of free partners that don't have any paid sites. When they click the Report Abuse link, site visitors are redirected to a form submission page on businesscatalyst.com site.
Verify domain ownership - a user trying to add a subdomain of an existing domain hosted on Business Catalyst will be required to provide proof of ownership by defining a TXT record on the site hosting the main domain.

Issues fixed by our May release

Issues 3051303, 3168786 - Workflow notifications - Fixed a problem preventing workflow notifications emails from being sent (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Issue 3164074 - Fixed a bug causing the lightbox gallery created from Muse to be displayed behind page elements
Issue 3162810 - Fixed a bug in rendering engine to prevent content placed between body and head tags being incorrectly moved inside the body tag
Issue 3166610 - Fixed a broken link to Partner Portal in Internet Explorer
Issue 3175003 - Fixed an issue that caused an incorrect price display for the Year One-Off Setup Fee when upgrading a site from Admin using CB
Issue 2567278 - Fixed a bug causing site replication to ignore product attributes
Issue 2947989 - CRM passwords are now case sensitive
Issue 2723731 - Removed CSS files from the head section of the Layouts files, when downloaded and opened in Dreamweaver, via the BC extension

Business Catalyst new admin interface updates

Added "Save and Add New" button in Web App Item Add & Edit screens (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Updated Quick Actions menus to add more actions (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Fixed an issue causing Recent items menu to display deleted items (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Fixed a display issue on File Manager making top buttons unreachable (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Fixed the scrollbars in Email Marketing>Campaign>Stats>Bounced Emails reports (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Fixed an issue causing Recent items menu to brake after selecting the current page from the Recent Items menu (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Replaced the Success notification displayed when selecting Users or Permissions tabs from User Roles with an Warning
Change the action label displayed in User Roles list from View to Edit to match the list pattern from Admin Users
Fixed a missing file JavaScript error occurring when trying to open image manager from product details-> Attributes -> options
Moved System Emails section from Site Setting to Site Manager (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Updated Domain Management interfaces to close the modal window and refresh the domain list after successfully adding a domain
Fixed an issue preventing the Hyperlink Manager to function properly (see get satisfaction forum discussion)
Updated the confirmation message received after copying a page to match the new workflow and button names
Fixed an issue causing the current screen or section to not be highlighted in the menu
Updated styling on the new dashboard, user management and email accounts interfaces
Updated dashboard reports filters and chart display; made the chart and the filter use the site time zone
Fixed an issue preventing users from inviting new admin users or create new email accounts on Internet Explorer 8
Fixed an issue preventing users from deleting Email Accounts or Admin Users in Internet Explorer 8
Fixed some issues preventing password recovery email from being sent
Removed the alert message displayed when the user or email account limit has been reached
Added localization for the simplified dashboard
Fixed display issues for site limits, domains and user list in the simplified dashboard
Added Custom reports for webBasics plan
Fixed a bug generating a "500:Collection error" on the simplified dashboard when user did not had View users permission
Added TOU checkbox in the email account setup screen
Updated Site Preview link in the dashboard to load the default domain
Fixed an issue in the new File Manager forcing a user to press Undo twice in order to see the change take effect if the code that was previously formatted contained any <"tag" with more than 2 lines
Fixed an issue causing the File Manager editor toolbar to incorrectly render if page URL path is longer than certain value; starting with this release, the site URL is trimmed
Fixed an issue causing the invite users to be displayed as [object Object] in dashboard and admin user list
Fixed a bug in the new admin causing the interface to become unresponsive when using the browser Back button
Fixed an issue in the new File Manager causing "Save Draft" button to publish the default page template instead of creating a draft version
Fixed a broken invite link issue in the Email Account invite email
Updated loading indicators in File Manager and Email Accounts screens

Release FAQ

For more specific questions and answers about this release, read the May release FAQ on the Business Catalyst community forums.

What's next

The first item on the what's next list might not be news for many of you, but it's definitely one of the most important milestones this year. The Creative Cloud launch is just around the corner, and Business Catalyst is playing an important role in that, as the publishing platform for Adobe® Muse and Dreamweaver. This launch will capture all our attention within the next weeks as we want it to be our best ever.

We'll start our next development cycle on May 15th, while the next Business Catalyst release is going to be pushed live in mid June. That being said, the following items are already on our launch plan for the next release and a few more will join the list. Please expect an update on our 2012 plans around mid May.

HTTP throttling – all page load and API calls to BC will be protected against attacks, this might trigger problems for API heavy sites. We are looking into enabling this update along with our June release, and will help make sure that a reasonable number of requests will be accepted from the same computer per minute.
Automatic site deletion - Starting with the June release, we are going to start automatically delete expired trial sites and canceled sites. Customers will be notified twice before we are going to proceed with deleting the sites.

Thank you,

Cristinel Anastasoaie
Adobe Business Catalyst Product Manager

Win a free year of Creative Cloud membership by attending San Francisco and Sydney Partner Events!

Wed, 02 May 2012 19:25:00 GMT

We're excited to announce that we'll be giving away one full year of Adobe Creative Cloud membership at each of our upcoming San Francisco and Sydney Partner events!

To go in the draw, simply attend our San Francisco or Sydney events. One lucky attendee at each will be selected at random and win the prize of a 1 year Creative Cloud membership.

Attend our San Francisco Partner Event - 31 May 2012
Learn more and book your spot >>

Attend our Sydney Partner Event - 4 June 2012
Learn more and book your spot >>

We look forward to seeing everyone at the events!
Jackson.

San Francisco BC Partner Evening Event: Book Your Spot!

Wed, 02 May 2012 13:04:00 GMT

Update: Attend the SF event to go in the running to win a free year of Creative Cloud membership! Learn more >>

We're hosting an official evening event for all Business Catalyst Partners, in our San Francisco Adobe office.

The Adobe-sponsored evening event is free for everyone to attend and will run between 5:00-9:00PM PDT on the 31st May, 2012.

To attend, simply book your spot below. We ask that each staff member from your team who'll be attending fill out the form, so we can best cater and manage the event. Once registered, we'll send you through location details and keep you updated.

We'll have special guests Jason Tinnin from Simpleflame, and Brent Weaver from BC Gurus from the US presenting, plus BC Evangelist Adam Broadway showcasing some leading edge Partner and client case studies.

31 May, 2012 Schedule:

Time	Presenter(s)	Topic
17:00		Arrive and setup
17:30	Adam Broadway	Intro and overview of BC
17:45	Brent Weaver	Positioning and selling your Business Catalyst services
18:30		Break
18:45	Jason Tinnin	Taking Business Catalyst to the next level - case studies and examples
19:30		Break
20:00	Adam Broadway	Showcase of Partners / Client case studies and the vertical approach
20:30		Q&A and closing
21:00		End of day

Official Australian BC Partner Conference: Book Your Spot!

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:50:00 GMT

[Updated 30/04/12: Full details of Day 2 social event announced - read more and register at: http://www.prettypollution.com.au/business-catalyst-partner-event]

We're hosting the first official Australian BC Partner conference on 4th June 2012 in Sydney, with a full day of Partner presentations lined up. If you weren't able to make it across to Adobe MAX last year, don't miss out on this great opportunity!

The Adobe-sponsored full day event is free to attend for all Partners and is bound to be a great community building event.

We'll have special guests Jason Tinnin and Cesar Keller from Simpleflame, plus Brent Weaver from BC Gurus from the US presenting, who in co-operation with leading Australian Partners Brett Stockley from Pretty Pollution and Brendon O'Sullivan from Bosweb Systems will also be organizing a full 2nd day of community building activities.

4 June, 2012 (Day 1) Schedule:

Time	Presenter(s)	Topic
8:30	Jackson Palmer	Welcome and schedule outline
9:00	Liam Dilley	Getting started with Liquid markup
9:45	Jason Tinnin	Taking Business Catalyst to the next level - case studies and examples
10:30		Morning tea break
10:45	Brett Stockley + Matt O'Malley	Best practices with Business Catalyst
11:30	Paul Ridoutt	Information architecture design
12:15	Jeff Perlman	Application smorgasbord - integrate with 30 plus applications via a single portal
13:00		Lunch break
13:45	Mark Barrett	Going up the food chain - using sales strategies and internal systems to increase projects value and lock in on-going revenue
14:30	Brent Weaver	Positioning and selling your Business Catalyst services
15:15	Declan Reynolds	Effectively outsourcing your Business Catalyst projects
16:00	Tim Gentle	Expand your reach - setting up an educated BC sales channel
16:45	Brendon O'Sullivan	Customer care and support best practices
17:30	Jackson Palmer	Thanks and closing
17:45		End of day

5 June, 2012 (Day 2) Schedule:

Join your fellow Partners for a day of fun and networking. We'll have barefoot lawn bowling and open-mic presentations throughout the day at the Balmain Bowling Club, then an after party not-to-be-missed at the CBD Hotel, Sydney.

A big thanks to our Master Partners, Simpleflame, BC Gurus, Pretty Pollution and Bosweb Systems for organizing and sponsoring Day 2. It's free to attend and bound to be a great day of community building.

Time	Presenter(s)	Topic
11:00AM - 5:00PM	Balmain Bowling Club	Barefoot bowling, networking, open mic, and a sausage sizzle
6:00PM - 9:30PM	CBD Hotel, Sydney	Partner after-party, fully catered, buy your own drinks

Townhall meeting recordings

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:24:00 GMT

Hi everybody,

Thank you for attending yesterday's sessions. We have recorded both sessions and you can find the links below, in case you were not able to attend. Our agenda included:

Introduction to Creative Cloud
New website at www.adobe.com/go/businesscatalyst
New support workflows
Dreamweaver CS 6 and Business Catalyst integration (live demo)
Q&A

For the recordings please see below:

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments they are welcomed.

businesscatalyst.com has a new home!

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 04:24:00 GMT

We're happy to announce that as part of Business Catalyst's integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, businesscatalyst.com will have a new home at adobe.com.

For all the details regarding the Creative Cloud, and the latest Business Catalyst information (feature tour, pricing etc.), please visit our new site at: http://adobe.com/go/businesscatalyst

We're really excited to be part of the Creative Cloud, and are sure you'll love our upcoming deeper integration with Adobe tools such as Dreamweaver and Muse. We thank you for your support and understanding during this migration, and hope you enjoy the new website. It highlights the exciting future ahead for Business Catalyst, and Adobe's investment in the platform.

We'll be placing notifications regarding the move across all businesscatalyst.com pages, and will continue to run this website up until May 7th, when we'll begin automatically redirecting visitors to the new adobe.com pages.

Some sections of the current businesscatalyst.com website will continue to operate past May 7th, including this blog, our contact form and various support pages that have not yet been migrated. You may notice that the new adobe.com site doesn't include everything we currently have on businesscatalyst.com - but it's a foundation that we'll be adding to in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for fresh customer showcases, an updated Partner pricing matrix, and more!

For the forseeable future, your trial/temporary sites will continue to be created with a [yoursite].businesscatalyst.com sub-domain and you'll still receive email notificatons from @businesscatalyst.com addresses.

If you have any questions, post them in the comment below and I'll be sure to get back to you.

Introducing Adobe ID

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:56:00 GMT

Update 25/04/12: Adobe ID merging workflow will be re-enabled today, and you'll be able to update your Business Catalyst partner account to use an Adobe ID. Read the Adobe ID merge FAQ here: http://forums.adobe.com/docs/DOC-1993

Update 23/04/12: After two days of Adobe ID merge, in order to improve on the process and to correct some issues that arose, we decided to put a hold to the Adobe ID merge process for 48 hours. We target to resume the merge again on Wednesday, 25/04/12. Existing accounts that have already been merged will continue to function properly.

Update 23/04/12: Please note that your login email address will change to your Adobe ID email address across all BC sites. If you'd like to keep your current login email address, please create a separate Adobe ID for it and then merge this with a newly created Adobe ID."

Hi everybody,

Starting with today, you can update your Business Catalyst account to use an Adobe ID, your Adobe.com account. This means one less login to remember and you can sign in with the same username and password you use to sign in to other Adobe products.

If you don’t yet have an Adobe ID, creating one takes only a few seconds, and doing so will pave the way for you to take advantage of Adobe’s Creative Cloud service launching this spring. Sign in to update your account now.

Why merge your account with your Adobe ID?

By having one single account across all your Adobe products, it would allow you to better manage and maintain your product portfolio. One single account will mean less credentials to remember, as well as improved access to support and a continuous relationship with Adobe. You will be able to see all your cases, no matter what Adobe product they belong to, and move seamlessly between various products.

The unique ID will work across all Adobe products and services such as:

The new Creative Cloud to be released soon
Acrobat.com
Typekit
Muse
BrowserLab
Photoshop.com
Adobe.com

Step by step

1. When logging in for the first time in your admin section, you will be prompted to merge your Adobe ID with your Business Catalyst account. If you do not have an Adobe ID, this will be the place to create one.

2. Once you create or enter an Adobe ID you will be signed in with the new credentials to your Business Catalyst account.

Please remember:

If your Adobe ID e-mail address is different from your Business Catalyst address, this will be your new credential to login. Your Business Catalyst e-mail address will no longer work
Once you make the merge this is a non-reversible process. You will no longer be able to go back to your old credentials.
If you use our webmail (the OpenSRS webmail), you’ll need to enter your old credentials to access the emails and not your new Adobe ID login
For sites defined in Dreamweaver, you’ll need to update the FTP credentials for each site to use the new Adobe ID credentials
For API calls you will need to update the credentials to use the new Adobe ID

Help and support

For more information and troubleshooting guides, read the Business Catalyst Adobe IDs FAQ

New Terms of Use for Business Catalyst

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:04:00 GMT

Along with several other changes in our processes over the past few months, we've also revamped our Terms of Use and signature process. Up until today our Terms of use were signed per website, but starting this release we will require a signature from every user attached to each website.

The next time you login to your Business Catalyst account you will be prompted to sign the new Terms of Use agreement. The roll-out process will be gradual, with only partners prompted to sign initially. The second step will require business owners to sign the agreement, while the third step will require white-labeled business owners to agree to the new Terms of Use.

Whitelabel Terms of Use workflow

If you have a white-label website please note that the workflow for terms of use changes slightly. Up until today you had an interface where you would provide a link to your text for the Terms of Use. Starting with this release you have a an interface that allows you to copy paste your entire text for the Terms of Use. You can see below how that would look like:

Once you have filled in your text for the terms of use, this is what your white-label customer will be seeing when prompted to sign the new agreement:

At the very bottom of the page the customer will be informed that by agreeing to your terms of use, they are also subject to the Adobe Terms of use.

Keep an eye on the blog for further announcements comming in the following weeks.

The Business Catalyst team.

April release - Infrastructure updates, new business dashboard and lots of bug fixes (updated)

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:12:00 GMT

Update: Thursday, 19 April 2012, 4:00 AM PST - With this release, the system folders are filtered only on Filesystem APIs and File Manager Alpha. System wide FTP filtering will be present in a future release.

Update: Wednesday, 18 April 2012, 2:00 AM PST - The release date has been moved to Thursday, April 19th to accommodate additional validation for infrastructure updates. We apologize for the inconveniences caused by this delay.

We are announcing a new Business Catalyst release, scheduled to go live on Wednesday, April 18th. Following the challenges we faced with R174, we've taken a much closer look at our quality processes and we're doubling down on testing to reduce any potential bugs this release - this leads to less features, but we know after consulting many partners that quality and stability are what's most important.

This release introduces a series of updates that are going to be gradually rolled out in April, whose goal is to take the Business Catalyst infrastructure and platform to the next level in terms of performance and reliability. Additionally, we are continuously improving our new admin interface to bring it closer to a full scale release. Read through the following sections to get detailed information about this release:

Infrastructure updates
Features and enhancements
Issues fixed by this release
Support updates

You can jump to the corresponding section by clicking the above links.

Infrastructure updates

CDN – the Content Delivery Network improves initial page load for AdminConsole, by serving files from very fast servers that are close to the computer loading the Admin Console. The CDN support has been turned on April 7 for sites delivered from our European data center and on April 9 for sites delivered from our APAC and North America data centers.

Features and enhancements

New dashboard for webBasics and webBasics+ plans

With this release, we are going to replace the business dashboard for webBasics and webBasics+ sites with a new simplified version that gets rid of all the unused graphs and information that cluttered the interface, while being built on the new API based UI framework. To streamline the site publishing workflow, the new dashboard exposes features likes site upgrade, invite new users and add domains.

The redesigned dashboard will be available only from the new Business Catalyst admin user interface (V3).

System folders filtered on FTP according to site plan (updated)

Prior to this release, BC system folders such as /Layouts had the same contents on all plans, even though Shop layouts weren't used on webMarketing plan for example. In order to reduce unnecessary traffic and remove noise, system folders will be accessible over FTP only if the feature is available in current site plan.

Note: the FTP filtering functionality is only available on Filesystem APIs and File Manager Alpha. System wide FTP filtering will be present in a future release.

Here is the mapping between folders and plans:

Folder	Minimum plan
/_System/Campaigns	webMarketing
/ModuleTemplates/Menus	webBasics+
/ModuleTemplates/SocialMedia	webBasics+
/Layouts/Affiliate	webCommerce
/Layouts/Announcement	webMarketing
/Layouts/Blog	webMarketing
/Layouts/Booking	webCommerce
/Layouts/Comments	webMarketing
/Layouts/CustomerCases	webMarketing
/Layouts/CustomerOrders	webCommerce
/Layouts/Faq	webMarketing
/Layouts/Favorite	webMarketing
/Layouts/Forum	webMarketing
/Layouts/Literature	webMarketing
/Layouts/OnlineShop	webCommerce
/Layouts/OutboundEmails	webMarketing
/Layouts/Shipping	webCommerce
/Layouts/SystemMessages	webMarketing (404 and submitted form confirmation pages are customizable only via Admin Console in webBasics)
/Layouts/SiteSearch	webMarketing
/Layouts/TellAFriend	all plans, only for sites created until 2012-03-25. Hidden for all plans for sites created after ~
/Layouts/WebApps	webCommerce

Send Secure Zone Login Details email switch

In this release, we've added a new parameter called SWE that decides whether or not the Secure Zone Login Details email will be sent when the form is submitted. By default, this new parameter is not included in the query string and its set to "True" (email will be sent). Partners that want to stop this email from being sent should add "&SWE=False" in the query string when creating a secure zone registration form.

The already existing parameter named "SAR", that decides whether the WebForm Submission Confirmation AND Secure Zone Login Details emails are sent remains unchanged. For the Secure Zone Login Details email specifically, if any of these parameters is set to "False", the email will not be sent.

Issues fixed in the April release

Web forms: submitted form confirmation page is now available for webBasics and webBasics+ plans in System Pages
Web forms: web form builder username and password fields are now hidden for webBasics and webBasics+
System Pages - "Page content empty" and "No start pages" custom error pages have been removed. Existing customization, if any, will continue to work. These pages are never shown for production sites, as these have proper start pages set.
Updated My Details screen to add support for Adobe ID accounts management
Issue 3150655 - Fixed an issue casing newsletter credits to not be updated for additional newsletter overage packages;
Issue 3149150 - Added the "File attachments" tab in Web Form builder for sites under the webMarketing plan
Issue 3128467 - Fixed a bug causing the delete products using Import feature to only delete the first product from the import file
Issue 3148553 - Fixed a bug preventing users to login if the secure zone registration form included a redirect using PageID parameter

Business Catalyst V3 updates

New improved HTTP headers – to improve the Admin/ loading time (not just the first time loading) we are improving the HTTP headers to use more browser level caching and we're adding GZIP compression to all suitable files.
Fixed a problem causing web apps user interface to hang when adding a new web app field (get satisfaction forum report)
Fixed a bug in web app setting that was blocking users from deleting a web app field if it had web app items using it
Workflow approval process for pages and templates is now available in V3 UI (see get satisfaction report)
Fixed a modal dialog resize problem that was blocking the users view of the window action bar, usually displayed at the button of the screen (see get satisfaction forum post)
Fixed a bug blocking user from inserting an image from Image Properties screen (see get satisfaction forum post)
Fixed many small various issues with File Manager Alpha version (thanks for your feedback!)
Fixed bug causing " Reset to Default" to stop working for Tasks filters
Added export button for Pages reports (Reports>Website Content>Pages) (see get satisfaction report)
Minor style updates for admin ribbon, breadcrumbs and links
Fixed a bug causing Save Draft to not update the web page status to "working copy"
Fixed the Preview web page functionality for web page working copies
Fixed a bug in web forms causing the web form builder to generate multiple items when creating custom form fields of type List (see get satisfaction report)
Fixed a admin menu bug that was placing the user under CRM>Customer menu although the current page was CRM>Search
Added a confirmation message when a case is blacklisted & deleted
Updated ribbon behavior to use ellipsis for displaying long customer names to prevent layout degradation
Minor tweaks to the links in the admin ribbon
Updated the bounced email reports screen to fix scroll
Fixed a minor issue that was causing an incorrect list name to be displayed after an item (product, campaign, customer, etc) was deleted
Fixed a bug preventing the "Form Properties" window from closing when user pressed the "Back" button while the pop-up is displayed

Support changes

New support/chat/forums in place – with this release, we have updated the Business Catalyst partner support workflows and tools. This change aims to improve the way we support our partners by offering a better support workflow, new forums and chat based on the Adobe support infrastructure. In addition, following the release, partners will be able choose between letting business owners access the Business Catalyst documentation or access a custom documentation. For more details, read the Improved support workflows and new forums blog post.

Thank you,

Cristinel Anastasoaie
Adobe Business Catalyst Product Manager

Improved support workflows and new forums

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:38:00 GMT

Hi everybody,

Starting this week, we're moving to a new forum tool to better cater to our growing community. Thanks to your commitment to the product, we have reached a volume of posts and community size on our forums which is equivalent to some of the largest products at Adobe. We needed a forum solution that could be integrated with overall Adobe forums and allow for easier integration with other online resources from different Adobe tools .

We want to be able to present Business Catalyst to other users as well, and to allow them to comment on our forums using their Adobe ID credentials.

As such, starting this week we are moving to a new forum solution, and in the next month we will have new support workflows in place.

The new forums

Adobe Forums has features that will help us build even stronger community, including personal messaging, profile pages for all users, a paid partner-only forum, better search, easier browsing, categorization and tags ,and many others. Once you log in, your new homepage will allow you to see your bookmarks, your discussions or documents, ideas and polls and much more at a glance.
.

New support workflows

The new integration with Adobe ID also allows us to integrate our support workflows with the overall Adobe standards. This means that beginning in May, we will be using new tools for chat and cases, that will allow us to increase our quality of service and offer better advice to partners and end customers.

The new support systems will allow us to differentiate between partners and business owners, and route cases to the appropriate level of support based on the nature of the case and the user that submitted the case. This way, in-depth technical questions from partners who have built many sites can be routed directly to Level 2 support, providing better service, while freeing Level 1 agents to respond to other run-of-the-mill queries in a more timely fashion.

Our support page for business owners will be coming a bit later on (in the June/July timeframe) and will contain documentation directly related to their role and the most common issues they might encounter. Of course, Premium partners will retain the option to hide this functionality from their customers, and continue to offer support through their own channels.

One of the biggest benefits of this upgrade is that a chat can be instantly turned into a support case, should it need to be escalated. This means that you no longer need to submit the same information twice to the support team.

Our support portal will allow you to see, update or reopen any of your Adobe cases (whether related to Business Catalyst, Dreamweaver or other Adobe products).

We hope that all these changes will provide a much better experience for you and your team.

The Business Catalyst Team

Scheduled downtime in Sydney datacenter

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:59:00 GMT

Hi everybody,

Last Saturday, March 31st, the APAC data center encountered a database node failure causing a number of sites not to load properly. We did a failover to a backup server to maintain operations.

Tomorrow, our engineering team will restore the original database server connection.

The maintenance will cause downtime outside of business hours, at 12AM Sydney time, or 7AM PST, and is expected to last no more than 10 minutes for the subset of websites affected.

Thank you,

The Business Catalyst team.

BC Blog

Standard/Premium Partner? Register for access to our new paid Partner forums!

Dublin Data Center Power Upgrade from May 12, at 7:00pm IST to May 13, at 8:00am IST

FedEx Scheduled Maintenance - May 26 and June 9

Listen to Episode 18 of the BC Podcast!

Listen to this month's podcast:

In April/May's Episode :

May release - New partner support, Infrastructure updates, Site templates and bug fixes

Partner support

Infrastructure updates

Features and enhancements

Issues fixed by our May release

Release FAQ

What's next

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San Francisco BC Partner Evening Event: Book Your Spot!

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Presenter(s)

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Official Australian BC Partner Conference: Book Your Spot!

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Townhall meeting recordings

businesscatalyst.com has a new home!

Introducing Adobe ID

Why merge your account with your Adobe ID?

Step by step

Help and support

New Terms of Use for Business Catalyst

Whitelabel Terms of Use workflow

April release - Infrastructure updates, new business dashboard and lots of bug fixes (updated)

Infrastructure updates

Features and enhancements

Issues fixed in the April release

Business Catalyst V3 updates

Support changes

Improved support workflows and new forums

The new forums

New support workflows

Scheduled downtime in Sydney datacenter