Experience of Upgrade to SAP Commerce Cloud 2211Release

Staying on track of an upgrade schedule isn’t easy. Many customers lack the time, budget, or prioritization causing them to work with outdated versions of critical platforms. For businesses using SAP Commerce Cloud, this may mean sticking with a version that is past the window of Mainstream Maintenance.

Such was the case with one of our customers where they were reaching the end of Mainstream Maintenance by this quarter. Acorel initiated the discussion for the need to upgrade to a newer version of SAP Commerce Cloud. The discussion started with the question whether to upgrade to SAP Commerce Cloud 2205 or 2211 Release. Both releases were compared on timeline and budget perspective, where SAP Commerce Cloud 2211 Release looked to be a viable option as it will be relevant for at least two more quarters.

Also as stability is concerned among both releases, 2211 still remained an optimal choice. We did not foresee major challenges for upgrading to 2211 release because the customer only uses SAP Commerce Backoffice as their Product Information Management (PIM) system. After the mutual discussions and agreement on the upgrade plan and deadlines, we started with the update on a local environment and yes, we were able to launch the system with minor changes in code. The first surprising thing we noticed after the upgrade was the change in look and feel of SAP Commerce Backoffice. It seems SAP now has decided to deliver all its products with a consistent GUI.

Here is a glimpse of it :

SAP Commerce Cloud release 2211 gives you the flexibility to even manage the Backoffice experience. One of the cool new features added is to set the organizational theme that applies to all users across all devices. It allows users to select their own theme that is applied to the current login user only. In addition, Backoffice credentials, language, and appearance settings can be controlled from the User Profile menu.

After the upgrade several regression testing cycles were executed. The first cycle of which was done by the Acorel developers and then we released the new version on the Acceptance environment for our Product Owner to validate the system.

Below are a few good-to-know issues identified with the upgrade, all of which we were able to fix after analysis.

1. UI issues regarding the styling of some of the fields due to which they were less visible on some screens. We fixed them by changing the CSS styling for all those fields so that they become prominent.

Before:

After:

2. Then there was one more UI issue regarding expanding different catalogues in Product cockpit resulting in an Internal Server error, which now works fine after a simple fix.

3. One important issue discovered by the Product Owner was the missing of a reference field from the Excel used for Export-Import of Products which guides the type of values to be filled in for a particular field. This was a tricky one because it took us some time to find the root cause which was the way a cell value was calculated with the Apache POI Java library to define this Reference field. This will be fixed by SAP, and made available in the upcoming Patch so that the missing field is present again by default.

Before:

After:

With all the issues fixed and the whole new look and feel of the PIM system, we received very positive feedback from the customer. They were excited as well to adapt themselves to these changes. At the end we were able to put a better customer experience for our customer within their reach because We are Acorel.