Services for Partners

Intershop Commerce Management provides service interfaces for integrating third-party business services like Web analytics, mail, order, PIM or ERP solutions via dedicated service provider cartridges. Once a service provider cartridge is installed, the system administrator makes the new services available to the sales organizations using the central administration front end. Once propagated to the organization, the services are immediately available on all three hierarchy levels, i.e., within the organization, its dependent channels and their corresponding applications.

In order to actually use a service, the system manager creates a "service configuration" on the organization or channel level, which represents a configurable association between a service type and the given level.

When managing service configurations, the following characteristics are relevant:

• You can create multiple (different) service configurations for one service type.

• Service configurations can be shared with the dependent levels, applying several activation rules (shared and active, shared and inactive, shared and mandatory, unshared).

• In case a service configuration is shared, enabling or disabling it on the level on which it has been created directly affects the operability on all dependent levels.

Generally, this allows for implementing even complex scenarios. Think of individual search service configurations, for example, for multiple storefront applications in one channel. In this case, you would create multiple different service configurations of the same type in the channel and share them to all applications as inactive. For each application, you would then individually activate the one service configuration that is intended for the current application.

For details about managing service configurations, see Services Management.