Adobe Business Catalyst is an all-in-one online business communication tool. It is more than just a Content Management Solution that allows you to easily update your website, it has many integrated features including;

• A Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) that allows you to manage your customers information online
• eMail Marketing, that allows you to send out personalised email marketing newsletters to your customer database
• eCommerce capacity, to let you sell your products or accept payments online
• Integrated analytics that give you great insight into your website performance
• A Knowledgebase that has a hugh array of training and support materials
• BLOGs – you can easily create and post blog articles, just like this one
• Power WebApps, that allow you to build custom applications that make managing information easy, a typical example is a directory
• An Event Calendar, that you can post events and take bookings
• Media Management, that allows you to upload any type of document eg. PDFs and track the downloads it receives
• Secure Zones, which allow you to password restrict certain areas of your website
• Importing and Exporting data using .csv. In simple terms, you can manage your website using excel spreadsheets
• Email Management, set up your own email accounts, log into webmail remotely if required
• …and the list could go on forever – view our Business Catalyst Overview Document.

We will be launching our April release on 13 April 2011 at 1:00 AM PST (check local time). The deployment will take a few hours but we anticipate no major disruptions to the Business Catalyst service during this time. The release includes browser compatibility updates for InContext Editing, consistent sales reports and additional tags for the new version of dynamic menus.

InContext Editing
Added support for Firefox 4 Windows, Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome. We still don't support Firefox 4 on Mac, due to this Firefox/Flash bug. Dynamic Menu module version 2

Following up on your feedback on menu module version 2, we are changing the default module templates location from the root of the /ModuleTemplates/Menu folder to /ModuleTemplates/Menu/Default. Now it will be easier to duplicate templates (just copy-paste the entire Default folder), and more clear how module templates work. If you already modified the default menu templates, please download them again locally from their new "Default/" location and remove the old ones. Your changes have been preserved.

We are also introducing 4 new tags, which will avoid getting empty id and class name HTML attributes:

{tag_menuitemcssclass_withclass} - CSS class name, with class attribute e.g. class="itemClass"
{tag_menuitemcssrolloverclass_withclass} - CSS class name for rollover state, with class attribute e.g. class="itemClassRollover"
{tag_menuitemcssselectedclass_withclass} - CSS class name for selected state, with class attribute e.g. class="itemClassSelected"
{tag_menuitemidname_withid} - Item ID, with id attribute e.g. id="myId"

For example, {tag_menuitemcssclass_withclass} will output class="itemClass" if you specified "itemClass" for a menu item, and won't output anything if you didn't specify a custom class.


Ecommerce reports updates
We have made some updates on the e-commerce sales reports to make the data consistent across the 3 reports that were using it: "Site admin > Dashboard", "Reports->Create an eCommerce report-> Sales" and "Reports > Summary >Ecommerce>Sales". These reports now use the following rules to calculate and display sales:

• Calculate sales based on invoice date rather than order create date
• Consider the total order amount, regardless of the order payment status: not paid, partially paid or paid
• Orders linked to deleted customers are ignored from sales reports

In addition, we have removed the Payment type and Payment Status filter option from "Reports->Create an eCommerce report-> Sales" report Issues fixed by the April 2011 release

Fixed an issue on Customers and Web App reporting causing customer CRM fields to not be included in reports if the items was created or updated via Import/Export (bug id: 2814124)
Fixed InternetSecure payment gateway causing all transactions to fail (bug id: 2757483) Fixed an ecommerce API issue causing product updates to not work (bug id: 2831604)

Adobe Business Catalyst