PAB Meeting on the 28th of May

[MagdaN]

Hi everyone,

Hope you can join us for an Advisory board meeting where we will be discussing a high level roll-out plan for BC.Next

You have below the details and time of the meeting. We will be streaming the voice over Connect as well so make sure you have headsets.

Connect room: Adobe Connect Login

Time for the meeting: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20150527T2300

Detailed agenda:

1. Context – what happened since max, releases, current state
2. The plan to launch
3. What’s included in the 1.0 version
4. What’s not included in the 1.0 version
5. Goals for the remaining part of the year (this will probably have a dedicated PAB meeting when we have more details)

Looking forward to seeing you there.

The BC team

[Devon Reehl]

Holy moly Phil - really?!?!  That would suck if that's the case.  The PAB email support channel has been a lifeline for us.  BC can you chime in on this?

[Barry Alt]

PAB email support channel? That would be great, can you clue me in as I've never heard of it?

[Phil_Lockwood_-_CC]

Official reply was:

"Please try to manage this using ' Product Canonical URL: ' under the SEO metadata of the product details. (NOTE: THIS DOESN'T WORK AT ALL). Hope that helps!

Else, I would suggest to consult our Developer forums for any workaround to this, here https://forums.adobe.com/community/business_catalyst/developer_forum where a member of our helpful community may be able to assist."

I'm not asking for customizations here... just inquiring as to BC's official logic regarding default product URLs. Seems like it would either be documented or support would get an answer. I know BC is a big system and not everything can be documented and updated reliably, but this is becoming an issue. We just learned today that the "FromEmail" field on the tell-a-friend form is completely ignored. We've been hard-coding a client email in there because 50% of those submissions fail if you use a Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail address (do to reverse lookups) for the "from" address... This is another undocumented feature that has cost us days and resulted in a website who's primary function fails 50% of the time. I'm not sure if we'll just refund the entire development cost or what, but I see no other options for this workflow. It's becoming too risky to build anything around peripheral BC features as they seem to have a bunch of inconsistencies.

[cristinel@adobe]

Hi Phil,

The canonical URL for a product is determined following the below rules:

1. It is the first catalog assigned to a product, if you assign the catalogs one by one and save the product in between
2. If you assigned multiple catalogs at once, the oldest catalog (the one with the smallest ID) will be used to form the default URL
3. When importing products, the first catalog from the CATALOG column will be used to set the canonical url. Same for the product API. Also, when exporting products, the first catalog from the catalogs list must be considered as canonical.

We'll make sure the documentation is more clear on this matter.

Cristinel

[Phil_Lockwood_-_CC]

Cristinel, I really appreciate the detail. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that it's accurate. The third "Featured Product" (ID: T41CLS-TGA-00) on this page:

Trimble MCS iStore

Is using a new category in the URL ("reorder"). The ID for that category is much newer/higher than the alternate.

I've also edited the product... removed all categories, assigned the primary category (Juno T-41), returned to Details and clicked SAVE, then assigned the /reorder category. So, this product now follows your criteria (AND has the Juno T-41 category set as the canonical in the SEO section) but it's still not using the primary category in the URL.

Sorry this thread has turned into documentation for URLs, but the support ticket didn't work out.

Thanks-

[cristinel@adobe]

Hi Phil,

Actually it works as expected. If I click on the product from the homepage I get to a page with the URL: http://mcsistore.trimble.com/reorder/T41CLS-TGA-00. If you view the source, you will notice a <link rel="canonical" href="http://mcsistore.trimble.com/shop/handhelds/juno-t41/T41CLS-TGA-00" /> added to the head, which is exactly as canonical URLs are supposed to work.

A quick note here, canonical URL does not mean that all the other URLs of the product will redirect to the canonical one, but just that all the other URLs will have mark (the rel=canonical) which will instruct Google of the original content location. When you load the canonical URL directly, the link rel is no longer displayed.

Cristinel

[Markus9988]

Hi Magda and Cristinel,

I just saw the pricing update blog post. I have to ask why you didn't deliver some positive news updates first before telling AU customers the price is going to go up 25% from October 1st - especially if you have some major updates soon to be released? I don't understand your marketing or the way you communicate with partners. You are hurting the product and the brand by the way you communicate with us. Partners will head to social media and the disqus feed over the weekend and start spraying BC again because there are no announced updates but prices are going up. My gripe is that most of our clients do their own due diligence on the system and when they google BC, all these negative disgruntled partner comments appear everywhere. This is no help to the sales process now or into the future as the comments stick in Google and Linkedin. There is still a 11 reasons BC sucks post from 4 years ago that clients constantly refer. I'll say it again, please create some positive chatter for us. And I'm off to the pub....

M