Slide deck to accompany Tech Talk Live with Aaron Heath from Saks.com and Jeff Potts from Alfresco

1. Aaron Heath
Application Developer
Saks Fifth Avenue
January 09 2013

2. saks.com
An enhanced, personalized, online
shopping experience. You may
shop at saks.com in many ways: by
a distinct look, a specific designer
or an individual item. saks.com is
committed to providing the same
legendary service and style found
in all Saks Fifth Avenue stores.

3. Alfresco @ Saks
Alfresco provides a mechanism for managing
marketing content while preserving the use of our
underlying e-commerce system by Red Prairie for
product and customer order data - giving us
better use and control of our website content.

4. Technology Stack (Alfresco)
• Alfresco Enterprise 3.4.9
• Red Hat 6
• Oracle
• JBoss

5. We use Alfresco to
• Serve content on saks.com, as well as our
mobile sites & apps.
• Empower business users to create, edit, and
publish their content – reducing IT involvement.
• Manage non-product marketing content.

6. We use Alfresco to
• Manage Store & Event content.

7. Key Alfresco Integrations
• Blue Martini assortment & product
association picker.
A custom RESTful web service that provides the
ability to navigate the Blue Martini product
system. The response from the service is used
in a custom Alfresco Share association picker,
so Alfresco content can be associated to Blue
Martini content.

8. • Store Content for Order Management System
(OMS).
We replaced a legacy system for managing our
Stores & Events content with Alfresco.
Using Alfresco Web Scripts, we integrated
Alfresco with our OMS to provide Find in Store,
and Store Locator services.
The store and event content is created and
managed by the store manager at each store.

9. Store & Event content is also used on saks.com,
our mobile site, as well as our Iphone and Ipad
apps.

10. • Custom Web Editor
In order to help improve the content editing
experience, we’ve developed a custom editing
tool that allows in-context editing from our
pre-production website.
The editing tool uses Alfresco web scripts for
locating, creating, and editing Alfresco content
remotely.

11. Environments & Architecture
• Pre-production – Authoring Environment
2 node cluster with load balancer.
Serves content to pre-production & QA websites.
All content is created, and edited in the authoring
environment.

12. Environments & Architecture
• Staging
2 node cluster with load balancer.
Serves approved content to our staging website,
and multiple development websites.

13. Environments & Architecture
• Production
3 node cluster with load balancer.
Servers content to saks.com, mobile site, mobile
apps, and Order Management System.

14. Workflow
Once content is flagged as Ready, it’s
automatically assigned to a custom
workflow. Content can be approved
manually, or by a scheduled job. Approved
content gets published to stage or
production using the Alfresco Transfer
Service.

15. Alfresco allows us to
• Empower business users to deliver marketing
content as a service to multiple online and
mobile channels.
• Have an alternative CMS for editorial content
without changing the core backend systems for
the site.

16. What s Next With Alfresco @ Saks?
Homepage Redesign, Custom Editing Tool v2
Personalization, Integration with nginx caching, Upgrade
to version 4!, continue porting existing content areas into
Alfresco…