What’s new in Hybris 5.3


The new version of Hybris’s Omnichannel Commerce Suite comes with some interesting features for integration with SAP and additional features in its B2B Accelerator.

Some of the interesting features of this release are:

Synchronous and Asynchronous Order Management with SAP

Hybris 5.3 now supports two ways to sync orders with SAP.

Asynchronous Integration

Here the orders are captured in Hybris and is synched with SAP asynchronously via the Data Hub. This is now available via both the B2B and B2C accelerators.

  • Orders originate in Hybris and are replicated in SAP via the DataHub using the iDoc XML format. Similarly the order confirmation, and status of delivery are synched from SAP back into Hybris.
  • In the asynchronous mode the Hybris storefront continues to operate independently even without the availability the SAP system.
  • The asynchronous mode ensures fastest response times for the customer and hence is most suitable for B2C scenarios.

Synchronous Integration

In the synchronous mode the orders are directly created in the SAP. This is ideal for B2B scenarios where one would need to consider various complex pricing rules, credit limits, inventory checks which in most cases are usually defined within SAP.

  • The synchronous integration requires both the SAP and Hybris systems to be available in order to be able to complete the order fulfillment cycle.
  • This would also require that users are logged in before being able to place an order.
  • Adding a product to cart triggers the creation of a sales order in SAP.
  • The list of Shipping address of the B2B Unit are mapped to the sold-to-parties addresses in SAP.

Personalization via SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence

Hybris now supports personalized shopping experience for customers via the SAP Customer Engagement and Intelligence (SAP CEI) where CEI is available.

This integration is bi-directional where user segmentation results from SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting is used to create personalized shopping experiences while at the same time the data from Hybris Commerce Suite is fed back into the CEI system to allow for inferences of such user segmentation and targeting.

B2B Commerce RESTful APIs

The B2B Commerce Application now comes with a new set of RESTful APIs that makes it very easy to integrate third party systems with the commerce platform or build additional functionality on top of the commerce application.

The APIs currently support the following operations:

  • User authentication and role validation.
  • Displaying category, product listing and product details.
  • Adding, editing, deleting items in shopping cart.
  • Accessing the organization information of a business unit including cost centers.

B2B New User Registration

The B2B accelerator now allows for new user registration along with approval workflows and automated notifications for approvals and rejections.

Improvements in the V2 APIs of OCC

The V2 APIs of the Omnichannel Commerce Connect (OCC), while still not fully there yet has some improvements.

  • The APIs can now accept JSON encoded objects in bodies of POST.
  • Cart merge strategies wherein the items in cart of a user before and after login are automatically merged, is now available in the OCC along with the accelerators.
  • The APIs support cache control headers where parameters like maxage, s-maxage, must-revalidate etc can be set using annotations.

Improvements to the Telco Accelerator

The Telco Accelerator has an improved Subscription Management System via the Subscription Billing Gateway. It can now allow users to directly manage their subscriptions from their My Account/ Payment Details sections.

Improvements to the Core Platform

Hybris 5.3 brings along with it some nice enhancements to the core platform.

  • Hybrs 5.3 now supports rolling updates of Nodes, this ensures that the rest of the nodes continue to serve user requests through the load-balancer while each node is being updated one at a time. This ensures zero downtime.
  • Improved data modeling now reduces the number of items to sync while importing data via ImpEx.
  • It is now possible to add additional attributes and indices to existing ManagedObjectTypes.
  • It is now possible to generate DTOs by declaring it in the beans.xml.

Conspicuous by its absence in the 5.3 announcements is news on the NG-Framework and migration of any of the cockpits to the ng-framework. Other than a one line mention on fixing over 70 bugs in the backoffice cockpit, there isn’t any mention of the ng-framework. Given Hybris ambitious plans ot migrate the current cockpits or build new persona based admin sections on the ng-framework, we can surely expect some news on it in the coming releases.

For now Hybris 5.3 looks like a great step towards easier integrations with SAP and a boost to getting a stronger foothold in the B2B Commerce space.