Smilehouse Workspace 1.4 brings new power to b-to-b e-commerce

New 1.4 version of the packaged e-commerce software Smilehouse Workspace was released on 30th of march 2005. New features are targeted especially for b-to-b e-commerce. The free Workspace Development Edition for partners and other interest groups can be downloaded from workspace.smilehouse.com.

Order history and saveable shopping cart features improve customer satisfaction. New features also enable more user friendly buying process and raise the degree of automation. Also integrations to back-end system are now more easy to implement.

Smilehouse Workspace 1.4 new features include:

Products
- Inventory management is now included by default.
- Products can be hidden based on their availability. Also a warning text can be shown if the inventory amount is getting low.
- The inventory management also supports option based inventory amounts and hiding those options that are not available.
- Product inventory amounts can be updated automatically on order creation and when the order is modified.
- The inventory management also supports updating the amounts when the order is cancelled or the ordered items are modified in the administration interface.
- Products can now be forced to be ordered only in specified amounts. For example you can configure a product to be ordered only groups of 4. Thus the customer could only order the product in the amounts of 4,8,12,16, etc.
Orders
- An order history can now be represented for registered customers. The registered customer can browse their previous orders and see related information about the order.
- The ordered items can also be restored back to the current shopping cart for making a new order.
- The order history is also a good way to keep the customer better informed with their order's processing.
- Registered customers can also save their current shopping basket for later use with the new Saveable basket feature.
- For merchants the searching of orders has been largely improved. The new search supports also searching by reference number or by ordered item's information.
Customers
- Automatic emails can now be sent when the customer's information has been modified.
- Destinations of automatic emails can be configured by using template variables. For example a notification about a new order by a customer can now be automatically sent to the customer's contact person.
- Mass removing of customers and a feature to reset the customer number sequence. It's now more easy to clean the testing customers before opening the shop to the public.
Visual
- Pictures and item codes can now be links to the product page in ProductLists and ProductPromotion WAEs.
- We have found that most users automatically click on the product picture when they want to see the product's page. Now this is finally supported. This also enables product promotions that include just the product pictures.
Other: Workspace now has support for plugins that can be used to customize the shop. The plugins have been architected so that they don't compromise the updateability of the shop. The plugins are externally packaged jar files which can be deployed easily to a running Workspace. Customizations created by plugins include for example delivery options and pricing by customer's own business rules, advanced search options not supported by default, changing the shop flow to support one time ordering for a customer. Indeed the plugins have proved to be a good solution for providing customized behavior so if some Workspace functionality isn't exactly what you need, we'll create a plugin!

For more information about 1.4 updates, check Workspace change log: http://workspace.smilehouse.com/changelog.shtml

Smilehouse Workspace is targeted for medium-sized companies, merchants and e-commerce solution builders all over the world. Workspace includes tools for building internet shops, product catalogs and extranet services without programming skills. It is the most easy-to-use packaged software for e-business.

Developer Edition for testing purposes can be downloaded from:
http://workspace.smilehouse.com/download.shtml

Online demo is also available:
http://workspace.smilehouse.com/demo.shtml

More information of Smilehouse and its products and services:

Jaakko Hallavo
Director, Business Development
Smilehouse Oy

Tel: +358 - 9 - 25 122 121
E-mail: jaakko.hallavo@smilehouse.com

About Smilehouse
Smilehouse is a software company focusing on e-business solutions. Our Smilehouse Workspace software is the most easy-to-use packaged e-commerce software for integrated e-business solutions.

Smilehouse Workspace has successfully been used in over 70 customer projects. The customers include Finnish Post, Iittala, Osborne Baltic, Genimap ant the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. All in all Smilehouse has over 600 Finnish corporate customers, whose e-business services we develop and improve.

Smilehouse was established in 1999. We employ 21 e-commerce professionals, our turnover for year 2004 was 1.3 million euros and we operate profitably.