First 24h with Websphere Commerce Feature Pack 8

Yesterday the new feature pack 8 and fix pack 9 of Websphere Commerce where released to the world. And I started to download it as soon as I saw it being available.

Our process is to try out the new versions as fast as possible to nail down the technical challenges we will face moving forward.

As usual the server install was strait forward and easy to follow. I had a small problem enabling foundation with search. Boiled down that to be that I had forgot to supply the password for the Solr admin WAS. And then I couldn't restart the enablement because the file [WCS_Install]\instances\demo\search\commerce\properties\searchServer.properties couldn't be deleted. I renamed it and then the enablement was able to continue. This file is new in FEP8 and it seems that the install didn't handle it existing before enablement.

When it came to the install in my development environment I had recently removed all the cached information for rollback which could be the cause of this issue. But I wasn't able to install fix pack 9 or feature pack 8 without having both fix pack 8 and feature pack 7 available on disk. These should be standalone and not require incremental installation so it seemed a bit strange and added some time to my install process.

The enablement didn't require any extra handling.

Today I'll look into setting up some organization structures and administrators to check out the new Aurora B2B storefront functionality.