Business Catalyst Blog

Hi everybody,

Thank you for attending yesterday's sessions. We have recorded both sessions and you can find the links below, in case you were not able to attend. Our agenda included:

• Introduction to Creative Cloud
• New website at www.adobe.com/go/businesscatalyst
• New support workflows
• Dreamweaver CS 6 and Business Catalyst integration (live demo)
• Q&A

For the recordings please see below:

•  Australia meeting
•  EU/US meeting

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments they are welcomed.

We're happy to announce that as part of Business Catalyst's integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, businesscatalyst.com will have a new home at adobe.com.

For all the details regarding the Creative Cloud, and the latest Business Catalyst information (feature tour, pricing etc.), please visit our new site at: http://adobe.com/go/businesscatalyst

We're really excited to be part of the Creative Cloud, and are sure you'll love our upcoming deeper integration with Adobe tools such as Dreamweaver and Muse. We thank you for your support and understanding during this migration, and hope you enjoy the new website. It highlights the exciting future ahead for Business Catalyst, and Adobe's investment in the platform.

We'll be placing notifications regarding the move across all businesscatalyst.com pages, and will continue to run this website up until May 7th, when we'll begin automatically redirecting visitors to the new adobe.com pages.

Some sections of the current businesscatalyst.com website will continue to operate past May 7th, including this blog, our contact form and various support pages that have not yet been migrated. You may notice that the new adobe.com site doesn't include everything we currently have on businesscatalyst.com - but it's a foundation that we'll be adding to in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for fresh customer showcases, an updated Partner pricing matrix, and more!

For the forseeable future, your trial/temporary sites will continue to be created with a [yoursite].businesscatalyst.com sub-domain and you'll still receive email notificatons from @businesscatalyst.com addresses.

If you have any questions, post them in the comment below and I'll be sure to get back to you.

Update 25/04/12: Adobe ID merging workflow will be re-enabled today, and you'll be able to update your Business Catalyst partner account to use an Adobe ID. Read the Adobe ID merge FAQ here: http://forums.adobe.com/docs/DOC-1993

Update 23/04/12: After two days of Adobe ID merge, in order to improve on the process and to correct some issues that arose, we decided to put a hold to the Adobe ID merge process for 48 hours. We target to resume the merge again on Wednesday, 25/04/12. Existing accounts that have already been merged will continue to function properly.

Update 23/04/12: Please note that your login email address will change to your Adobe ID email address across all BC sites. If you'd like to keep your current login email address, please create a separate Adobe ID for it and then merge this with a newly created Adobe ID."

Hi everybody,

Starting with today, you can update your Business Catalyst account to use an Adobe ID, your Adobe.com account. This means one less login to remember and you can sign in with the same username and password you use to sign in to other Adobe products.

If you don’t yet have an Adobe ID, creating one takes only a few seconds, and doing so will pave the way for you to take advantage of Adobe’s  Creative Cloud service launching this spring. Sign in to update your account now.

Why merge your account with your Adobe ID? 

By having one single account across all your Adobe products, it would allow you to better manage and maintain your product portfolio. One single account will mean less credentials to remember, as well as improved access to support and a continuous relationship with Adobe. You will be able to see all your cases, no matter what Adobe product they belong to, and move seamlessly between various products.

The unique ID will work across all Adobe products and services such as:

• The new Creative Cloud to be released soon
• Acrobat.com
• Typekit
• Muse
• BrowserLab
• Photoshop.com
• Adobe.com

Step by step

1. When logging in for the first time in your admin section, you will be prompted to merge your Adobe ID with your Business Catalyst account. If you do not have an Adobe ID, this will be the place to create one.

2. Once you create or enter an Adobe ID you will be signed in with the new credentials to your Business Catalyst account.

Please remember:

• If your Adobe ID e-mail address is different from your Business Catalyst address, this will be your new credential to login. Your Business Catalyst e-mail address will no longer work
• Once you make the merge this is a non-reversible process. You will no longer be able to go back to your old credentials. 
• If you use our webmail (the OpenSRS webmail), you’ll need to enter your old credentials to access the emails and not your new Adobe ID login
• For sites defined in Dreamweaver, you’ll need to update the FTP credentials for each site to use the new Adobe ID credentials
• For API calls you will need to update the credentials to use the new Adobe ID

Help and support

For more information and troubleshooting guides, read the Business Catalyst Adobe IDs FAQ

Along with several other changes in our processes over the past few months, we've also revamped our Terms of Use and  signature process. Up until today our Terms of use were signed per website, but starting this release we will require a signature from every user attached to each website.

The next time you login to your Business Catalyst account you will be prompted to sign the new Terms of Use agreement. The roll-out process will be gradual, with only partners prompted to sign initially. The second step will require business owners to sign the agreement, while the third step will require white-labeled business owners to agree to the new Terms of Use.

Whitelabel Terms of Use workflow

If you have a white-label website please note that the workflow for terms of use changes slightly. Up until today you had an interface where you would provide a link to your text for the Terms of Use. Starting with this release you have a an interface that allows you to copy paste your entire text for the Terms of Use. You can see below how that would look like:

Once you have filled in your text for the terms of use, this is what your white-label customer will be seeing when prompted to sign the new agreement:

At the very bottom of the page the customer will be informed that by agreeing to your terms of use, they are also subject to the Adobe Terms of use.

Keep an eye on the blog for further announcements comming in the following weeks.

The Business Catalyst team.

Update:  Thursday, 19 April 2012, 4:00 AM PST - With this release, the system folders are filtered only on Filesystem APIs and File Manager Alpha. System wide FTP filtering will be present in a future release.

Update: Wednesday, 18 April 2012, 2:00 AM PST - The release date has been moved to Thursday, April 19th to accommodate additional validation for infrastructure updates. We apologize for the inconveniences caused by this delay.

We are announcing a new Business Catalyst release, scheduled to go live on Wednesday, April 18th. Following the challenges we faced with R174, we've taken a much closer look at our quality processes and we're doubling down on testing to reduce any potential bugs this release - this leads to less features, but we know after consulting many partners that quality and stability are what's most important.

This release introduces a series of updates that are going to be gradually rolled out in April, whose goal is to take the Business Catalyst infrastructure and platform to the next level in terms of performance and reliability. Additionally, we are continuously improving our new admin interface to bring it closer to a full scale release. Read through the following sections to get detailed information about this release:

• Infrastructure updates
• Features and enhancements
• Issues fixed by this release
• Support updates

You can jump to the corresponding section by clicking the above links.

Infrastructure updates

• CDN – the Content Delivery Network improves initial page load for AdminConsole, by serving files from very fast servers that are close to the computer loading the Admin Console. The CDN support has been turned on April 7 for sites delivered from our European data center and on April 9 for sites delivered from our APAC and North America data centers.

Features and enhancements

New dashboard for webBasics and webBasics+ plans

With this release, we are going to replace the business dashboard for webBasics and webBasics+ sites with a new simplified version that gets rid of all the unused graphs and information that cluttered the interface, while being built on the new API based UI framework. To streamline the site publishing workflow, the new dashboard exposes features likes site upgrade, invite new users and add domains.

The redesigned dashboard will be available only from the new Business Catalyst admin user interface (V3).

System folders filtered on FTP according to site plan (updated)

Prior to this release, BC system folders such as /Layouts had the same contents on all plans, even though Shop layouts weren't used on webMarketing plan for example. In order to reduce unnecessary traffic and remove noise, system folders will be accessible over FTP only if the feature is available in current site plan.

Note: the FTP filtering functionality is only available on Filesystem APIs and File Manager Alpha. System wide FTP filtering will be present in a future release.

Here is the mapping between folders and plans:

Send Secure Zone Login Details email switch

In this release, we've added a new parameter called SWE that decides whether or not the Secure Zone Login Details email will be sent when the form is submitted. By default, this new parameter is not included in the query string and its set to "True" (email will be sent). Partners that want to stop this email from being sent should add "&SWE=False" in the query string when creating a secure zone registration form.

The already existing parameter named "SAR", that decides whether the WebForm Submission Confirmation AND Secure Zone Login Details emails are sent remains unchanged. For the Secure Zone Login Details email specifically, if any of these parameters is set to "False", the email will not be sent.

Issues fixed in the April release

• Web forms: submitted form confirmation page is now available for webBasics and webBasics+ plans in System Pages
• Web forms: web form builder username and password fields are now hidden for webBasics and webBasics+
• System Pages - "Page content empty" and "No start pages" custom error pages have been removed. Existing customization, if any, will continue to work. These pages are never shown for production sites, as these have proper start pages set.
• Updated My Details screen to add support for Adobe ID accounts management
• Issue 3150655 - Fixed an issue casing newsletter credits to not be updated for additional newsletter overage packages;
• Issue 3149150 - Added the "File attachments" tab in Web Form builder for sites under the webMarketing plan
• Issue 3128467 - Fixed a bug causing the delete products using Import feature to only delete the first product from the import file
• Issue 3148553 - Fixed a bug preventing users to login if the secure zone registration form included a redirect using PageID parameter

Business Catalyst V3 updates

• New improved HTTP headers – to improve the Admin/ loading time (not just the first time loading) we are improving the HTTP headers to use more browser level caching and we're adding GZIP compression to all suitable files.
• Fixed a problem causing web apps user interface to hang when adding a new web app field (get satisfaction forum report)
• Fixed a bug in web app setting that was blocking users from deleting a web app field if it had web app items using it
• Workflow approval process for pages and templates is now available in V3 UI (see get satisfaction report)
• Fixed a modal dialog resize problem that was blocking the users view of the window action bar, usually displayed at the button of the screen (see get satisfaction forum post)
• Fixed a bug blocking user from inserting an image from Image Properties screen (see get satisfaction forum post)
• Fixed many small various issues with File Manager Alpha version (thanks for your feedback!)
• Fixed bug causing " Reset to Default" to stop working for Tasks filters
• Added export button for Pages reports (Reports>Website Content>Pages) (see get satisfaction report)
• Minor style updates for admin ribbon, breadcrumbs and links
• Fixed a bug causing Save Draft to not update the web page status to "working copy"
• Fixed the Preview web page functionality for web page working copies
• Fixed a bug in web forms causing the web form builder to generate multiple items when creating custom form fields of type List (see get satisfaction report)
• Fixed a admin menu bug that was placing the user under CRM>Customer menu although the current page was CRM>Search
• Added a confirmation message when a case is blacklisted & deleted
• Updated ribbon behavior to use ellipsis for displaying long customer names to prevent layout degradation
• Minor tweaks to the links in the admin ribbon
• Updated the bounced email reports screen to fix scroll
• Fixed a minor issue that was causing an incorrect list name to be displayed after an item (product, campaign, customer, etc) was deleted
• Fixed a bug preventing the "Form Properties" window from closing when user pressed the "Back" button while the pop-up is displayed

Support changes

• New support/chat/forums in place – with this release, we have updated the Business Catalyst partner support workflows and tools. This change aims to improve the way we support our partners by offering a better support workflow, new forums and chat based on the Adobe support infrastructure. In addition, following the release, partners will be able choose between letting business owners access the Business Catalyst documentation or access a custom documentation. For more details, read the Improved support workflows and new forums blog post.

Thank you,

Cristinel Anastasoaie
Adobe Business Catalyst Product Manager

Hi everybody,

Starting this week, we're moving to a new forum tool to better cater to our growing community. Thanks to your commitment to the product, we have reached a volume of posts and community size on our forums which is equivalent to some of the largest products at Adobe. We needed a forum solution that could be integrated with overall Adobe forums and allow for easier integration with other online resources from different Adobe tools .

We want to be able to present Business Catalyst to other users as well, and to allow them to comment on our forums using their Adobe ID credentials.

As such, starting this week we are moving to a new forum solution, and in the next month we will have new support workflows in place.

The new forums

Adobe Forums has features that will help us build even stronger community, including personal messaging, profile pages for all users, a paid partner-only forum, better search, easier browsing, categorization and tags ,and many others. Once you log in, your new homepage will allow you to see your bookmarks, your discussions or documents, ideas and polls and much more at a glance.
.

New support workflows

The new integration with Adobe ID also allows us to integrate our support workflows with the overall Adobe standards. This means that beginning in May, we will be using new tools for chat and cases, that will allow us to increase our quality of service and offer better advice to partners and end customers.

The new support systems will allow us to differentiate between partners and business owners, and route cases to the appropriate level of support based on the nature of the case and the user that submitted the case. This way, in-depth technical questions from partners who have built many sites can be routed directly to Level 2 support, providing better service, while freeing Level 1 agents to respond to other run-of-the-mill queries in a more timely fashion.

Our support page for business owners will be coming a bit later on (in the June/July timeframe) and will contain documentation directly related to their role and the most common issues they might encounter. Of course, Premium partners will retain the option to hide this functionality from their customers, and continue to offer support through their own channels.

One of the biggest benefits of this upgrade is that a chat can be instantly turned into a support case, should it need to be escalated. This means that you no longer need to submit the same information twice to the support team.

Our support portal will allow you to see, update or reopen any of your Adobe cases (whether related to Business Catalyst, Dreamweaver or other Adobe products).

We hope that all these changes will provide a much better experience for you and your team.

The Business Catalyst Team

Hi everybody,

Last Saturday, March 31st, the APAC data center encountered a database node failure causing a number of sites not to load properly. We did a failover to a backup server to maintain operations.

Tomorrow, our engineering team will restore the original database server connection.

The maintenance will cause downtime outside of business hours, at 12AM Sydney time, or 7AM PST, and is expected to last no more than 10 minutes for the subset of websites affected.

Thank you,

The Business Catalyst team.

Hi everybody,

As you probably are aware, our Asia-Pacific center has experienced some downtime at the beginning of this week. We want to apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you, and offer you a detalied explanation on what happened and what measures we're taking to prevent this in the future.

Two days ago we were confronted with a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) that caused downtime and performance degradation to our Asia Pacific data center. The DDoS attack was executed at HTTP level against a customer site hosted on our platform. Because of the multi-tenant architecture of Business Catalyst, the attack impacted other sites hosted on our Asia Pacific data center before being contained by our engineering team. You have below a step by step account of what went on:

• The incident started on Apr 2, 22.02 GMT with performance degradation alerts raised by our monitors.
• At 22.10 a critical system outage was declared and a incident response team assembled. Sites hosted by our Asia Pacific datacenter were experiencing severe performance degradation: long response time, pages not loading. The response team proceeded to restore the service by performing rolling restarts of the web servers. Servers freshly restarted and added to the load balancer continue to collapse quickly under very heavy load.
• At 22.30 networking experts joined the incident response team and proceeded to inspect firewalls and load balancers. HTTP traffic reached 8-10 times the regular volume. Log analysis at network level did not identify any potential offending IPs generating abusive traffic. 
• At 22.45 log analysis at application level surfaced a site as a candidate target for the high volume traffic. Following the confirmation of this finding, a decision was taken to temporarily suspend the site in order to avoid the impact on all sites sharing the same environment, while the support team contacted the customer.
• At 23.30 the site targeted by the high traffic was suspended from serving at web platform level. High traffic continued to overload the web servers.
• At 00.00 the incident was declared DDoS attack and security experts were called to join the response team. Incoming traffic was coming from several thousand IP addresses distributed across multiple geographies. Following security experts advice several counter-measures were deployed at network device level.
• As effect of the network defense measures at 0.30 the web servers were back to normal, but the network devices themselves were still overloaded by active connections. Sites were accessible but the service showed major degradation: intermittent page not found errors, long response times.
• Until 02.00 GMT on Apr 3rd the network engineers and security experts continued to add defense measures until the attack was fully contained. Service quality was restored after 03.00 GMT, and for the next 30 min the incident response team continued to check system health after the attack was contained. 

As a result of this incident, several measures were taken: the system was put on heightened alert status with more sensitive monitoring, new tools were deployed to allow for rapid investigation and a new procedure was put in place to enable fast response and containment of similar attacks.

Once again, our apologies for any inconvenience this incident might have caused. Our security team is always on stand by to prevent this type of incident from reoccurring, and preventive measures have been put in place following this attack.

The BC Team

Meet Partner Geoff McQueen, get the low-down on the latest BC system update, and of course listen out for a fresh HTML quiz question in Episode 17 of the BC podcast!

Listen to this month's podcast:

Simply click the play button below to stream the podcast via your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the podcast in .mp3 format for offline listening.

To subscribe and receive the BC Podcast each month, you can find us on the iTunes store here or by simply searching "BC Podcast" from iTunes.

In March's episode:

• Meet Partner Geoff McQueen:
  
• Hear about his web application, AffinityLive
  
• Learn how to effectively time track and boost profits from your web projects
• What was included in the last system release?
  • An exciting refresh to the BC File Manager
    
  • Updated user management and email account interfaces
• Our monthly quiz - be the first listener to chime in with the correct answer in the comments, and we'll give you a special shout out in next month's episode!

Related links:

• Listen to Adam's full interview with Geoff McQueen
• Watch Alexandru's video blog, detailing his vision for the future of business Catalyst
• Read Magda's update on our refreshed plan names and pricing
• Get the full details on last week's system update by reading Cristinel's official release notes

Hi everybody,

As you probably know by now, the system is experiencing some stability issues. We appologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you or your customers. Our engineering team has looked into the issues since they have started and we have set up a special page with updates, where you can track what is happening. We have found the cause and are currently fixing the problems as we speak.

Description of the issues

Starting after the R174 release we have identified some memory leaks on all datacenters that triggered a sever restart every 2 to 5 hours. The impact consisted in slowness when loading the BC AdminConsole or slowness in loading customer sites, or random 500 Internal Server errors. Not all customers were impacted, but a portion of them.

During the efforts put into investigating the issue, we have triggered some servers to freeze that took them out of the load balancers, that at its turn resulted in more servers being affected by high load and slowness. We put a team in place to monitor server load and restart the servers with problems to maintain a decent level of service until a permanent fix is deployed.

We have worked on a patch to solve the memory leaks, and it is being deployed to make sure we get rid of this problem once and for all.

Please check the newly created system status page for any updates on this issue - we will keep it updated from now on with up to date information about all our services and their availability.

Again, we apologize for any problems caused by this system failure. In irony, it seems to be caused by a logging module designed to help us understand and debug load and slowness issues more effectively - we'll provide a more detailed report once we finalize the technical investigation. 

Sincerely,

The BC Team