Introducing the Business Catalyst Platform
Adobe Business Catalyst (BC) is an online business platform that integrates a set of essential web features into one hosted application. Website hosting, content management, e-commerce, e-mail marketing campaigns, and built-in user case management are all rolled into one, so that you can build immersive sites and online stores quickly, at a fraction of the normal cost.
The Business Catalyst Platform benefits three different sets of users:
- Web designers: Build online stores and websites with complex functionality with no back-end coding or hosting or deployment configuration required; edit BC site natively in Dreamweaver (or any browser with an Internet connection). Use the BC Partner Portal to manage and invoice your clients.
- Small business owners: Use BC to manage their own businesses. As a small business owner, you can easily update web content, receive orders, send e-mail campaigns, respond to customer inquiries, and run reports all from one integrated dashboard.
- Site visitors: When users browse a site built on BC they can interact with the features to purchase items, view their order history, participate with the online community, log in to members-only zones, and even submit their own content.
To deliver these benefits, the Business Catalyst Platform includes the following main modules:
- E-commerce functionality with products and catalog management, shipping provider, and payment gateway integration
- Customizable web forms that gather customer data, follow workflows, and send auto-replies
- A fully featured customer and case management system
- User registration and built-in account management
- Password-protected secure zones
- E-mail campaign publishing system with integrated reporting
- Event calendars that accept reservations and optional capacity settings
- Custom content types (Web Apps) that display business-related data and media
- Automated reoccurring billing for subscriptions
Business Catalyst was acquired by Adobe Systems in September 2009. Since then, we've seen some exciting synergy both from a business and an engineering perspective. In the next section, I'll describe some of the recent improvements to the Business Catalyst Platform.
Integrate with Dreamweaver
A major milestone was the launch of a new Business Catalyst extension for Dreamweaver to make it easier than ever to develop BC online businesses within the Dreamweaver workspace. Using Dreamweaver CS4 or Dreamweaver CS5, you can use the Business Catalyst panel, shown in Figure 1, to connect to all your Business Catalyst sites and work on them from within Dreamweaver natively, using workflows you're familiar with.
The new Business Catalyst extension includes the following improvements:
- Quick Site Setup wizard to define sites and get remote files in a few mouse clicks
- Business Catalyst panel integration with the Files panel
- Support for uploading Dreamweaver DWT files directly into BC to use as BC templates
- Module Configure wizard to add easily modules to web pages
- Fully customizable module layouts that use the updated Tag Insert functionality
- Improved Related Files bar for quick access to CSS code
You can use the Files panel the same way you are used to working—by double-clicking files and creating files and folders to build out your site structure. And now you can use DWT files created in Dreamweaver to build site templates, following the same workflow you use when building sites other than Business Catalyst sites. Choose File > New to create a new template, and then choose Insert > Template Objects > Business Catalyst editable region. After defining a region, you can choose File > New > Page from template and the new page will be linked to the template automatically.
Note: To learn more about how to edit BC sites from Dreamweaver Download and install the Business Catalyst extension for Dreamweaver.
Provide an easy way for your clients to edit their websites
On April 7, we launched a beta version of our new InContext Editing feature that enables you and your web clients to update text, images, and links using any browser with an Internet conection. Your site is shown as it would look like live and you can click any element of the site to edit it (see Figure 2). Your clients will really appreciate these improvements to faciltate site updates and they'll enjoy how intuitive it makes website content editing. As we improve this feature, we will enable users to edit modules like blogs and online store products "in-context" to make it even easier to browse and edit content.
As an added bonus, with InContext Editing, you can now set editable regions using Dreamweaver to control which parts of a Business Catalyst site your web clients can edit.
Manage your clients with the Partner Portal
Because the focus of BC is on the web designer, we also provide you with an industry-leading Partner Portal that provides easy access to all of your BC sites and payment and billing history—and lets you manage your web clients in a centralized, online interface (see Figrue 3). It takes just a few clicks to instantiate a new site and there's no complicated deployment process because the whole application is hosted.
It's easy to build and deploy multiple online businesses using one system. You can even quickly create prototypes for potential clients by importing their existing site, adding the features you know they need to improve their business, and presenting it at your first client meeting. Nothing compares to a demo of a live, functioning site with all the bells and whistles, displaying a company's existing branding and web content, to help you seal the deal.
Where to go from here
The core strengths of the Business Catalyst Platform is that it offers web designers the ultimate creative freedom to build immersive online experiences. You can upload your own Flash, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files using FTP and edit them using Dreamweaver. Since the content is completely separated from the appearance and layout, the system makes site updates easy to manage.
You also have a cost-effective all-in-one solution for your clients combining web-hosting, e-commerce, contact management, and e-mail marketing into a tightly integrated package that offers the functionality that your clients require to run a successful online business.
Your clients will appreciate the ability to update their site's content with the new InContext Editing features and the intuitive WYSIWYG toolbars. You'll enjoy working with the updated Partner Portal, because it makes it easy to run your web business and manage your clients.
And the hosted solution ensures that you'll never have to worry about server configuration, restoring data, or upgrading modules, because everything is handled for you on the back end.
To get started with and learn more about Business Catalyst, check out the following resources:
- Register a trial Partner account.
- Watch Introducing Business Catalyst on Adobe TV.
- Read Getting started with Business Catalyst.
- Read Introducing the Business Catalyst tools.
- Check out Adam Broadway's new Business Catalyst Evangelist site.
To get more information about working with the Business Catalyst Platform, refer to the following resources:
- Business Catalyst Developer Center
- Building your first site in Business Catalyst
- Customizing the pre-built templates that are included with a Business Catalyst trial site
To build Business Catalyst online businesses with Dreamweaver, download and install the following software:
