Akeneo 5 Migration

Connecting with your users right away is to keep updating according to the latest update. Every business has to get engaged with their customers in real-time updates to up their customer service & satisfaction.

Customers want to keep updated with better features and enhancements! So, let’s quickly jump into the features of Akeneo Latest Version 5.x with the help of this article.

With Akeneo’s latest version, 5.x users can reach their businesses to the next level through more than 70 new features and major enhancements in five different specialities.

Now, these enhancements and features are possible for Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition Serenity customers as well as Flexibility and Community Edition customers.

Akeneo PIM 5.0 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) version. It will be supported for 18 months until the end of September 2022. The enhancement in version 5.0 applied to both the Akeneo community as well as the Enterprise edition of Akeneo.

The previous Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Akeneo was Akeneo 4.0.x. Now Akeneo 5.x is here with major changes in Automation, Governance, Quality, Connectivity, and Productivity.

Akeneo is an open-source Product Information Management solution provider organization. It is established in 2013 in Nantes by a Franco-American team based in Nantes, Boston, and Dusseldorf.

Akeneo is the most used open-source PIM solution in the World. There are 75k companies over the Globe managing Product Information using Akeneo.

They have also the enterprise edition of the Akeneo solution. It is famous among all the PIM because of its organizability functionalities.

Webkul is one of the best Akeneo solution providers in the world. It has the largest number of Akeneo connectors available for various eCommerce frameworks.

Webkul developed more than 50+ extensions for Akeneo and it is expanding day by day. Also, here are some glimpses of Akeneo 5.x.

Automation

The enhancement in the Automation applies to the Akeneo Enterprise Edition only. Automation will make your work here more productive as well as it helps users to take manual tasks off their services, allowing them more time to work.

By clearly defining product sections, you can set up automation rules to classify your products into the right sections and easily enrich product information by adding values directly to the product.

Therefore, in this new user interface users can:

Manage directly rules from within the PIM.
Great new automated rule actions
Improved rule conditions
Improved rule management

Data Governance

Satisfying customers with accurate and compelling data is the most crucial objective of PIM (Product Information Management) software.

The data that makes up the aforementioned information is what informs your customers regarding your product and then makes a significant impact on their decision to purchase.

Data governance is a set of principles and practices that assure high quality through the entire lifecycle of your data. In Akeneo data governance of an important part to enrich product data collection.

However, Akeneo 5.x comes with a lot of changes in product quality. This feature, make product modelling capabilities even more adaptable and robust and also ensure a great product experience. We can see further details here:

New association types – Now users can associate several products together and also can define quantities for each product, select two-way association types, and the small UI improvement.

Enrichment in the variant products – To reduce your manual effort Akeneo allows great flexibility in the product module just in one single click user can easily convert the variant product into a simple product with the new Akeneo PIM Interface.

Enhanced measurement families – Now with the new Akeneo interface user can add their own custom measurement families.
- Some new standard measurement families are binary, area, energy, duration, etc.
- Some new standard measurement units-
  - Area- square meter, square centimeter, square millimeter, etc.
  - Duration- second, minute, hours, etc

Improved Quality

In today’s era, one of the most significant concerns for the user is the data quality which indicates how reliable a given dataset is.

Certainly, rich, coherent, and consistent product data is important to achieve great product know-how, Akeneo introduced the concept of “data quality” in our PIM.

Therefore, this new capability benefits you to measure your data quality along two axes: enrichment and consistency.

Each of these two axes takes into account several principles to come up with an overall quality score for each product of your catalog.

Good data quality enhances the accuracy of analytics applications, which can lead to better business decision-making that boosts sales, improves internal processes then gives companies a competitive edge over competitors.

Moreover, it will be easier to manage the data quality of the product with the quality score with this you can check the quality of the product, and product model as well as you can check the quality of the selected attributes.

Some more enhancements in the quality of Akeneo 5.x introduces –

New revamped data quality dashboard
Spell-check modifications
New “Missing image” rules

Connectivity

In Akeneo basically, three connections are transferring data into this PIM: Product flow coming from an ERP, asset flow coming from DAM, and another flow, mixing both products and assets, coming from a retail platform.

PIM solutions can help foster collaboration across the organizations involved in onboarding new products, streamline the catalog update process, and reduce errors and differences in the product information.

It also ensures that any updates made within the system are distributed to all of the appropriate channels.

To better integrate the third-party application Akeneo introduced a brand new API, known as the “Events API”.

Above all can connect third-party applications with Akeneo API as well as you can connect Akeneo with multiple Akeneo using one of the best products of Webkul “Multi Akeneo Syndication“.

So, Akeneo 5.x enhancements on Associations allow users to better track data sent and received and give them moreover autonomy to act on synchronization errors.

Productivity

Manually adding new ones to your product catalog is a truly time-consuming and error-prone process. To easily create a new product based on an existing one, now use the duplicate feature to create multiple similar products in a single click!

As a result, Akeneo added lots of new features and improvements like new import/export capabilities, an enhanced user experience on our product grid, and a more insightful process tracker that will increase productivity.

Technical Improvements in Akeneo 5.x

There are a lot of changes made by Akeneo in the code as well as support features in Akeneo 5.x.

PIM Performances in Akeneo 5.x

In the Akeneo 5.0.x, Akeneo improved the API also, introduced a brand new API, known as the “Events API” to accelerate the synchronization of data between Akeneo PIM and 3rd-party applications.

In other words, this new API is complementary to the existing REST API.

Elasticsearch in Akeneo 5.x

Akeneo 5.0.x set Elasticsearch 7.x as the minimal requirements. Elasticsearch is an open-source, RESTful, and distributed search engine. Subsequently, It is a document-oriented database designed to manage semi-structured data.

Elasticsearch has its domain-specific language that specifies the queries in the JSON format.

PHP Version in Akeneo 5.x

Akeneo which is based on PHP also MySQL database sets PHP 7.4 as the minimal requirement for the Akeneo 5.0.x version. You can check furthermore the benefits of PHP 7.4.

Arrow Functions 2.0 (Short Closures)
Null Coalescing Assignment Operator.
Typed Properties 2.0.
Weak References.
Covariant Returns and Contravariant Parameters.
Preloading.
New Custom Object Serialization Mechanism.

MySQL

Akeneo 5.0.x supports the MySQL 8 database. You can also learn “How to take Akeneo Database Backup” here. Further, this module helps you to take the backup of the database and assets and restore the backup files.

If you want to know more, you can learn more about the Akeneo 4.x to Akeneo 5.x migration.

Webkul Best Akeneo Solution

Webkul provides the best Akeneo solution in terms of eCommerce, ERP, POS, DAM, and API integration. We have almost 53 different connectors at our store. We are creating furthermore plugins day by day.

eCommerce & ERP System

Webkul has the largest number of Akeneo connectors available for various eCommerce frameworks and ERP systems. Moreover, some of the best Webkul Akeneo e-commerce connectors are listed below.

Magento 2 Akeneo Connector
Shopify Akeneo Connector
WooCommerce Akeneo Connector
Odoo Akeneo Connector

Digital Asset Management Integration

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the tool for managing the asset information among the various systems from a single source. It is basically a system that stores and organizes asset information. The DAM helps to spread the asset information to various channels.

You can check further the best Webkul DAM(Digital Asset Management) modules:

Akeneo DAM (Digital Asset Management) Extension
Akeneo Image Gallery

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage like CDN is now a day plays a crucial role in website optimization. Therefore, to reduce your server storage and better availability of your media file over the internet, you can integrate Content Delivery Network and AWS storage systems.

Moreover, to reduce your system storage we provide Akeneo modules for Cloud Storage:

Akeneo Amazon CloudFront Connector
Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Akeneo Integration
Akeneo Amazon S3 Integration

Some Other Akeneo Add-ons (Catalog Print, Rules, UI Improvement, Social Media)

The need for PIM is expanding day by day based on better product experience management. Likewise, we provide the solution for Catalog Print, Social Media, Rules, and many other Akeneo extensions.

You can see further modules like –

Product PDF Generator
Custom CSV Export
Web To Print
Category Image and Description
Custom Action Rule Conditions
Akeneo UI Reference Entity

References