Akeneo is a French company founded in 2013 by a Franco-American team. Akeneo provides an Open Source Product Information Management(PIM) tool for centralizing and managing the Product data.
Source – Akeneo
Akeneo offers the solution for both community and enterprise edition. The very first version as released by Akeneo was Akeneo PIM 1.5 on March 8, 2016. As of now, Akeneo has published 8 versions.
With the release of Akeneo 3.0 in February 2019 and long-term dedicated support to August 2020, it has become essential to upgrade the Akeneo 3.0 to enrich the new functionality and performance improvements. Akeneo has named this version as “Super-Rabbit“.
Akeneo PIM provides the expediency of collecting, enriching, and spreading your product data to different E-commerce channel, mobile, and Web Print.
Webkul is one of the best Akeneo solution providers in the World. It has the largest number of Akeneo connector available for various eCommerce frameworks and it is expanding day by day.
Akeneo 3.0: Long Time Support(LTS) and Improved PIM
Akeneo PIM 3.0 is a Long Term Supported(LTS) version which includes three key points: managing reference entities, support for Single Sign-On, and performance improvements.
Reference Entities
Reference entities help the customers to create and enrich the entity related to the products. This feature is available in the enterprise edition of the connector.
A customer can enrich, create, and manage the reference entities in Akeneo. Reference entities help the customer to manage the commonly used information related to the product like colour, size and non-product information like cities, countries.
You can see a dedicated menu” Entities” in the Akeneo PIM menu list.
Source – Akeneo
Single Sign-On
Single Sign-on(SSO) is an authentication process for accessing more than one application with a single set of user id and passwords.
With the single sign-on, the user can increase his productivity, manage the users, process improvement, and manage the company promoted applications.
Performance and Scale Improvements
Akeneo 3.0 also covers the Performance, UI and Scalability improvements. Now, it will be easier to manage a large number of products, products data, and categories.
Akeneo 3.0 product grid is now able to load 1,000,000 products and 20,000 categories in 2 seconds.
Now, the Akeneo user can also manage the large product attributes sets. The user can add more attributes to define a grid filter. Akeneo 3.0 has also improved the time to load the dashboard and the completeness widget.
Technical Improvements
There are a lot of changes made by Akeneo in code as well as support features in Akeneo 3.0.
Elasticsearch 6.5.4 Support
Akeneo 3.0 set the Elasticsearch 6.5.4 as the minimal requirements. Elasticsearch is an open-source, RESTful, and distributed search engine. It is a document-oriented database designed to managed semi-structured data.
Elasticsearch has its own domain-specific language that specifies the queries in the JSON format. This version of Elasticsearch fixed some issues like faster searching, structure finder timeout, and prevent stack overflow.
PHP 7.2 Support
Akeneo which is based on the PHP and MySQL database sets the PHP 7.2 as the minimal requirements for Akeneo 3.0 version. PHP 7.2 supports Argon2 Password Hash, Convert numeric keys into Arrays, Handling non-countable objects, Improved TLS / SSL constants, New Libsodium Extension, and No Mcrypt Extension.
MySQL Encoding (utf8mb4) Support
Akeneo 3.0 started to use utf8mb4 encoding instead of UTF-8. UTF-8 is a Unicode character set which supports variable length encoding using one to three bytes per character. The utf8mb4 character set is a 4-Byte UTF-8 Unicode encoding.
Some features of the utf8mb4 over the UTF-8 are –
- It supports BMP and supplementary characters
- It requires a maximum of four bytes per multibyte character.
Improvement in the Performance of the Product Grid
The performance of the product grid has improved using the dedicated read model in Akeneo 3.0. Now, it has become easier to load the product in the product grid.
The grid can display up to 400 pages (1,00,0000 results). However, you can use the filters in the grid, to optimize the results displayed.
Category Tree Performance Improved
The category tree performance has improved in Akeneo 3.0. A user can load 20,000 categories in Akeneo 3.0 within 2 seconds. It also displays the number of product in each category.
Improve Product Export Performance
Akeneo 3.0 has changed the code structure to improve product export performance by computing the headers at the end. Now, the users can export the product faster(1.4x times) than other Akeneo versions.
Support
For any issues related to Akeneo module, please create a support ticket at- https://webkul.uvdesk.com/en/customer/create-ticket Also, for any pre-sales queries or customization discussion, please drop an email to [email protected]
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