We are all excited about an upcoming stable version of Magento 2.2.0 that is to be launched in September 2017 (as announced during the Magento 2.2 Webinar for Developers). Pre-release code won’t be supported even on formal Enterprise or Github; it’s not a problem though, because developers can start building products with this code as soon as GA code upgrades become available.
Features
Advanced Reporting
Advanced Reporting module provides reporting functionality which can be activated from your Magento Admin both in the Community and Enterprise editions, since it’s a free offering. It allows to sign up for Magento Business Intelligence, combine your Magento store data and data from Google Analytics.
Check out the examples below to get an idea of how Business Intelligence can visualize your data.
All these graphs and tables are available on one single dashboard which allows comparing and analyzing data from different reports.
Fraud Protection offered by Signifyd
Signifyd is a SaaS-based, enterprise-grade fraud technology solution for eCommerce stores. It provides chargeback protection and fraud screening for merchants. You can review any particular order or sign up for full package that can scale across all your merchants. Signifyd integration is available for both Magento 2.2 editions (Community and Enterprise).
B2B
Magento 2.2. also offers new B2B features for Enterprise licence holders. Company account management features that are available out-of-the-box allow B2B merchants to easily support company account and cooperate with multiple buyers and various organization structures. Corporate buyers can manage their accounts without involving merchants due to easy-to-use self-service tools, add and remove company users, update organization structure as shown in the screenshot below.
B2B purchasing has changed too. As many buyers start purchasing process from requesting a quote for bulk or special orders, Magento 2.2 offers a way to streamline the “Request a Quote” workflow managed by Magento. Right from the shopping cart your customer can request a quote, add comments and attach files by request. All quotes are managed from the Magento Admin panel.
It is now easier to build better negotiations with your customers, since it takes you just a couple of clicks to calculate discount for a particular user, for product or shipping and include your answer to the quote. Also, in Magento 2.2 (EE) customer can order by SKU, search for SKUs or upload .csv file with SKUs. Magento verifies this information and shows product images and details, so customer can be sure that he definitely orders those products he really wants to. Customer can copy products from previous orders or select products on category pages. Also, customers can reorder their previous orders in 2 quick steps, without changing shipping and billing methods and address.
Newly Developed B2B Features for Magento 2.2 Release
Payment on Account
- Enable or disable Payment on Account per website
- Choose how this payment method is displayed to buyers
- Select countries to use payment method
- Set min and max order amounts for credit purchases
- Set credit limit and currency per account
- View and filter ledger of credit transactions for each company
- Display credit limit, balance and available credit
- Optionally allow company to exceed credit limit
Customize Catalogs and Price Lists for Customers
- Use filters and search to find specific products
- Set prices for single product or multiple items at once
- Use fixed or dynamic pricing to offer percentage discount
- Apply pricing changes for selected products
- Shared Catalog operation are processed in the background so merchants can work on other tasks while catalogs are updating.
Simple API Integration to Other Systems
- Web APIs for new features (Company, Company Credit, Shared Catalog, Quotes, Requisition Lists, Tier Prices)
- APIs are designed to simplify and enable ERP integration
Platform
Security Hardening:
- Unserialized calls have been removed from all the critical performance code to close potential security vulnerabilities
- Upgraded hashing algorithm to improve security for sensitive values
Improved Developer Experience:
- Improved logging for cron & JS exceptions
- Minimized core around plugins, added original call parameters
Added @api Annotations - Reduce Upgrade Effort:
- From feedback and audit of Marketplace extensions
- 4x # of APIs in 2.2 vs 2.1.7
Performance
Technology Stack Updates
- Drop PHP 5.6 (EOL’d Jan 2017)
- Add PHP 7.1 support
- Add REdis 3.2 support
- Add MySQL 5.7 support
- Drop Varnish 3, add Varnish 5 support
Component Library Updates (to Latest Stable)
- Composer 1.4.1
- ZF2 2.5
- ZF1 1.12.20
Improved UI Component Developer Experience:
- Configuration supports XSD validation
- JS errors displayed in web console & log
- Inherited from root UI Component for easier customization
Mass Asynchronous Operations:
- Enterprise only framework feature to enable easy development of long running business processes
- Retries managed by business logic
- Used In (B2B) Shared Catalog
Pipeline Deployment
- Pipeline Deployment Flow
- Run build and deploy stages separately
- Manage configuration across environments easier
- Production environment upgrade can happen in less than 1 minute
Pipeline Deployment Configuration Management
Magento 2.2 Performance Improvements
Indexer Improvements
- Customer can browse and buy on storefront while indexes running with no impact
- Long-running indexers operate in batches to manage memory and run times better
Cart Improvements
- Buyer can create a cart with 300 line items or more
- Merchant can process a cart with 300 line items or more
Cache Improvements
- No longer invalidates on quantity change are triggered by checkout
- Varnish “Grace” & “Saint” modes are enabled by default
Performance Toolkit
- Updated Profiles
- Faster Generation (in some cases entities generates in 14 times faster!)
- New B2C and B2B Benchmark Files
- Expanded Profiles Bundled & Configurable Products Images & Swatches Attributes / Attribute Sets Companies Price Books Quotes
As you can see yourself, these numbers impress, so we’re waiting for Magento 2.2 stable version to apply its power to the real-life cases.
