A key aspect of multisite support is the sharing of data. For example, if two sites share a gift list, a customer can include products from both sites on his or her gift list. This is much more convenient for the customer than having separate gift lists for each site.
ATG provides a number of mechanisms for sharing data across sites. Using ATG’s multisite support, your sites can share:
Personalization tools, such as scenarios and targeters.
Catalog data, such as categories, products, and SKUs.
Standard commerce facilities, such as shopping carts, promotions, orders, gift lists, and product comparisons.
Search results.
These elements can be shared across all sites, a subset of sites, or be unique to each site.
Data sharing is managed by a variety of mechanisms.
Site Groups
A site group comprises a subset of the sites in a multisite environment. Site groups provide a way to logically group sites to manage data sharing between those sites. A sharing group consists of a site group and the data the sites share.
For example, suppose your multisite environment initially consists of two affiliated sites, Site A and Site B, that share a shopping cart. These sites would be defined as a site group. When you define this site group, you specify that the sites share a shopping cart. These sites plus the shopping cart constitute a sharing group.
Now suppose each of these sites has an associated microsite. Site A’s microsite is Site A2. Site B’s microsite is Site B2. In each case, the microsite shares additional resources with the parent site, such as product comparisons. So you would need to create two other site groups: one containing A and A2, and one containing B and B2. You would put all four sites in the first site group, so they can all share a shopping cart.
The following diagram illustrates the situation:
Note: By default, sharing of product comparisons is tied to sharing of shopping carts. This example assumes for illustrative purposes that they are managed independently. See the Shopping Cart section of the Multisite Support in ATG Products chapter for more information.
