Overall update summary
2024.1 is the release where PDX Enhanced Content arrives, giving manufacturers and CPG companies a way to generate below-the-fold content from PDX master data through templates, refine it in a visual Content Editor with real-time compliance validation, and publish it to Amazon marketplaces. It also begins the AI machine learning matcher programme with pre-trained models for name similarity. On the platform, the Workbench and Self-Service UI are restyled to match the Web UI, Faceted Search indexing is parallelized for throughput and stability, and an external DAM adaptor connects to DemoUp Cliplister. Product data work gains ECLASS ADVANCED filtering, Instrument UI improvements and expanded data validity in unfolding data containers. In PDX, onboarding channels support multiple markets, the UI is localized, a process log adds transparency, and Digital Shelf Analytics arrives through CommerceIQ.
Applicable links
- Update notes: Read
Workbench facelift
Applicable to all domains | Included in Base | Admin | 24.1 highlight
What changed
STEP users, especially administrators, often work across both the Workbench and the Web UI, and switching between them felt disjointed because their look and feel were distinctly different. With 2024.1, the Workbench is aligned with current Web UI styling, following the same UI guidelines for colors and icons. There are no functional changes to the Workbench — this is strictly a style update.
- A more consistent and modern appearance across interfaces.
- Reduces the learning curve when moving between UIs.
- No functional change, so no retraining on behavior is needed.
Self-Service UI update
Applicable to all domains | Included in Base | Admin | 24.1 highlight
What changed
The Self-Service UI is where customers manage basic elements of their own systems without Stibo Systems assistance. In 2024.1, in line with the Workbench facelift, the SaaS Self-Service UI receives a look and feel upgrade for consistency with other products and alignment with the STEP Instrument UI, alongside multiple UI-related changes that improve usability.
- A familiar look aligned with the rest of the product set.
- Decreases the learning curve for users.
- Improves usability and overall experience in self-service tasks.
Instrument update
Applicable to PMDM | Please refer to your Account Manager | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Work continues to extend the foundation of Instrument UX and add capabilities for greater efficiency and applicability. With 2024.1, the experience improves for organizing data and creating customized views, references and classification links are handled better in Details View, bulk asset imports are supported, and business users can work with data containers when enriching product data in Details View — adding, editing and removing them, creating data containers with keys, copying and pasting values, controlling cell width, and sorting and filtering.
- Greater flexibility in organizing data and building customized views.
- Data container enrichment becomes available to business users in Details View.
- Assets can be imported in bulk.
ECLASS ADVANCED filtering
Applicable to PMDM | Available with the ECLASS ADVANCED license | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
This work continues from 11.1, which introduced a new ECLASS ADVANCED Editor screen, and 2023.3, which brought several editor enhancements. With 2024.1, the focus is on improving data overview through template-based filters, hierarchy-based filters and filter selection supported by JavaScript.
- Significantly limits the data shown, improving the user experience.
- Streamlines general maintenance of ECLASS ADVANCED data.
- Ultimately reduces time to market.
DemoUp Cliplister integration
Applicable to PMDM | Included in Base | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Digital assets are typically organized, distributed and stored in dedicated Digital Asset Management systems, so customers rely on flexible integration to handle product-to-asset references. With 2024.1, the API-based External DAM Adaptor is enabled with integration to DemoUp Cliplister, a third-party DAM tool. Users can search and browse assets in the external DAM in real time and link assets stored in Cliplister to object information in STEP. The functionality can be extended to additional third-party DAM offerings, depending on the API and a custom extension.
- Real-time search and browse of assets held in an external DAM.
- External assets can be linked to STEP object information.
- The adaptor pattern can be extended to other DAM tools.
Simplified matching setup — AI machine learning matchers
Applicable to Customer, Supplier and Location MDM | Available with the Customer Domain and Supplier Domain license | Admin | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Matching is central to any customer MDM project and consumes much of the effort, and practitioners often misjudge the roles, skills and time needed to build and fine-tune the algorithm — leading to delayed time to value, complex ownership, inaccurate results and heavy manual review. 2024.1 begins delivering on the vision to simplify this by providing a set of pre-trained AI machine learning models, or matchers, that assess the similarity of elements found in party data. Incorporating them into existing matching rules improves comparison of elements such as names in this update, with matchers for addresses, emails and phone identifiers to follow.
- Reduces the skills and effort needed to establish a matching algorithm.
- Improves the ability to compare names within existing matching rules.
- Starts a programme that will extend to addresses, emails and phone identifiers.
Faceted Search — performance and scale
Applicable to all domains | Included in Base | Admin | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Faceted Search is part of the modern search experience initiative, extended in 2023.3 to Customer, Supplier and Location domain use cases for a consistent experience across data domains, and improved in 2023.4 for performance and robustness with a focus on index publishing. With 2024.1, the performance and scale of the Elasticsearch indexing process improve further by allowing multiple background processes to run concurrently — a parallelization mechanism in the Event Processor flow.
- Faster data throughput and faster indexing of millions of objects.
- A more stable solution if processes are interrupted, stopped or fail.
- Supports search for users unfamiliar with the underlying data model.
Optimized central onboarding — conditional data validity in data containers
Applicable to all domains | Included in Base | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Business users creating or updating B2B customer or supplier data face complexity in ensuring the data they enter is valid, on top of a high volume of data entry tasks. This initiative continues work started in 11.2 with search-before-create and address typeahead, extended through 2023.3 and 2023.4 with the new data container experience. With 2024.1, the data validity capabilities of unfolding data containers expand to give business users control over which data types are hidden, mandatory or read-only as well as value validity, guided data entry within workflows, value history, and list-of-values IDs in data container keys.
- Guided data entry saves time in central authorship and maintenance of business partners.
- More control over what users see and must complete.
- Value history and guided entry within workflows reduce errors.
PMDM channels support multiple markets
Applicable to PDX Onboarding | Available with the PDX Onboarding license | Admin | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Retailers operating in multiple markets need country-specific product information from their vendors to ensure accurate data and comply with local regulations. With 2024.1, vendors can provide data points spanning different dimensions, allowing a breakdown of market and language concurrently. The flexibility of PDX supports one-to-one data model representations, so additional configuration is avoided.
- Retailers can be confident data complies with local regulations and fits its market.
- Accelerates data delivery.
- Minimizes manual effort before a product is syndicated.
PDX UI in my local language
Applicable to PDX Onboarding and Syndication | Available with the PDX license | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Navigating and decoding an application that is not in the user's native language is slow and difficult. In 2024.1, each user can choose their preferred language for the application, starting with French, German and Spanish. The language changes with a single click, and all newly added capabilities are automatically available in the preferred language.
- Business users work more effectively in their own language.
- Language can be switched per user with one click.
- New capabilities arrive already localized.
Digital Shelf Analytics
Applicable to PDX Syndication | Available with the PDX Syndication license, third-party CommerceIQ license required | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Manufacturers and brand owners need their products to perform well in the market, not just meet basic retailer requirements. With 2024.1, products syndicated from PDX can be seen in the associated CommerceIQ account, with data insights from the analysis conducted on each product reported back to PDX. This produces a quality score based on the product's digital shelf performance versus the original product data as published from PDX. This is the first iteration, with the portfolio of insights to be expanded later.
- Supports an informed approach to correcting discrepancies on the product detail page.
- Gives a quality score based on actual digital shelf performance.
- Connects syndicated data back to how it performs in market.
Process log
Applicable to PDX Onboarding and Syndication | Available with the PDX license | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Large-scale manufacturers and brand owners need transparency to keep track of ongoing tasks and operations. The 2024.1 update introduces a Process Log giving visibility into all processes and operations running in the background — queued, active and completed processes in PDX, started by anyone on the team — along with estimated completion times for long-running operations and the ability to cancel queued processes started by accident.
- Users always know what is being processed, what is queued and when the next job runs.
- Estimated completion times for long-running operations.
- Accidentally started processes can be cancelled.
PDX Enhanced Content — templatized content generation
Applicable to PDX Enhanced Content | Available with the PDX Enhanced Content license | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Manufacturers and CPG companies struggle to create and maintain below-the-fold content for large product assortments because existing tools do not scale. The 2024.1 update introduces PDX Enhanced Content, letting them use product master data and assets from PDX to generate product-specific content for retailers at scale. The Enhanced Content Editor provides a visual creation process, and product marketing managers define how product-specific content is generated through content templates applied to all products using that template — then review the automatically generated content and make final adjustments before sending it to Amazon.
- Below-the-fold content can be produced at assortment scale rather than product by product.
- PDX master data and assets feed content generation directly.
- Deep integration with applicable Amazon marketplaces makes publishing straightforward.
PDX Enhanced Content — publish to Amazon markets
Applicable to PDX Enhanced Content | Available with the PDX Enhanced Content license | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
Amazon remains one of the largest online retailers, letting vendors sell across 21 geographically specialized marketplaces, and is an important sales channel for manufacturers and CPG companies. With 2024.1, the Enhanced Content application supports creation and publication of enhanced content tailored to Amazon, allowing A+ content to be added to product listings.
- Above-the-fold and below-the-fold content can both be provided through PDX.
- Makes it easier to establish a solid presence across Amazon marketplaces.
- A+ content can be produced and published from the same place as product data.
PDX Enhanced Content — Content Editor
Applicable to PDX Enhanced Content | Available with the PDX Enhanced Content license | Business User | 24.1 highlight
What changed
The Enhanced Content application includes a Content Editor that lets product marketing managers produce below-the-fold content for retailer product detail pages. Users compose the content layout by dragging and dropping compliant modules and populate each with headlines, rich text, images and keywords. Real-time validations ensure compliance with retailer requirements so users can adjust quickly, including cropping images directly in the application, and content can be previewed at any point.
- A powerful but easy-to-use toolkit requiring no technical expertise.
- Real-time validation catches retailer compliance issues before publication.
- Preview shows approximately what consumers will see.
Enhancement requests delivered with 2024.1
ERs span all domains and PMDM | Included in Base; third-party licenses required for two (Adobe InDesign, ETIM) | Admin, Business User, Developer | 24.1 highlight | consolidates the deck's two enhancement request slides
What changed
Enhancement requests let the platform adapt continuously to market and customer needs. Eight are delivered with 2024.1. On the API side: information on the validator associated with an attribute and with a list of values can now be accessed from the JavaScript API; items within a collection can be accessed and queried; STEPXML export can optionally include empty calculated attribute values, reflecting the current state of data in STEP; and Kafka message keys and headers can be created through a dedicated business function as an alternative to the Key Template parameter for the Kafka Delivery plug-in. For product data: InDesign CC2024 (v19) is supported for both server and client, with plug-ins for Windows and Mac, and older versions de-supported per Adobe's policy; the ETIM Taxonomy Importer imports change codes into a metadata attribute on the attribute-classification link, so ETIM customers can see whether an attribute has been deprecated in the context of a given classification; a new Label field on globally configured Multi Edit Data Containers lets administrators override and localize the data container title across contexts; and a new Task Mode with a default task mode option is available in the Task component of the Global Navigation Panel, plus for the Status Selector Homepage Widget and Status Selector components.
- Broader JavaScript and export API coverage for customer-specific configuration.
- Print customers stay current with Adobe's supported InDesign versions.
- ETIM customers gain visibility of deprecated attributes per classification.
- Administrators gain control over data container titles and default task modes.
FAQ
2024.1 introduces PDX Enhanced Content — templatized content generation, a visual Content Editor and publication to Amazon marketplaces — and begins the AI machine learning matcher programme with pre-trained models for name similarity. The Workbench and SaaS Self-Service UI are restyled to align with the Web UI, Faceted Search indexing is parallelized, and an external DAM adaptor integrates with DemoUp Cliplister. Product data work adds ECLASS ADVANCED filtering, Instrument UI improvements and expanded data validity in unfolding data containers. In PDX, onboarding channels support multiple markets, the UI is localized into French, German and Spanish, a process log adds transparency, and Digital Shelf Analytics arrives through CommerceIQ. Eight enhancement requests are also delivered.
Administrators are the main audience for the Workbench facelift, the Self-Service UI update, Faceted Search, matching setup and multi-market onboarding channels. Business users are targeted by the Instrument update, ECLASS ADVANCED filtering, the DAM integration, central onboarding, the localized PDX UI, Digital Shelf Analytics, the process log and all three Enhanced Content updates. Developers are addressed by several of the enhancement requests.
The 2024.1 deck does not map initiatives to the Acquire, Manage and Share data journey steps used in later releases. It groups them by applicability instead — all domains, PMDM, Customer/Supplier/Location MDM, PDX Onboarding, PDX Syndication and PDX Enhanced Content. Journey step mapping should be confirmed from the release notes before publishing
The Workbench facelift, Self-Service UI update, DemoUp Cliplister integration, Faceted Search and central onboarding are included in base, as are the enhancement requests. ECLASS ADVANCED filtering requires the ECLASS ADVANCED license, and the AI machine learning matchers require the Customer Domain and Supplier Domain license. Multi-market onboarding channels require the PDX Onboarding license; the localized UI and process log require the PDX license; Digital Shelf Analytics requires the PDX Syndication license plus a third-party CommerceIQ license; and all three Enhanced Content updates require the PDX Enhanced Content license. Two enhancement requests require third-party licenses — Adobe InDesign and ETIM. For the Instrument update the deck directs customers to their Account Manager.
Digital Shelf Analytics is explicitly a first iteration, with the portfolio of insights to be expanded in later releases. The AI machine learning matchers cover name comparison in this release, with address, email and phone identifier matchers to follow.