Translating Development-Related Slang

Positioned as a leader in cloud-based ERP solutions, Acuamtica’s offering starkly contrasts traditional, monolithic on-premise systems, such as SAP or NetSuite. Acumatica’s cloud-centric approach brings scalability, accessibility, and a significant reduction in total cost of ownership, marking a new era in ERP technology.

Learn how having Acro Commerce build an API connector helps Accurate Industries get the most out of Acumatica ERP. 

Read the case study

Meet buyer demands with a more intuitive, customizable ecommerce platform—built for the unique needs of B2B. BigCommerce provides the necessary infrastructure for intricate sales processes, making digital commerce more accessible for manufacturers.

Learn more at BigCommerce.com

Acro Commerce uses Confluence as our “remote-friendly team workspace where knowledge and collaboration meet.”

Each employee, department, and project has a space in Confluence to share, create, capture and collaborate at any level.

Learn more about Confluence

Drupal CMS makes customizing the look of your site easier, adds support for decoupled navigation, improves content modelling and editing, block management, performance, and more.

Learn more about Drupal

Drupal Commerce powers ecommerce innovation through every stage of growth. At its core, it is lean and mean, enforcing strict development standards and leveraging the best features of Drupal for maximum flexibility. Drupal Commerce was created with a framework-first perspective, focusing on what you can build with it. Drupal Commerce enables teams to adapt to change and scale efficiently.

Learn more about Drupal Commerce

Figma is a highly collaborative rapid prototyping and user interface design tool. Applications such as Adobe XD or Sketch are similar tools. 

We use Figma in our design system pipeline, allowing us to update ‘tokens’ in a design file to reflect the look and feel of a component in a live project build. Figma is a powerful prototyping and design tool that allows as much or as little team collaboration as needed. 

Learn more about Figma

“What started in 2011 as an open source project to help one team of programmers collaborate is now the platform millions of people use to deliver software faster, more efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance.” - GitLab

At Acro, we use GitLab as a web-based Git repository for our development projects that enable our team to perform all the tasks in a project—from project planning and source code management to monitoring and security.

Learn more about GitLab

Jira is a project management tool that allows teams to track and manage their work by creating and organizing tasks, bugs, and issues.

Jira uses agile methodologies, such as Scrum and Kanban, to help teams work collaboratively and efficiently. It also provides advanced reporting and analytics features that help project managers track team performance and progress.

Learn more about Jira

ReactJS, our front-end framework of choice, is open source, flexible, and enjoys a vast ecosystem of community-created and maintained components. You can combine React, the best-of-breed javascript browser-based rendering framework, with any backend system to bring reliable, testable, and highly portable user experiences to life.

Learn more about React

B2B on Shopify is a suite of features that allows manufacturers and B2B through an online store without using third-party apps or workarounds. Core functionality includes customer-specific catalogues, payment terms, adding purchase order numbers and draft orders, and choosing currencies while connecting multiple customers and locations in a single company profile.

Learn more about Shopify

Storyblok is a headless content management system (CMS) that helps companies build better content experiences faster and without limits.

Storyblok's integration with Gesso revolutionizes content management, allowing manufacturers to create rich, dynamic narratives. This combination empowers marketers to control content directly, ensuring brand consistency and relevance.

Learn more about Storyblok

Storybook is an open-source tool for building UI components and partial layouts in isolation. It streamlines UI development, testing, and documentation. Storybook is the “realization” of the conversation between UI/UX and front-end developers. Storybook is used to demo how components behave and function and help give context to design elements.

Learn more about Storybook

Amazon Web Services provides “on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).” - Amazon Web Services

“A Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” - Customer Data Platform Institute

The role of a CDP:

• Aggregate customer data types from multiple sources. This includes sorting and cleaning data that businesses have previously discarded as erroneous or not important because it was not immediately usable.
• Analyze the data from all these sources and create a persistent, dynamic customer profile that has varied uses: by marketing teams for better segmentation and personalization, by executives for business modelling and by engineering teams to consolidate the data pipeline and provide better reporting, just to name a few.

Learn more: What is a Customer Data Platform, and How Does it Work?

“A content management system (CMS) is an application that is used to manage content, allowing multiple contributors to create, edit and publish. Content in a CMS is typically stored in a database and displayed in a presentation layer based on a set of templates like a website.” - Optimizely

Your content management system can be set up in various ways. Learn more here: CMS Architecture: Traditional, Decoupled & Headless

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.” - Salesforce

“Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media.” - Mozilla

The project planning phase at Acro Commerce is referred to as Discovery & Strategy, or D&S, for short.

Discovery & Strategy aims to uncover all the information you need to decide your development roadmap, guided by experts who advise on best practices and technologies to get you to your goals faster.

We’ll dig into your current website’s architecture with exercises like a

• Content Inventory,
• Analytics Review,
• and Technical Audit
• We’ll also ask a wide range of questions to understand better your business goals and motivations, target audience, and website users' overall needs. 

As we uncover the necessary information, we’ll work toward establishing a well-informed plan for developing and delivering your project.

At this time, we’ll work through various deliverables, such as…

• an information architecture, including user personas and a sitemap diagram,
• and technical architecture, covering recommendations for commerce and CMS solutions and modules, integrations, and hosting architecture.

For more information on D&S, read Why Discovery & Strategy is Critical to Success

“A digital experience platform (DXP) as an integrated set of technologies designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys. A DXP can provide optimal digital experiences to a variety of constituents, including consumers, partners, employees, citizens, students and other audiences, and help ensure continuity across the full customer lifetime journey. It provides the presentation orchestration that binds together capabilities from multiple applications to form seamless digital experiences. A DXP forms part of a digital business ecosystem via API-based integrations with adjacent technologies. DXPs are applicable to business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-employee (B2E) use cases.” - Gartner

Industry-focused business functionality that helps companies see and connect every facet of their business. 

“ERP systems tie together a multitude of business processes and enable the flow of data between them. By collecting an organization’s shared transactional data from multiple sources, ERP systems eliminate data duplication and provide data integrity with a single source of truth.” - Oracle

Front End as a Service is a solution that allows businesses to quickly and easily create professional-looking websites or web applications without needing extensive knowledge of front-end development.

Watch our Commerce Talk video on FEaaS to learn more.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool for installing, storing, and managing marketing tags without modifying website code. 

This allows you to integrate easily with other marketing tools and platforms, such as:

• Google Analytics
• Google Ads
• Facebook
• Hotjar
• CRM Platforms

And it allows you to track almost any kind of event or user behavior you can think of.

• Link clicks
• Button clicks
• Form submissions
• Conversions
• Shopping cart abandonment
• Adding items to cart
• Removing items from cart
• File downloads
• Scroll behavior
• Video views
• Call to action (CTA) performance
• Table of contents (TOC) clicks
• Custom events

Due to its ease of use and built-in security features, GTM is also used to reduce dependency on developers and plugins.

A minimum marketable product is the simplest version of a product that can be released to the market while still providing enough value to attract customers. An MMP includes essential features that address the core needs of the target audience. 

MMP vs. MVP

• MMPs act as a foundation for the iterative development of a more complex, long-term project, getting your website out in the wild and generating sales. 
• An MVP is the most basic version of a product that can be developed and released to gather feedback from early adopters. It focuses on delivering key features that solve a specific problem or fulfill a basic need.

“An order management system (OMS) is a digital way to manage the lifecycle of an order. ¹ It tracks all the information and processes, including order entry, inventory management, fulfillment, and after-sales service. An OMS offers visibility to both the business and the buyer.” - IBM

“Product information management (PIM) is the process of managing and enriching product information and related digital assets across different teams to provide an engaging product experience and successfully sell the product across multiple sales and marketing channels. A PIM solution is a master-data-fueled, process-driven application for collaborating on product content. It serves as a single, central platform to collect, manage, govern and enrich product information and content and distribute it to marketing, sales, and ecommerce channels.” - Informatica

A retained service agreement (RSA) allows clients to reserve Acro’s experts beyond the completion of an initial development project.

RSAs are also commonly used for ongoing maintenance, support, or adding features and functionality to existing websites.

“SaaS is a cloud-based software solution in which software providers deliver applications to users over the internet. SaaS companies provide access to their software most commonly via a website or apps.” - Salesforce

Learn more with our Commerce Talk video: Software as a Service: What is SaaS?

SAML enables the SP to operate without having to perform its own authentication and pass the identity to integrate internal and external users. It allows security credentials to be shared with an SP across a network, typically an application or service. SAML enables secure, cross-domain communication between the public cloud and other SAML-enabled systems, as well as a selected number of other identity management systems located on-premises or in a different cloud. With SAML, you can enable a single sign-on (SSO) experience for your users across any two applications that support SAML protocol and services, allowing an SSO to perform several security functions on behalf of one or more applications.” - Oracle

“Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication method that enables users to securely authenticate with multiple applications and websites by using just one set of credentials.
SSO works based on a trust relationship between an application, known as the service provider, and an identity provider, like OneLogin. This trust relationship is often based upon a certificate that is exchanged between the identity provider and the service provider. This certificate can be used to sign identity information that is being sent from the identity provider to the service provider so that the service provider knows it is coming from a trusted source. In SSO, this identity data takes the form of tokens which contain identifying bits of information about the user like a user’s email address or a username.” - OneLogin

“User Acceptance Testing (UAT), which is performed on most UIT projects, sometimes called beta testing or end-user testing, is a phase of software development in which the software is tested in the "real world" by the intended audience or business representative. This type of testing is not intended to be menu-driven, but rather to be performed by business users to verify that the application will meet the needs of the end-user, with scenarios and data representative of actual usage in the field.” - Stanford University | IT

A firm that enhances the value of third-party products by adding customized products or services for resale to end-users. Example: The Answer Co is a VAR for Acumatica Cloud ERP solutions.