Important update: Published Products discontinuation. This feature is no longer actively supported and will soon be retired. We strongly recommend exploring alternative solutions and unpublishing all products.

That change can be challenging, especially if you heavily rely on this feature. To assist you in this transition, we have compiled a list of alternative methods and workarounds to help you achieve similar outcomes. 

Even if each use case is unique, we encourage you to explore the following alternatives:

Use case #1: I want to have two versions of the same product

• Alternative #1

Are these two versions of the same product addressing different business goals? Different requirements? Or even different websites?

If that’s the case, dedicated different channels may solve your need. Managing different product information for each of their business purpose may be addressed by channels alongside completeness. 
 

• Alternative #2

If some of your products are already available on your sales channels, and you need to update them, you may already have a running export process with potential triggers to launch their update. As soon as you want the next export to consider these updates, turn its status to 'Disabled' while you update it and turn it back to 'Enabled' as soon as you want the next export to consider your updates. This can be achieved with a dedicated attribute too. 

Here is an example of workflow that can be implemented:

1. A product is created with the default status set as Disabled
2. The product is being enriched with no status update
3. Once the product is enriched and completeness has reached 100%, the status is updated to Enabled which triggers the activation of the product on the channel(s)
4. You can automate the status to be updated to Disabled or Draft to make sure the product won't be updated on your channels without a manual confirmation
5. The product can now be modified to a new version but the update won't be published until you change the status to Enabled

Use case #2: I want to activate some products on a channel

If you want to manage the availability of some products for specific channels and/or markets, Akeneo offers the flexibility to do so with several native possibilities:

• Completeness:  this is a powerful feature that helps ensure your products are available for a specific channel based on pre-required product information you’d have defined. Until a product reaches 100% of the requirements for a specific channel, it won’t be exported.

• Status: if a product is disabled, it won’t be exported. This means you could enrich a product, reach 100% completeness, and update the status to ‘enabled’ ensuring it is available for a channel. Products could be created with the ‘disabled’ status by default, and the channel manager could decide to bulk-update the status of a product selection to enable them.

Rest assured, our commitment to delivering a high-quality user experience remains unwavering. We are confident that the improvements resulting from this change will contribute to a more efficient and enjoyable software experience for all our users.