Our partner, Akeneo, just announced its new PIM version on September 28th. There won’t be a 1.8 version but a 2.0 version, meaning lots of changes and evolutions, as announced by Frédéric de Gombert a few days ago. 
For this new version, Akeneo 2.0 teams focussed on import, search, display, enrich and export.
New product modeling
One of the main changes for this 2.0 version on business side is the new product modeling :
- No more variant group
- No more inner variation bundle
A new product modeling has been implemented to reduce complexity, painfullness and time-consuming for managing similar products. This product modeling aim at helping users creating and enriching products with variants. This new modeling allows to manage family variant with variant levels. Here is a example with a product that has 2 attributes (color and size) : 
Some attributes are used for all variants (name, brand…) and some others are specific to one variant (composition, picture…). So pictures are linked to a color-focused family variant.
New interface
[gallery link=“file” size=“medium” ids=“950,952,951”] Akeneo teams created a very sleek new design with improved ergonomics. New tools have also been added in this new design :
- Search bar in grids and product forms
- Keyboard shotcuts
- Pop-in tool to create attributes and families
New technologies
For technicians, Akeneo made use of its new big version for php support 7.1 & Symfony 3.3 to improve performance even more. With this new interface, there are also many evolutions on the Front side with new tools : Yarn, Webpack… 
Not only technicals components benefit from changes, the new 2.0 Akeneo’s API allowed us now to manage attribute groups, currencies, types of association, product models, variants families. 
New users rights management in the Enterprise version
Management of users rights in the Enterprise version has been completely redesigned and is now more detailed. Users rights are manageable for each import and export, also now for the API. Some examples : The user Mary will not be able to export product values on wich she has no posting permission. The user Mary will be able to create projects from imports on products on wich she only has a publishing permission.
Conclusion
This new version brings even more changes than what we were expected and on several points :
- the new product model of this 2.0 Akeneo version answers to new needs and allows enrich teams to save time
- the new more ergonomic interface simplifies and improves the PIM’s use
- new technical components and API’s updating improve performances
- users rights new management in the Enterprise version
This new updated version of Akeneo PIM is an implied stable LTS version with a maintenance from Akeneo during 18 months. To leave users and developers time to migrate from 1.7 to 2.0 version, 1.7 version will be taken in hand 24 months by the editor, instead of 18.