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Overview of the Personalization Server
This following topics are included:
What is the Personalization Server?
What is the Personalization Server?
The Personalization Server is a complete solution for building personalized e-commerce sites.
Personalization is the means by which Web content developers can tailor an application to a particular individual or group based on any number of criteria. The criteria can be predefined user attributes such as age and gender, or can be based on behavioral information gathered as the user navigates a site.
Using the Personalization Server, you can build Java-based Internet pages and sites with dynamic, personalized document content. You can customize what content gets delivered based on individual user profiles. The Personalization Server has a built-in rules editor that you use with Java Server Pages (JSP) tags to deliver a responsive, customized experience for users.
With the Personalization Server you can build a wide range of portal types, from business-to-consumer "megaportals" to business-to-business enterprise portals. What this means for your e-Commerce enterprise is a flexible, personalized, Web presence that listens and responds to your customers and partners based on what you define as important factors.
The Personalization Server makes extensive use of J2EE mechanisms such as Java Server Pages (JSP) with tag library extensions, session and entity Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), and Java Naming Directory Interface (JNDI).
The Personalization Server is a complete solution that enables rapid deployment of adaptable and personalized applications, allowing your businesses to extend competitive advantage and accelerate response time to customer and market demands.
Property Set Management
In the Property Set Management tool, you create property sets and define the properties that make up those property sets. Property Set Management provides schema details to personalization server subsystems such as User Management and Rules Management. Group, user, request and session schemas can be created in Property Set Management. Such profile schemas prescribe sets of profile attributes. A property can be considered a name/value pair. Property sets serve as a namespaces for properties, so that properties can be conveniently grouped, and so that multiple properties with the same name can be defined. For more information on Property Sets, see Creating and Managing Property Sets.
Personalization Advisor
The Personalization Advisor provides content personalization capabilities by using an embedded rules engine to classify a user and create a dynamic query into a content database to return personalized content for that user. The Personalization Advisor is an EJB that can be accessed directly, but is typically accessed through a set of JSP tags. These JSP tags allow HTML developers to assemble dynamic pages without writing any Java code. The personalization advisor was built to scale for large e-commerce web sites. It uses a pooling and caching mechanism to keep rules engines ready for rapid evaluation of Personalization rules. For more information about the Personalization Advisor, see the Personalization Advisor documentation.
User Management
User Management for the product is provided through a set of tools in our administration application and alternatively through any WebLogic Server Realm. Typically, new sites that rely on self-registration will use the WLPS user management tools. For sites with large collections of existing users in the form of customers or employees, the WebLogic Realm support can provide added security through products such as LDAP servers. For more information about User Management, see Creating and Managing Users.
Content Management
Content displayed in web pages may be simple or complex, statically or dynamically determined, and stored in a variety of ways. A simple type of content may be a GIF file; a complex type might be a "parse and display" of financial data from an external database query. A static piece of content may be an included HTML page with a company logo; a dynamic type may be a set of data representing stock quotes based on user preferences and the current quote value. Example sources of content might include: JSP, static HTML, XML, and files in many other formats; queries of external and internal database systems; HTTP and FTP results from other servers; or the content management system built into the Personalization Server.
The Personalization Server provides a content management component. Content that needs to be queried in a dynamic or complex way, and content that changes over time, are good candidates for storage using this component. Content stored in the content management component may be queried directly from JSP, through specialized query tags, or may be used by other components.
The content types are determined by the developer, as are the metadata properties that will be associated with the content type. The property set management scheme is not used to manage content properties, because the content management system is responsible for that functionality. A standard set of metadata properties, such as author, creation date, and MIME type, are automatically associated with all content types.
A set of object types is provided to construct queries to be submitted to the content management component. The page developer has tags available to do this, and other components use this facility as well. A collection of content objects is returned.
For more information on Content Management, see Creating and Managing Content.
Rules Management
A rule can be thought of as a stylized if-then construct. In the Personalization Server, rules are used to do two things: 1) classify users and 2) select content for display from the content management system based on the user. A rules service is provided to take the appropriate inputs for a particular user and return results.
A classification rule may be employed to determine what the user logged in fits a certain classification, given the user's and current group's property values or the Request or Session properties. So, for example, if a user is over 35, under 65, and is male, then the user is considered a middle age man. If a classifier rule evaluates to true, it returns a Classification object with the same name as the classification. The results of this rule can be used by a page developer to vary the content displayed based on one or more classifications.
Content selector rules, if they evaluate to true, will result in a query that can be sent to the content management component. The if parts of the content selectors can make decisions based on all the same types of criteria as the classification rules, and also can use the current time to constrain when the rule is in effect. They can also refer to classifier rules, so fundamental categorizations can be reused. The result of a content selector is a ContentQuery object, which contains a query expression that can be directly submitted to the content management component.
Rules in the Personalization Server are organized and saved in rulesheets. A rulesheet may have any combination of classifiers and content selectors, which can be called by name using the JSP tags.
For more information on Rules, see Creating and Managing Rules.
Portal Management
Portal Management provides an HTML windowing toolkit for web site developers, group administrators and actual end-users to personalize, customize and individualize the layout, look, and content of an e-commerce site. It provides these features through a set of JSP tags, EJBs and administration tools. If the customer chooses to use the Portal product, they will develop portlets in JSP. These portlets are mini-windows on to information, content or application services available in the portal. They can be minimized, maximized in their own window, edited, and provided with help. Once built, a Portal administrator selects portlets for availability in their portal. Once available, a portal user controls the layout and visibility of these windows.For more information on Portal management, see Creating and Managing Portals.
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