Profile repositories are a fundamental ATG concept that is discussed in detail in the ATG Personalization Programming Guide. A profile contains properties that describe the characteristics of your ATG application users. There are two kinds of profile properties: explicit and implicit. Web site users (for example, the customers of a commerce site) provide explicit properties themselves, typically by filling out a registration form or editing a Preferences page. Examples of explicit properties are a person’s name and address. Implicit properties are information that the system gathers about visitors by tracking their behavior at your sites. A list of recently browsed Web pages is an example of an implicit property.

Keeping track of profile properties makes it possible for a Web application to maintain persistent information about users and to deliver personalized content to them accordingly. For example, you could have an option on your registration form that asks visitors to indicate their income range, which the system stores as a profile property. You could then set up your site content so that you display different items according to the income range of each site visitor.

The profiles of site visitors or customers are external user profiles. However, anyone who uses ATG applications to manage activities related to your customer-facing sites also has a user profile. For example, marketers who are responsible for creating user segments or other targeting assets must have a profile in order to access the targeting interface in the Business Control Center. The profiles of ATG application users are internal user profiles. Unlike external profiles, internal profiles are not created or updated automatically. Instead, an administrator creates and manages them manually through the Business Control Center.

If an ATG installation uses preview features, the environment can also include preview profiles, which are used to test how content will appear to a sample user.

For information on how to configure the repositories used to store user profiles, including an architecture diagram, see Configuring Profile Repositories earlier in this guide.

The procedures for creating and managing user profiles through the Business Control Center are essentially the same for all three types of profile. This chapter describes these procedures.