You can maintain separate profile repositories for external and internal users, and the ATG platform and most ATG applications are configured by default to do so. External user profiles represent anyone who visits your externally-facing Web sites. For commerce sites, external users are typically customers. Internal user profiles represent people within your organization who use ATG applications such as the Business Control Center or ATG Service to create and manage site content. Maintaining distinct profiles for internal and external users has a number of benefits:

The default external user profile repository is /atg/userprofiling/ProfileAdapterRepository, which is defined by the userProfile.xml file located in <ATG10dir>\DPS\config\profile.jar. Each ATG application that adds properties to the external user profile stores its userProfile.xml file in an ExternalUsers sub-module.

Internal profiles are stored in the /atg/userprofiling/InternalProfileRepository, defined by the internalUserProfile.xml file in <ATG10dir>\DPS\InternalUsers\config\config.jar.

For information on the default internal/external profile repository model, including information on how the repositories are used by the Business Control Center and other ATG applications, refer to the ATG Business Control Center Administration and Development Guide.

Internal Profile Repository

This chapter describes how to set up and configure the ProfileAdapterRepository. However, the InternalProfileRepository is also an instance of atg.adapter.gsa.GSARepository, and you can extend and configure it using the methods described in this chapter for the ProfileAdapterRepository.

Many of the services provided for the ProfileAdapterRepository that are described in this manual also exist for the InternalProfileRepository. For example, the ATG Personalization module includes an /atg/userProfiling/InternalProfileTools component, which is implementation of class atg.userprofiling.ProfileTools configured for the InternalProfileRepository.

A parallel set of database tables also exists for internal user profiles. Where the user item in the ProfileAdapterRepository references the dps_user table, the user item in the InternalProfileRepository points to a dpi_user table, and so on.

In most cases, external user profiles are created automatically when a user visits one of your Web sites. However, internal user profiles are typically not created in this way. After you have defined the properties that make up the internal profile repository, you must create individual profile items for each user in your system. The recommended interface for doing so is the Business Control Center. See the next section, Profile Repository Administration Interfaces.

Note that the Business Control Center is configured by default to accept logins from profiles in the internal user repository.