Overview of User Profiles and Property Sets

A user profile is a schema that determines which data you collect and store about a user. Similarly, a group profile is a schema that determines which data you collect and store about a specific group of users. Each piece of data in a user profile is called a user property. A user profile is the entire collection of user property values for a user from all available user property sets.

User properties can range from statically-defined properties, such as a user's Social Security number, to dynamically-created and persisted properties, such as Web-site tracking information for a particular user, or user preferences entered from a standard input screen.

User profiles use property sets to organize the properties that they contain. A property set is a convenient way to give a name to a group of properties for a specific purpose.

A property set type establishes a set of expectations for how a property set is used. For example, a property set for users called "personal" could contain such properties as age, gender, marital status, and social security number. Another property set called "preferences" could contain such properties as hobby, favorite color, and news preference.

User profiles are a key component in Interaction Management. When users log in to a portal, the portal knows all their property values and can target them with personalized content, e-mails, and discounts based on the personalization rules you set up.

Security and User Profiles

User profiles are a key component in portal security. When you use visitor entitlements to limit end user access to portal resources (desktops, books, pages, portlets, and other resources), the visitor entitlements can be defined with user properties. For example, you could create an visitor entitlement role called "manager" that says, "If a user who logs in has an "employee_type" property with a value of "manager," that user belongs to the "manager" role. You could then select a portlet and set its visitor entitlement to the "manager" role. Then, when a manager logs in, the manager sees the portlet. If a non-manager logs in, the person does not see the portlet.

User profiles also play a role in setting up delegated administration. You can create Delegated Administration roles using, among other things, user properties.

When setting up visitor entitlements and delegated administration, you will see the following option: "The user has specific characteristics." (Double-check that option name). This is the option you use to select user profile properties in defining the visitor entitlement or Delegated Administration role.