You can populate the preview repository in two ways:
Manually. You can create preview profiles through the ATG Business Control Center as you would create any other user profile (see Creating New Profiles in the next chapter). A possible disadvantage of doing so is that you will be previewing using profiles that may have references to items that have not yet been deployed, which means that the content that is eventually displayed to customers may not be exactly the same as the content that was displayed during the preview. If your intention is to preview new items before deploying them, however, this behavior may be what you want.
By importing data. You can copy selected profiles containing actual customer data from the ProfileAdapterRepository on the production server into the preview profile repository. This method is helpful if the profiles have large numbers of properties, or properties that need to be set through a production site in order to have meaningful data. Perform the import regularly if you require up-to-date profiles for previewing.
One way to import profile data is to use the Profile Migration Manager utility, described in the ATG Personalization Programming Guide.
