Comparing dynamic business rules to content management publishing

In rule-based merchandising, a dynamic business rule specifies how to query for records to promote, and not necessarily what the specific records are.

Endeca's record promotion works differently from traditional content management systems (CMS), where you select an individual record for promotion, place it on a template or page, and then publish it to a Web site. Endeca's merchandising is dynamic, or rule based.

This means that, as your users navigate or search, they continue to see relevant results, because appropriate rules are in place. Also, as records in your data set change, new and relevant records are returned by the same dynamic business rule. The rule remains the same, even though the promoted records may change.

In a traditional CMS scenario, if Wine A is Recommended, it is identified as such and published onto a static page. If you need to update the list of recommended wines to remove Wine A and add Wine B to the static page, you must manually remove Wine A, add Wine B, and publish the changes.

With Endeca's dynamic record promotion, the effect is much broader and requires much less maintenance. A rule is created to promote wines tagged as Recommended, and the search results page is designed to render promoted wines. In this scenario, a rule promotes recommended Wine A on any number of pages in the result set. In addition, removing Wine A and adding Wine B is simply a matter of updating the source data to reflect that Wine B is now included and tagged as Recommended. After making this change, the same rule can promote Wine B on any number of pages in the result set, without adjusting or modifying the rule or the pages.