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4.4: Personalizing applications

4.4: Personalizing applications

Personalization describes a range of features that enable applications to treat visitors as particular individuals. For a really simple example, consider a site that issues the message "Hello, John Smith" when the customer John Smith logs onto the site.

Personalized service can give your Web site a competitive edge, much like a good customer service team can add value to human-to-human interactions at your physical site and keep customers coming back. Personalization can also increase the chance that your Web site presents a user with content that is of particular interest to that person.

For an e-business site, personalization can be fairly necessary, even if it does not go so far as to call customers by name. For example, suppose several Web site visitors are performing various transactions concurrently. Applications need some way to group each user's transactions into a unit that is separate from the transactions of other users. Session tracking provides such functionality.

See articles 0.11 and 0.12 to learn about two complementary personalization approaches supported by IBM WebSphere Application Server -- tracking user sessions and maintaining user profiles.

If you are already familiar with the concepts, skip ahead to 4.4.1 and 4.4.2 for programming details. See 6.6.11 and 6.6.12 to take a look at the administrative aspects.

For additional capability offered by the IBM WebSphere Personalization product, visit the following Web site:

http://www.ibm.com/software/webservers/personalization/
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Go to previous article: Converting WAR files to Web applications (wartowebapp script) Go to next article: Tracking sessions