Chapter 7. User Profiles

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Chapter 7. User Profiles

Portals are designed to serve many types of users and to provide an experience for each audience that best matches their expectations and needs. Portal audiences include anonymous Internet users, employees , system administrators, developers, webmasters, content creators , editors, trading partners , and many others. It is much easier to meet the needs of your users when you know who they are and can make educated guesses about what they might need from your portal. As a result, user profiles are essential for nearly every portal.

User profiles are records containing two kinds of data:

  • Information about the user such as name , address, interests, demographic information, and a host of other data relevant to the portal

  • Data concerning the user's activities in the portal, such as authentication details and past behavior on your portal

In most cases, personal information is gathered by users filling out online forms such as registration forms, order forms, and others. The web log, which tracks which pages were visited and in which order, is the key source for data about user activity on the site. You may want to merge data from both these sources into a data warehouse for reporting and analysis purposes. User profiles are essential for securing your site, providing personalization, and tracking user activity. You can use them for targeted emails, mailings , and marketing and advertising campaigns . Figure 7.1 shows the overall architecture for a profile within a portal.

Figure 7.1. Portal Profile Architecture

graphics/07fig01.gif


You can store profile data in a directory service such as Microsoft Active Directory or a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory, in a relational database, or both. For an enterprise portal, Active Directory is a likely choice for authentication because the portal is only available to internal users; and if you are using Active Directory for network and email authentication, you know every user already has an Active Directory entry. A commerce site, on the other hand, is more likely to use a relational database such as SQL Server to track orders, which in turn provide vital data for the profile. SharePoint Portal Server and Commerce Server both store profile information in the database.

This chapter explains how to determine the user profiles you will need, where the data should be stored in the overall portal architecture, and how that data might be used for enhancing the user experience and increasing the effectiveness of your portal in reaching your audience. I also discuss how profiles can be helpful for anonymous users, and the differences between profiles in Internet, intranet, and extranet scenarios.

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Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers
Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers
ISBN: 0321159632
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 164

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