Custom Fit

Personalization can greatly improve productivity and usability while providing key marketing advantages

By Colin White

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The User-Driven Approach

With this personalization approach, portal users are presented with a list of business content sources, and they select what that they would like to see displayed on their personalized portal home page. This is somewhat similar to the personalization facility supported by my.yahoo.com that was discussed earlier. The list of sources is created and maintained by portal administrators and can be updated by users publishing business content to the portal for sharing with other portal users. An entry in the list may be the name of an application or document, or may be the name of a business content server (a database, file, or document management system, for example) that manages content on behalf of a specific application or department. To help locate information managed by a business content server, a portal will normally provide a search facility.

The main issue with the user-driven approach to personalization is that there is usually little ability to categorize source content by business subject area - other than a rudimentary facility that organizes the list of content sources by keyword. The lack of a rich categorization facility makes it difficult for portal users to locate needed content as the number of content sources increases. To solve this problem, some portal products provide a categorization manager to document information about source business content in an information directory. Entries in the information directory are organized in a hierarchy of subject-based folders where each subject is related to a specific business topic or concept. The business taxonomy that defines this folder structure is developed during the portal design process and is used by the categorization manager to determine the most appropriate folder in which to document information business content.

Categorization is done by applying taxonomy rules to information extracted from the business content itself, or from the metadata about the business content (file name, Web page URL, author, and so on). Sometimes external search engines are used to help create or enhance the business taxonomy. Examples of search-engine vendors include Autonomy Corp., Semio Corp., and Verity Inc. Products from these vendors use a variety of techniques (pattern matching, rules-based, and semantic analysis) to search source content and to create a business taxonomy.

The Application Approach

A portal's categorization manager and its associated information directory support an application-driven approach to personalization. Here the information directory becomes the roadmap to the complete domain of business content that can be viewed by business users through the portal. To find the business content they require, portal users navigate the folder entries in the information director, or search the directory using the portal's search engine. Information directory entries seen by the user are filtered based on security requirements, and on personalization rules that define the type of business content that users require to perform their jobs. Not all portal products provide a categorization manager or an information directory, and this is a key distinguishing factor between portal products.

As this brief article has shown, there are many different uses for personalization and correspondingly many types of personalization technology and products. Used wisely, personalization can provide significant productivity gains and can become a key marketing advantage for e-businesses.

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Colin White (cwhite@databaseassociates.com) is the founder of DataBase Associates and specializes in data warehousing, business intelligence, database systems, and intelligent e-business. He is a frequent contributing writer to Intelligent Enterprise and other magazines.