Profiles System

  • Article

The Commerce Server 2009 Core Profiles System (Profiles System) lets you create, collect, track, store, and use business data objects. The Profiles System stores two main business data object types: profiles and site terms. You use profiles to characterize shoppers, organizations, addresses, credit cards, currencies, and other objects that you want to define and track to support your business objectives. You use site terms to provide a limited set of choices for shoppers when they enter personal preferences or other information in your Web site.

The Profiles System includes the following functional and scale benefits necessary to support large-scale enterprise deployments:

  • Data partitioning. Allows for distribution of physical stores for membership and shopper profiles.

  • Data aggregation. Allows for unified access to multiple heterogeneous physical stores, such as SQL Server and Active Directory LDAP.

  • Data encryption. Provides hashing and encryption properties for storing sensitive data such as credit cards and shopper passwords.

  • Shopper profile management user interface. Access and manage profiles and site terms through the Customer and Orders Manager application. For information about the features available, see Customer and Orders Manager.

  • Profile schema management user interface. Create, modify, and manage profile definitions and site terms by using the Profile Schema Manager. This is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in and is accessible from the Commerce Server Manager. For a summary of features, see Commerce Server Manager.

  • Click-stream and shopper profile analytics. Integration with the Data Warehouse and analytics systems.

Commerce Server 2009 stores profile information in the Profiles data store. You can base this in Active Directory, SQL Server, or both. You can export data from the Profiles data store into the Data Warehouse, and then use SQL Reporting Services to analyze the profile data that you collect.

Features Overview

The following table describes the Profiles System features and enhancements.

Feature

Description

Data management

  • Predefined profiles. Commerce Server 2009 provides default profiles for addresses, blanket purchase orders, credit cards, organizations, user objects, and currency.

  • Manage profile schema. Extend the Profiles database schema by creating your own custom properties for profile definitions.

  • Profile definition management.

    • Create, change, and delete data sources, data objects, and data members.

    • Add custom attributes to data sources, profile definitions, and profile properties.

    • Create, change, and delete profile definitions.

    • Change and organize profile properties.

  • Schema import/export. Import and export profile schema.

Application Programming Interfaces

  • Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation. Use for:

    • Authorized profile. Manage profile authorization programmatically.

    • Bulk query syntax. Perform bulk query of profile database programmatically.

    • Profile runtime. Find, create, and store shopper profile data programmatically.

    • Profile schema. Manage profile schema definitions programmatically.

    • Site terms management. Manage definition of site terms programmatically.

    • Profile Web service. Allows for distributed management of the Profiles System plus client connectivity support.

Applications

  • Customer and Orders Manager. Find and view shopper profiles and define site terms by using a Windows Smart Client Web services-enabled application.

  • Profiles Schema Manager. Manage profile definitions and site terms.

LOB support

  • BizTalk Adapter for Profiles. Exchange profile data with external systems programmatically.

  • Synchronization. Synchronize any line-of-business system with profile data on the production server.

Analytics and reporting

  • Data Warehouse and Analytics authentication module for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Allows for Commerce Server 2009 Data Warehouse and analytics systems to correlate logged ASP.NET shoppers to Commerce Server 2009 shoppers for Data Warehouse reporting. 

  • Analytics integration. Generate reports on shopper activity. Commerce Server 2009 provides the following reports:

    • Distinct Users by Time

    • New Registered Users

    • Registered User Properties

    • Registered Users by Date Registered

    • User Days to Register

    • User Registration Rate

    • User Trends

Security

  • Profile data encryption/decryption. Commerce Server 2009 provides two encryption methods: one-way hash for storage of password secrets, and asymmetric encryption for storage of credit cards and other data that requires separate decryption.

  • Property encryption. Support for one-way hashing of passwords and asymmetric, reversible encryption for properties.

  • Membership provider for Visual Studio 2008. Support for Commerce Server 2009 Profiles data store to participate in Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET membership authentication.

International

  • Language preference. Track and store a shopper's preference for language on the Web site.

See Also

Other Resources

Analysis Reporting

Customer and Orders Manager

Commerce Server Manager

Before You Start Developing with the Profiles System

Development Platform and Commerce Server Systems