Best Practices for Profiles

  • Article

This topic lists the best practices for creating and managing your profiles in the Commerce Server Profiles resource.

  • Use the following minimum permissions for the Profile service_ADsource connection string to the Active Directory:

    • Domain user in the domain
    • Create, Delete, Read, and Reset Password on the base URL Organizational Unit

    If you are not using an account that has permission to create the base URL Organization Unit, then you must manually create the base URL Organization Unit before unpacking the site.

    If you change the connection string for the global resource ADsource to a normal user with delegated permissions (full control) to the SupplierAD container, users can be created using the Business Desk, but organizations cannot be created. The NTSecurityDescriptor, required to create organizations, is not returned unless the user is an administrator, or a member of Domain Administrator, or has the "Manage Auditing and Security Log" security policy applied.

  • To store a profile in Active Directory, the profile must include the properties cn and SAMAccountname for the out-of-the-box user profile.

    These minimum properties are required to satisfy Active Directory constraints. Other properties might be required depending on the profile definition type.

  • Use embedded profiles to associate profile data.

    If you want to store multiple addresses for each user, add a property for each address to the user profile definition (such as billing address, shipping address1, shipping address2, and so on). Define the type of each of these properties as profile, and then associate each property with an instance of the address profile definition. This enables you to use the Profile Service to retrieve the addresses (by address ID) and to take advantage of the Profile Service cache to speed the retrieval of the specified address. Additionally, this method enables you to avoid using CSOLEDB altogether on the site. By not using CSOLEDB on the site, you reduce the memory footprint of your process, and free up some database connections.

    For information about embedding profiles, see Embedding a Profile Definition.

  • Publish profile changes to your Web site on off-peak hours.

    If you publish profile changes to your Web site during high usage, you will bring down your site.

  • Use Business Desk to import selected profile properties to Data Warehouse.

    Use Business Desk to select the profile properties that will be imported into the Data Warehouse. For more information, see Specifying Data to be Imported into the Data Warehouse and Importing Cookies.

  • Use the Profile data import Data Transformation Services (DTS) task to import profile data into the Data Warehouse.

    Address profiles are stored in the Addresses table in the Commerce Server database. By default, the Addresses table (source) is mapped to the Address class (destination) in the Data Warehouse.

    UserObject profiles are stored in the UserObject table in the Commerce Server database. By default, the UserObject table (source) is mapped to the RegisteredUser class (destination) in the Data Warehouse.

    For detailed information about how the Address and UserObject profiles map to columns in the Data Warehouse, see ETL Process for the Profile Data Import DTS Task.

  • To view all the site terms your site currently uses, run the SiteTerms.vbs script, available in the Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit.

    Commerce Server 2002 provides the BusinessDataAdmin2::GetSiteTerms Method API to retrieve site terms from the profile catalog.

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