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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
Practitioner Studio
Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
Personalization
Learn how to configure your HCL Digital Experience portal site as an Administrator.
Digital Experience Personalization
Digital Experience Personalization provides automatic customization of website content presented to individual users and user groups.
LikeMinds Recommendations
Personalization contains a dynamic recommendation system based on LikeMinds, which is software that is used with your e-commerce applications.
Configuring LikeMinds
Use a suitable database modification tool or edit the likemindsdb.properties file to configure your LikeMinds server installation.
Configuring the LikeMinds engines
Configuring LikeMinds utilities
Learn what and how to configure LikeMinds utilities in HCL Digital Experience.
Configuring the sifter for mentor selection
Learn how to configure the sifter to find mentors for your LikeMinds server engines.
Sifter performance considerations
The sifter places high processing demands on the system running it. For this reason it is important to tune it with consideration of its usage and environment.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
- Configuring
  Run the following tasks after you install and deploy HCL Digital Experience. They address tasks that are typically run one time and have a global effect. Some configuration changes are made more frequently or do not have a global effect. These tasks are addressed in the Administering section.
- Backup and restore
  Backup and recovery of data files and databases is an essential operation for any business system, particularly for data and applications that run in production environments. Create and follow a plan for backing up and recovering data on all tiers of your HCL Digital Experience deployment. IBM Installation Manager must also be included in backup and recovery planning. If you back up the HCL Portal file structure and then install a fix pack, your HCL Digital Experience and IBM Installation Manager become out of sync after you restore the HCL Portal file system. This condition is not recoverable.
- Migrating
  Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
- Integrating
  Integrate HCL Digital Experience with software such as HCL Sametime to enable your users to collaborate more easily. You can also use the unified task list portlet to integrate HCL with your backend business process software, such as IBM Process Server.
- Administering
  Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
- Securing
  Security tasks include setting up property extension databases and custom user repositories, configuring and activating SSL, and configuring authentication. In addition, tasks such as activating Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and NIST SP800-131a security modules and configuring external security managers such as Security Access Manager might be required to secure your portal environment.
- Monitoring
  HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
- Setting up a website
  Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
- Staging to production
  During portal solution development, the solution is initially developed, tested, and refined on one server or a limited number of servers. The solution is deployed later on live systems, referred to as the production environment. The process of moving the solution from the development environment to the production environment is called staging.
- Developing
  This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
  - Working with Practitioner Studio
    Learn how to enable, configure and disable Practitioner Studio on the latest version of HCL Digital Experience.
  - Web content
    Learn more about managing libraries, creating, editing or cleaning up data, and setting up syndication for HCL Digital Experience web content management.
  - Site templates
    Site templates are configured and managed using Site Builder. If you choose not to enable Practitioner Studio, you can still manage Site Templates using the Application navigation menu in the toolbar.
  - Themes
    Learn how to use the Theme Manager portlet and the Theme Optimization Analyzer in creating and developing theme web content.
  - Personalization
    Learn how to configure your HCL Digital Experience portal site as an Administrator.
    - Digital Experience Personalization
      Digital Experience Personalization provides automatic customization of website content presented to individual users and user groups.
      - How a site is personalized
        Use this topic to understand how to define a personalized list of new articles for a website, such as a section of an intranet site for targeted employee bulletins or where the content of the site is tailored to the particular user.
      - Personalization terms
        The concepts and principles for working with Portal Personalization require an understanding of terminology.
      - The Personalization interface
        The Portal Personalization user interface consists of three portlets: the Personalization Navigator, Personalization Editor, and the Personalized List.
      - Publishing personalization rules
        HCL Digital Experience Personalization sends published rules across HTTP to a servlet which resides on each personalization server.
      - The Web Content resource collection
        The Web Content resource collection allows you to write rules that select lists of content from the HCL Web Content Manager.
      - The Portal User resource collection
        The Portal User resource collection uses public APIs provided by HCL Digital Experience to access user information.
      - LikeMinds Recommendations
        Personalization contains a dynamic recommendation system based on LikeMinds, which is software that is used with your e-commerce applications.
        LikeMinds Recommendation Engine architecture
        To build your own recommendation application, customize the LikeMinds Recommendation Engine settings to work with your database and Web applications.
        How LikeMinds generates recommendations
        Learn how LikeMinds generates recommendations when a user logs on and navigates through your HCL Digital Experience web site.
        The LikeMinds Recommendation Engines
        Learn about the three types of recommendation engines, Preference engine, Clickstream engine, and Item Affinity engine.
        The LikeMinds utilities
        Get an overview of the utilities that support running of background processes along with the LikeMinds server.
        Configuring LikeMinds
        Use a suitable database modification tool or edit the likemindsdb.properties file to configure your LikeMinds server installation.
        Estimating database size
        The size of your database depends on your application, as well as the number of users and items. View some general guidelines for estimating the size of your database, but your results may vary.
        Database performance
        View some guidelines for performance optimization in your LikeMinds database.
        Scheduling LikeMinds events
        Use the lps.schedule setting to schedule events to be fired at specific dates and times.
        Configuring the LikeMinds engines
        Configuring the Preference engine
        The Preference Engine generates recommendations based on users' ratings of items. You can configure the following settings for the Preference Engine.
        Configuring LikeMinds utilities
        Learn what and how to configure LikeMinds utilities in HCL Digital Experience.
        Configuring the sifter for mentor selection
        Learn how to configure the sifter to find mentors for your LikeMinds server engines.
        Sifter-specific mentor set configuration
        You can specify the following categories of sifter-specific configuration parameters for mentor sets below.
        How the mentor selection process works
        In order to fully understand the sifter, it is important to have a clear idea of how the mentor selection process works, and how to set configuration parameters that increase the accuracy of your recommendations.
        Sifter performance considerations
        The sifter places high processing demands on the system running it. For this reason it is important to tune it with consideration of its usage and environment.
        Recomputing (rebuilding) the mentor pool
        For better recommendations, you must recompute, or rebuild, the mentor pool at least once a day, ideally at a time when the database has little usage. This allows new users to become mentors and removes current mentors who are no longer good mentors.
        Running multiple sifters
        Use the following settings to run multiple instances of the sifter and have all the sifters share some configuration parameters and override others.
        Preventing multiple sifters from sifting the same user
        When you run multiple sifters simultaneously to distribute load, use the following setting to prevent multiple sifters from sifting the same user in the Lps_User_Data table. This setting limits the sifter to look at only a certain group of users, or eliminates a group of users from being sifted.
        Number of threads to sift users
        Learn how to set the number of threads to sift users.
        Sifter sleep time when the Lps_User_Data sift_pri field Is 0
        The Lps_User_Data sift_pri field values must be greater than 0 in order for the sifter to get useful data (that is, updated mentors) for users.
        Time interval for checking sift priority
        Learn how to specify time interval for checking sift priority.
        Ratability parameters
        The buildvisit background utility computes a ratability value for each item in the database. It is only used for the Preference Engine.
        Repeated items in visit list
        To specify whether the buildvisit utility should repeat an item in the visit list to be shown to a user, set db.visitlist.ratability.duplication_threshold. Items with ratability values greater than this threshold may be repeated.
        Configuring the Clickstream Engine
        Learn how to configure the Clickstream Engine.
        Configuring the Item Affinity Engine
        For every cross-selling transaction in the user's shopping history, the Item Affinity Engine derives its calculations from the following statistics.
        Specifying recommendation behavior
        You can configure several parameters that affect the way the LikeMinds server generates recommendations.
        MovieSite Sample
        The MovieSite documentation focuses on six aspects of LikeMinds capabilities.
        Using the LikeMinds utilities
        Learn about the four utilities LikeMinds uses to update the database, buildvisit (for the Preference Engine), sifter, buildstats, and lpsIAA (for the Item Affinity Engine's accumulator utility).
        Filtering LikeMinds recommendations
        When LikeMinds makes recommendations, it can make the recommendations based on all items in your resource collection, or it can limit the predictions to only items that have certain characteristics.
      - Feedback and analytics
        Personalization provides a complete logging framework for collecting data on how visitors are using your Web site. If Feedback is enabled, data is automatically collected about each Personalization rule that is fired. In addition, development tools enable Web sites to collect a variety of data related to visitors' actions and behavior. By default this data is logged to a standard database schema for later analysis and reporting. The framework is also extensible, allowing Web sites to customize and supplement the way data is collected and stored to more fully meet their needs.
      - Developing a personalized portlet
        This exercise demonstrates how to use Personalization features of HCL Digital Experience and Rational Application Developer to build your first personalized portlet. Your final result is a working portlet that uses Personalization rules and content spots to display personal news based on user attributes (or profiles).
      - Personalization programming reference
        HCL Digital Experience provides the programming model, processes, and APIs for the Personalization rules and resource engines.
      - Personalization APIs
  - Portal administration
    Use the Portal administration portlets that are provided with HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
  - Registration/Edit my profile
    Managing Registration/Edit my Profile is one of the available Administrator-related features in the Practitioner Studio interface.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

Sifter performance considerations

The sifter places high processing demands on the system running it. For this reason it is important to tune it with consideration of its usage and environment.

Use the following simple guidelines when tuning the sifter:

Schedule the sifter to build the mentor pools during hours of the day when there is low traffic volume, for example, at 3 a.m.
Tune the number of processing threads used by the process. You can configure this setting for each mentor set.
To optimize the resource utilization of the sifter, set the number of threads to spawn to twice the number of CPUs in the machine that the accumulator is running on. The LikeMinds Recommendation Engine configuration value that controls this is item_affinity_set.item_affinity.num_threads.
Distribute the sifter onto a separate server from the LikeMinds Recommendation Engine.
Run multiple sifter processes distributed across multiple machines for greater scalability.