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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.
Personalization programming reference
HCL Digital Experience provides the programming model, processes, and APIs for the Personalization rules and resource engines.
Workload management
Only one Portal Personalization engine can be installed on an application server.

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.
      - 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.
        Preparing your personalized application
        Before deploying applications that take advantage of the features of Portal Personalization, certain features must be configured in order to work properly. The Feedback and LikeMinds components of Personalization both communicate with their databases using Java data sources. Before using either of these components, you must create resource references to the data sources in your project.
        Programming model
        Personalization builds on the same programming model used by WebSphere Application Server.
        User and content models
        The first step in developing a Personalization solution is to analyze your business conditions and events to determine the users and content to be targeted. The business users and administrators are primarily responsible for this task.
        How the rules engine works
        The rules engine processes and delivers the results of a rule execution to a content spot contained in a web page. The content spot is marked by a content spot bean, which is placed in either a JSP file or a servlet. The JSP file or servlet is then linked to the web page.
        Workload management
        Only one Portal Personalization engine can be installed on an application server.
        Using the Personalization APIs
        Personalization provides open APIs that enable the Personalization run-time environment and Rational Application Developer to access user and content data in customer data stores.
        Generic query framework
        The generic query framework enables resource collection developers to convert a property-based query object into a language specific executable query string. It contains query component classes, and builder and callback interfaces.
        Request Context
        The Request Context is the interface used to access various attributes for rules.
        Sample Personalization resources XML file
        Use the sample file ExportFromServlet.xml as a reference for coding other Personalization actions.
        Content spot exits
        Content spot exits provide the ability to alter the default flow of processing of content spots, making it possible in the runtime environment to override the rule to process, the current user, and the results of rule processing.
        Resource cache
        Personalization uses the WebSphere Application Server Dynamic Cache service to cache the results of select rules and to cache the rules themselves in a DistributedMap. When publishing, importing or saving rules, the cache is flushed automatically to ensure that the site is current.
        Programmatically starting rules
        All types of rules can be accessed programmatically within a Java application. For example, a profiler can be used to determine the behavior that an application must exhibit depending on the current user, or an action can return content to your application for further processing before the content is displayed. Rules are mapped to content spots, and because a content spot is an implementation of JavaBeans, it can be programmatically declared and implemented.
        Rule Exception Handling in the run-time environment
        The default method of error or exception handling within the Personalization run-time environment is for the engine to print out a trace error to the application server's stdout log. Using an exception handling utility, it is possible to specify the type of output (error message or stacktrace), the output log file to use (stdout or stderr), and whether the exception should be rethrown to the JSP. The additional exception handling capabilities can be set on a per-request basis or globally.
      - 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.

Workload management | HCL Digital Experience

Only one Portal Personalization engine can be installed on an application server.

Consequently, there is one Personalization engine for each servlet engine. Personalization supports application server clustering, because each Personalization instance in the cluster shares the same IBM® Java™ Content Repository. Therefore, each Personalization instance accesses the same customer data stores.

IBM® WebSphere® Application Server dynamic caching is used to cache resource instance and the results of queries used in rules. The dynamic cache shares expiration notification for the cache across clones in a cluster. Although Personalization uses the dynamic cache internally to cache the results of rules, it is also possible to use the WebSphere® Application Server dynamic cache to cache the entire response from a JSP or servlet.

Note: Care must be taken when using Personalization and the dynamic cache of JSPs, servlets, or portlets. When using the dynamic cache to cache JSPs or servlets, the cache key must take into account all the inputs into any rules on that page. If rules on the page use an employee department attribute of a user resource, the cache key must be configured to contain this employee department attribute.