Installation Guide
An installation of HCL Unica products is complete when you install, configure, and deploy the HCL Unica products . The Installation Guide provides detailed information about installing, configuring, and deploying the products.
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
Administering Interact
When you administer Unica Interact you configure and maintain users and roles, data sources, and optional product features. You also monitor and maintain the design and runtime environments. Product-specific application programming interfaces (APIs) are available for you to use.
Security Management
Access to the Unica Interact runtime User Interface requires authentication. Only the Login IDs defined in Unica Platform and having Unica Interact admin role can access the pages.
Configuring users
Unica Interact requires you to configure two sets of users, runtime environment users and design environment users.
Managing Unica Interact data sources
Unica Interact requires several data sources to function properly. Some data sources contain the information Unica Interact requires to function, other data sources contain your data.
Offer serving
You can configure Unica Interact in many ways to enhance how it selects offers to present. The following sections describe these optional features in detail.
Understanding the Interact API
Unica Interact serves offers dynamically to a wide variety of touchpoints. For example, you can configure the runtime environment and your touchpoint to send messages to your call center employees informing them of the best up sell or cross sell prospects for a customer who has called with a specific type of service inquiry. You can also configure the runtime environment and your touchpoint to provide tailored offers to a customer (visitor) who has entered a particular area of your Web site.
Managing the Unica Interact API
Whenever you use the startSession method, you create a Unica Interact runtime session on the runtime server. You can use configuration properties to manage the sessions on a runtime server.
Classes and methods for the Unica Interact API
The following sections list requirements and other details you should know before you work with the Unica Interact API.
Classes and methods for the Interact JavaScript API
The following sections list requirements and other details you should know before you work with the Unica Interact JavaScript API.
About the ExternalCallout API
Unica Interact offers an extensible macro, EXTERNALCALLOUT, for use with your interactive flowcharts. This macro enables you to perform custom logic to communicate with external systems during flowchart runs. For example, if you want to calculate the credit score of a customer during a flowchart run, you can create a Java™ class (a callout) to do so and then use the EXTERNALCALLOUT macro in a Select process in your interactive flowchart to get the credit score from your callout.
Unica Interact utilities
This section describes the administrative utilities available with Unica Interact.
About the Learning API
Unica Interact offers a learning module which uses a naive-bayesian algorithm to monitor visitor actions and propose optimal offers (in terms of acceptance). You can implement the same Java™ interface with your own algorithms using the Learning API to create your own learning module.
Interact WSDL
The Unica Interact installation includes two WDSL (Web Services Description Language) XML files that describe the available web services and how to access them. You can view these files in your Unica Interact home directory, and an example is shown here.
Interact runtime environment configuration properties
This section describes all the configuration properties for the Unica Interact runtime environment.
Unica Interact Simulator
This section describes all the configuration properties for the Unica Interact simulator.
Interact design environment configuration properties
This section describes all the configuration properties for Unica Interact design environment.
Real-time offer personalization on the client side
There may be situations where you want to provide real-time offer personalization without implementing low-level Java™ code or SOAP calls to the Unica Interact server. For example, when a visitor initially loads a web page where Javascript content is your only extended programming available, or when a visitor opens an email message where only HTML content is possible. Unica Interact provides several connectors that provide real-time offer management in situations where you have control only over the web content that is loaded on the client side, or where you want to simplify your interface to Unica Interact.
Unica Interact and Digital Recommendations integration
Unica Interact can integrate with IBM Digital Recommendations to provide Unica Interact-driven product recommendations. Both products can provide product recommendations for offers, but using different methods. Digital Recommendations uses a visitor's web behavior (collaborative filter) to build correlations between visitors and recommended offers. Unica Interact is based on customer's past behavior, attributes, history, and less on view-level offers, learning which offers best match a customer's behavior profile (based on demographics and other information about the customer). Offer acceptance rates help to build a predictive model through self-learning. Using the best of both products, Unica Interact can use a personal profile to define offers that will pass a category ID to Digital Recommendations and retrieve recommended products based on popularity (the "wisdom of the crowds") for display to the visitor as part of the selected offers. This can provide better recommendations for customers that will result in more click-throughs and better outcomes than either product acting alone.
Interact and DDX integration
With Digital Data Exchange, your website can link to Unica Interact to provide a powerful omni-channel execution engine that delivers the best offers to the optimum channels and evolves (learns) from the offer feedback to continuously increase marketing effectiveness.
Configure gateways
Use triggered message gateways to send offer information from outbound channels.
Interact Design Time Separation from Campaign
Unica Interact 12.1.6 onwards, Interact Design Time is a standalone application under Unica suite, independent of Campaign. Interact Design Time has been part of the Unica Campaign product hence tightly coupled with Campaign and uses a lot of Campaign services. After separation, Interact Design Time can function properly irrespective of Campaign is installed or not. Interact Design Time is a new application under HCL Unica having its own configurations for Security, REST API Filter configuration, UI Navigation settings etc deployed with /InteractDT as context root.
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
Unica Interact overview
Unica Interact is an interactive engine that targets personalized offers to visitors of inbound marketing channels. You can configure Unica Interact to be behavioral, strictly event-based, situational, strategic, and so on. Unica Interact is a module within the Unica suite of tools.
Marketing Campaign
Designing the Unica Interact configuration is a multi-step process that involves many people in your organization. You work with the Unica Interact user interface, the Unica Interact API, and Unica Campaign flowcharts to configure your interactive marketing campaign.
Interactive channels
An interactive channel is a representation of a client-facing touchpoint that is used to coordinate all of the objects, data, and server resources that are involved in interactive marketing.
About interactive flowcharts
Interactive flowcharts are similar to Unica Campaign batch flowcharts when used to create strategic segments.
Gateways
This section provides details on the new user interface developed for Gateways.
Use triggered messages to send offers to different channels
You can use triggered actions to deliver offers to a different touchpoints than the one where the request was sent in Unica Interact. These offers are triggered by predefined user events and event patterns.
Understanding deployment to runtime servers
Deployment is how you transfer all the configuration that you define in the design environment to the runtime server groups. Deployment is grouped by interactive channel. When you deploy an interactive channel, you are sending all the data that is associated with an interactive channel to the selected runtime server group. This is why, when you are creating interactive channels, you must define the production runtime servers and the non-production (testing) runtime servers.
Simulator and Coverage analysis
You can run simulations in design time to easily test the events, event patterns, and strategies you defined for your interactive channel to make sure you receive the results you are expecting in runtime.
Personalization Playback
Marketers can use Personalization Playback to review activities that are the outcome of existing campaigns. Personalization Playback shows the aggregated user activities grouped by audience, offers, and segments. It also includes capabilities to drill-down for activity details such as profile attributes, session attributes, API history, event patterns status, delivered and disqualified offers for Interact APIs.
Profile data governance
Profile data may contain sensitive information. It was expected that Interact systems needed a mechanism so that the admins could configure the columns that are sensitive, and the level of data protection required. Admin users can choose to hide or mask the sensitive columns.
About the Interact List process in batch flowcharts
When Unica Interact is installed, the Interact List process is available in batch flowcharts. Similar to the Call List and Offer List processes, the Interact List process allows you to specify which offers are served to which visitors to your interactive site. This provides you with the ability to target offers to entire audience levels, target specific individual audience members, or suppress offers from specific audience members by using table-driven features.
About Interact reporting
Unica Interact is integrated with Unica reporting to deliver comprehensive Cognos® reports in Unica Interact.
An installation of Unica Interact consists of several components including third-party tools (such as web application servers, databases, and load balancers) and components such as Unica Platform and Unica Campaign. All of these components have several properties, features, and settings you can configure to improve performance.
About tuning Unica Interact for best performance
An installation of Unica Interact consists of several components including third-party tools (such as web application servers, databases, and load balancers) and components such as Unica Platform and Unica Campaign. All of these components have several properties, features, and settings you can configure to improve performance.
Unica Interact Design Time System Tables
When you install the Unica Interact design time server, you also run a series of SQL scripts to set up the required system tables in your data source that Unica Interact needs to operate. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the design time system tables.
Unica Interact Runtime System Tables
When you install the Unica Interact runtime server, you also run a series of SQL scripts to set up the required system tables in your data source that Unica Interact needs to operate. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the runtime system tables.
Unica Interact Learning Tables
When you install the Unica Interact design time server, you also run a SQL script to set up the required tables in your data source that Unica Interact needs to run the learning service. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the learning tables.
Unica Interact User Tables
When you install the Unica Interact runtime server, you also run a SQL script to set up the required user tables in your data source that Unica Interact needs to operate. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the user tables.
Unica Interact Contact and Response History Tables
When you install the Unica Interact design time server, you also run a SQL scripts to set up the required tables in your data source that Unica Interact needs to track contact and response history data. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the contact and response history tables.
Unica Interact Event Pattern Report Tables
This section describes the database schema design for the Unica Interact Event Pattern report. To improve the Event Pattern report execution time, the report is designed to run on the aggregated data. The aggregation process is to collect the transactional ETL data and store it in separate tables from which the report is generated. The tables in which the aggregated data is stored are described here.
Unica Interact Event Pattern ETL Tables
When you install the Unica Interact Event Pattern ETL process, you also run a SQL script to set up the required event pattern tables in your data source that Unica Interact needs to operate. This document provides a data dictionary describing the structure and content of the event pattern tables.
Macros can be used in Unica Campaign and Unica Interact to enhance your flowcharts.
Using Macros in Unica Campaign
This chapter provides usage information about Unica Campaign macros. Be sure to read this chapter before you attempt to use macros in Unica Campaign.
Using macros in Unica Interact
This chapter provides usage information about Unica Interact macros. Be sure to read this chapter before you attempt to use macros in Unica Interact.
Macros Reference
This section describes each available macro that is available for use in Campaign, Interact, or both. Macros are listed in alphabetical order.
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
HCL Marketing Software Support in the GDPR Context
HCL Unica provides GDPR support for the following Unica products:
Procedure: High Level
The high level procedure to execute the Interact GDPR utility is listed underneath: