IFS and IFS Applications

IFS announced today that IFS Applications 7, the seventh generation of the company's component-based business application suite, allows companies to use IFS Applications' content and processes directly within IBM WebSphere Portal. This capability complements the personal portals available in IFS Applications. It adds the ability to build scalable portals using IBM WebSphere, which improve employee productivity and increase customer loyalty.

IFS now enables companies to include all IFS portlets in an enterprise-wide IBM WebSphere Portal. Running IFS Applications with IBM WebSphere Portals, companies can set up portals that combine portlets for specific processes in IFS Applications with the more than 600 portlets available in the WebSphere Portal catalog. At the same time, users can use preconfigured IFS personal portals for specific roles and tasks.

In 1999, IFS Applications was one of the first business application suites to include portal functionality. Today, customers like BAE SYSTEMS, Bofors AB, and Statnett use the predefined, role-based portals in IFS Applications, along with more than 250 individual portlet applications, to set up role-based portals to provide employees, customers, and suppliers with relevant information and functionality.

"Portals are an important means of achieving efficient collaboration and high user productivity, which is why portals have been a key component of the IFS Applications user interface for many years," said IFS chief technology officer Dan Johansson. "By supporting IBM WebSphere Portal, we can add value to our customers' portal solutions through the broad range of third-party portlets and collaboration and integration tools that are available for the IBM WebSphere Portal."

"By supporting IBM WebSphere Portal, IFS joins the front line when it comes to allowing people to interact and collaborate in a personalized way," said Gunnar Millde, Manager of ISV and Developer Relations, Nordic, for IBM. "The strong combination of WebSphere Portal and IFS Applications will allow our customers to get the dynamic information they need."

The integration between IFS Applications and IBM WebSphere Portal is based on open standards that are implemented using the Java(TM) Portlet API (JSR 168). An extension to the J2EE(TM) 1.4 platform, the Java Portlet API has quickly become the de-facto standard for portal interoperability.

"Since the Java Portlet API is an open standard that is or will be supported by most vendors, we can extend our support to other portals in the future," Johansson said. "For now, WebSphere Portal is where we see customer demand."

IFS is an IBM ISV Advantage Partner. Besides portals, IFS and IBM collaborate on application servers, mobile technology, and hardware. IFS Applications is supported on IBM WebSphere Application Server, and the IFS Mobile Client uses J2ME(TM) components from IBM Workplace Client Technology(TM), Micro Edition.

About IFS and IFS Applications

IFS (XSSE: IFS) is one of the world's leading providers of component-based business software developed using open standards. IFS' industry-focused solutions are optimized for ERP, enterprise asset management, and MRO. IFS Applications(TM) offers companies an integrated lifecycle approach to managing customers, products, assets and services, enabling them to employ lean enterprise concepts, control costs, manage projects, increase efficiencies in their supply chain, and measure their performance.

An introduction to LikeMinds:

Personalization contains a dynamic recommendation system based on LikeMinds. LikeMinds is software that is used with your e-commerce applications. LikeMinds analyzes user interactions that occur on your Web site and generates real time predictions and recommendations to your Web site users.

Real time predictions are generated by three LikeMinds engines using recommendation rules within Personalization. These rules, called recommend content, base their predictions on transactions logged through Personalization's rating and action beans.

When a user visits your Web site, rating and action beans log captured transactional data. If your e-commerce Web site is set up so that users can rate content (or products), you use Rating beans to capture rating data. Similarly, if you use shopping cart technology, you use action logging beans to capture content affinity behavior to capture shopping activity. Both rating and action data is stored in your database. For example, the following

Types of transactions may be recorded:

1. Products a user has purchased
2. Items added or removed from a shopping basket
3. A history of the user's navigation throughout the application
4. Products that go best with a product that the user has already selected
5. Any action or series of actions that are meaningful for a site

Using recommend content rules, LikeMinds surfaces results through a set of recommendation engines. These engines predict relevant content for users based on their past Web browsing habits. Typically, after a user has rated a minimum number of items or completed a minimum number of transaction activities, that user is assigned a set of mentors. A mentor is a specially designated user who has visited the e-commerce application a number of times, and whose profile is similar to the user's. LikeMinds uses a technique called collaborative filtering to build a mentor's profile for each user to predict how much a user will like particular items and which items that user will enjoy, buy, or add to their shopping cart.

Predicting a matching product to go with a user's selected product, independent of actual user preferences, is accomplished by the discovery of probable pairs of product matches to be recommended. This concept is called item affinity and uses a family of algorithms different from collaborative filtering. While collaborative filtering uses its algorithms to discern the highly variable affinities between individual Web-surfers, the item affinity approach looks at relationships that can exist between items.

You can use LikeMinds in a variety of situations, including:

1. eRetailer promotion and personalization Web sites
2. Financial portal content recommendation and personalization Web sites
3. Help desk and/or on-line technical support content recommendation Web sites
4. Gift recommendations for eRetailer
5. Music, movie, book, or other product rating and recommendations
6. Travel bureau trip planners

By:
WebSphere Developers's Team
http://www.websphereguru.net

Introduction to Personalization:

“Personalization" allows a portal or Web site to choose which content should appear for a particular user..
For example, a site using Personalization might show different news articles to managers than to regular employees, or different information to valued customers.

We can define content through a number of applications, including Document Manager or Web Content Management. Personalization automatically detects the content definition from these applications. Definitions of database or LDAP content types can also be made through a Personalization wizard included with Rational Application Developer V6.

Once you define the content type, attributes of the content are exposed to the rule author. The rule author can use these attributes to make conditions which define if and when certain content is displayed, or even if certain actions like database updates and triggered e-mails may occur.

Benefits of Personalization:

The Personalization component selects content for users based on information in their profiles and on business logic. With Personalization facilities, subject matter experts can select content that is suited to the needs and interests of each site visitor. These Web-based tools help companies quickly and easily leverage content that is created by business and subject matter experts.

Personalization classifies site visitors into segments and then targets relevant content to each segment. Business experts create the rules for classifying users and selecting content, using Web-based tools.
Personalization has built in capabilities for the DB2 Content Manager Runtime Edition. This means that personalization rules can easily be used in your Web Content Management or Document Manager solutions.
Personalization also includes a recommendation engine that provides collaborative filtering capabilities. Collaborative filtering uses statistical techniques to identify groups of users with similar interests or behaviors. Inferences can be made about what a particular user might be interested in, based on the interests of the other members of the group.

Campaign management tools are also included with Personalization. Campaigns are sets of business rules that work together to accomplish a business objective. For example, a Human Resources manager might want to run a campaign to encourage employees to enroll in a stock purchase plan or sign up for some other new benefit which has just become available to employees. The Human Resources manager would define a set of rules that are shown to accomplish this business objective. Campaigns have start and stop dates and times and can be email and Web-page based. Several campaigns can run simultaneously and can be prioritized.

By:
WebSphere Developers' Team
http://www.websphereguru.net