New features and changes in version 9.1.0

Interact real-time offer suppression

This release of Interact provides improved offer suppression management features to provide users with a simple interface for determining when to stop presenting a particular offer to a particular visitor (such as after the visitor has accepted it, after the visitor has rejected it, after seeing it a certain number of times) This helps to ensure that the most relevant offer is always presented to each visitor, increasing response rates. See the Interact User's Guide for more information.

Support for IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale caching solutions

This release of Interact now supports additional caching solutions to improve performance in large-volume deployments: the built-in ehCache caching solution that has always been provided continues to work as before, and for larger installations, support for the IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale caching solution has been implemented.

By installing the optional Interact Adapter for eXtreme Caching on each runtime server, you can use WebSphere eXtreme Scale caching to store and manage customer profile and in-session contextual data during real-time operation. See the Interact Tuning Guide for more information.

Integration with HCL® Interact Advanced Patterns for more complex event patterns and better real-time marketing decisions

Through integration with HCL Interact Advanced Patterns, Interact now supports more complex event pattern recognition during real-time decisions to increase the relevance of offers and messages. See the Interact Administrator's Guide and the Interact Advanced Patterns documentation for more information.

HCL® Marketing Software installation and upgrade improvements

The improvements to the installation and upgrade process include:

  • Installation guides for all products have been rewritten and reorganized into separate installation and upgrade guides, to make information easier to find and use.
  • The installers have been enhanced to include better descriptions of the information you need to enter and to clarify what steps to take during each stage of the installation.
  • Each installer now provides links directly to the product's installation and upgrade guides, in either PDF or HTML formats.

Configuration to control collection of learning statistics

In previous releases of Interact, learning statistics were being collected for all offers returned by the getOffers call. To improve the collection of learning statistics and the precision of the data collected, the following changes have been made in this release:

  • For all offers that are returned in a getOffers call, if the offers are determined by self-learning, then both the contacts and responses are now counted as a learning statistic, and are run through the learning aggregator.

  • For all offers that are returned in a getOffers call, if the offers are not determined by self-learning, then both the contacts and responses are not counted as a learning statistic, and are not run through the learning aggregator.

Note that if learning is turned off globally, no learning attributes are logged for all treatments.

To log the learning attributes of all treatments, regardless of whether they are determined by self-learning, enable the configuration setting interact | offerServing | alwaysLogLearningAttributes. Enabling this setting matches the behavior of earlier versions of Interact. (RTC65426, RTC56978)