New features and changes in version 8.6.0

Interact integration with IBM® Digital Recommendations for product recommendations

Interact can now combine its sophisticated approach to offer personalization with IBM Digital Recommendations scalable product recommendation solutions to provide optimal offer and product information in customer interactions.

You can now customize your web pages to first call Interact for the offers to present to a visitor, which then use an API call to send a product category ID to Digital Recommendations to retrieve the most popular product recommendations for that offer. For example, you might configure a page so that Interact provides the best offer for the specific visitor (10% off all appliances), while Digital Recommendations provides the best product recommendations for that offer (the most popular home appliances for the specific category ID),

For additional information, see the HCL Interact Administrator's Guide and the sample application installed in /<Interact_home>/samples/IntelligentOfferIntegration, available for use as a demonstration and a starting point for your own web pages.

(ENH11607)

New deployment management and versioning

For interactive channels, deployment information has been moved to a separate Deployment tab. The Deployment tab provides an enhanced user interface for managing deployments, including the following features:

  • View and undeploy active deployments. Active deployment view provides immediate information about the current deployment, and allows you to undeploy the selected deployment as wanted.

  • View pending changes. Pending Changes view lets you see what changes are marked for deployment but are not yet deployed, and lets you deploy the changes or only the global settings as needed to the targeted server group.

  • Roll back previous deployments. The Deployment History section lets you select and redeploy earlier versions of a deployment, or reload and modify earlier components (flowcharts and strategy tabs).

  • Reload and modify previous Design Time components. You can use the Deployment tab to reload interactive channels, flowcharts, and interactive strategies from previous deployments to view or modify them before redeploying.

  • Custom views. Filter the deployment history list to show only the information that you want, such as filtering out all but the deployments to a particular server group, or only the deployments that succeeded. You can also sort lists on specific columns or on multiple combinations of columns to view deployment information exactly as needed.

(ENH11608)

External learning enhancements

In previous releases, Interact pre-built learning could not be used alongside custom learning requirements. Now, select functions of the Interact pre-built learning implementation is accessible via a new set of API calls to let you use built-in learning methods in your external learning algorithm. See the Javadocs installed in /<Interact_home>/docs/learningOptimizerJavaDocs for additional technical details. (ENH11609)

Profile Data Service: hierarchical profile data retrieved via EXTERNALCALLOUT

You can now use the EXTERNALCALLOUT API function to import hierarchical profile data into Interact runtime sessions. This allows you to pull data from various sources, including web services. (ENH11610)

Interaction strategy tab enhancements

The Interaction Strategy tab has been redesigned to add features and to enhance ease-of-use. Improvements include:

  • New view options. It is now much easier to manage large numbers of rules, offers, zones, segments, and so on, through the use of list filtering and multiple selections of segments and zones.

  • Apply options to many treatment rules at the same time. You can now select multiple segments or zones in the list to assign the same set of advanced options, learning model customization, and parameterized offer attributes to all selected treatment rules at the same time.

  • Enable, disable, delete many treatment rules at the same time. The same selection features allow enabling, disabling, and deleting multiple treatment rules in a single step.

  • Drag-and-drop interface. The drag-and-drop interface has been enhanced, and now allows adding zones in addition to segments and offers to the rules. You can also select and drag more than one item onto the list of rules at the same time.

  • New views: you can now view treatment rules by segment or by zone, as well as added information and filtering.

  • Added the ability to copy an interaction strategy to another campaign through the use of the Copy Interaction Strategy icon.

  • Removed the automatic save feature to prevent unwanted changes. You must now explicitly save your changes to the strategy tab, or cancel to discard unwanted modifications.

(ENH11611)

Enhanced parameterized offers

You can use offer parameterization to personalize a generic offer to individuals using attributes that are specific to the individual and session. You can now configure parameterized offers on the Strategy tab, as part of a treatment rule after an offer is mapped to a segment and zone. Parameterized offer values will be specific to the treatment rule.

Note that using the new strategy tab features, you can select multiple treatment rules and modify common parameters at the same time.

You will also be able to set the parameterized values using the Global Offers, Whitelist, and OffersBySQL tables.

(ENH11612)

Reporting enhancements

The following report enhancements have been provided with this release, if you are using the optional Interact Reports Pack:

  • Zone Performance Report by Offer. This report, available by selecting Analytics > Campaign Analytics, clicking Itnteract Reports, and then clicking Zone Performance, lets you see how offers are performing by zone.
  • Cell Performance Report filter. The Interact Cell Performance report has been enhanced so that you can run it for only the items you select, to help you improve the response rate of your interactive strategies. This enhancement allows you to filter the data on a specific cell code, more focused than the original report.

(ENH11254, ENH11253)

Secure RMI protocol

Interact currently provides two methods to retrieve JMX statistics: RMI and JMXMP (configurable through the Marketing Platform configuration. Previously, only JMXMP enabled secure access (requiring a Marketing Platform user name and password to retrieve JMX statistics). With this release, that level of security is now supported for RMI as well.

You can configure secure RMI in the Marketing Platform configuration settings on the Interact | monitoring page, by setting protocol to RMI, and enableSecurity to TRUE.

(ENH11488)