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Administrator Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
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.
Event pattern ETL process
To process large amounts of Unica Interact event pattern data and to make that data available for queries and reporting purposes, you can install a stand-alone Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process on any supported server for optimal performance.
Stopping the stand-alone ETL process
When you launch the stand-alone ETL process on a server, it runs continuously in the background until stopped.

Administrator Guide
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.
  - Interact data sources
    Unica Interact requires several sets of data to function. The sets of data are stored and retrieved from data sources, and the data sources you set up depend on the Unica Interact features you are enabling.
  - Databases and the applications
    The data sources that you create for use by Unica Interact might also be used to exchange or share data with other Unica applications.
  - Campaign system tables
    When you install the Unica Interact design environment, you also create new, Unica Interact-specific tables in the Unica Campaign system tables. The tables that you create depend on the Unica Interact features you are enabling.
  - Runtime tables
    If you have more than one audience level, you must create staging tables for the contact and response history data for each audience level.
  - Test run tables
    The test run tables are used for test runs of interactive flowcharts only. Test runs of interactive flowcharts should test your segmentation logic. You only need to configure one test run database for your Unica Interact installation. The test run tables do not need to be in a stand-alone database. You could, for example, use your customer data tables for Unica Campaign.
  - Profile database
    The contents of the profile database depend entirely on the data you need for configuring your interactive flowcharts and Unica Interact API. Unica Interact requires or recommends that each database contain certain tables or data.
  - Learning tables
    If you are using Unica Interact built-in learning, you must configure the learning tables. These tables contain all the data the built-in learning feature learns on.
  - Contact history for cross-session response tracking
    If you enable the cross-session response feature, the runtime environment needs read-only access to the Unica Campaign contact history tables. You can configure the runtime environment to view the Unica Campaign system tables, or you can create a copy of the Unica Campaign contact history tables. If you create a copy of the tables, you must manage the process of keeping the copy up to date. The contact and response history module will not update the copy of the contact history tables.
  - Running database scripts to enable Unica Interact features
    To use the optional features that are available in Unica Interact, run database scripts against the database to create tables or update existing tables.
  - About Cross Session Contact Tracking
  - About contact and response history tracking
    You can configure runtime environment to record contact and response history in the Unica Campaign contact and response history tables. The runtime servers store contact and response history in staging tables. The contact and response history module copies this data from the staging tables to Unica Campaign contact and response history tables.
  - About cross-session response tracking
    Visitors may not always complete a transaction in a single visit to your touchpoint. A customer may add an item to their shopping cart on your web site and not complete the sale until two days later. Keeping the runtime session active indefinitely is not feasible. You can enable cross-session response tracking to track an offer presentation in one session and match it with a response in another session.
  - Using a database load utility with the runtime environment
    By default, the runtime environment writes contact and response history data from session data into staging tables. On a very active production system, however, the amount of memory required to cache all the data before runtime can write it to the staging tables may be prohibitive. You can configure runtime to use a database load utility to improve performance.
  - Event pattern ETL process
    To process large amounts of Unica Interact event pattern data and to make that data available for queries and reporting purposes, you can install a stand-alone Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process on any supported server for optimal performance.
    - Running the stand-alone ETL process
      When you launch the stand-alone ETL process on a server, it runs continuously in the background until stopped. The process follows the instructions in the Unica Platform configuration properties to determine frequency, database connections, and other details during its operation.
    - Stopping the stand-alone ETL process
      When you launch the stand-alone ETL process on a server, it runs continuously in the background until stopped.
- 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.
- JVM parameters
- 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.
- Unica Interact and Unica Journey integration
- Unica Interact and Unica Deliver integration
- Configure gateways
  Use triggered message gateways to send offer information from outbound channels.

Stopping the stand-alone ETL process

When you launch the stand-alone ETL process on a server, it runs continuously in the background until stopped.

About this task

Procedure

Open a command prompt on the server where the ETL process is installed.
Navigate to the <Interact_home>/PatternStateETL/bin directory that contains the executable files for the ETL process.
Run the command.bat file (on Microsoft Windows) or command.sh file (on UNIX-like operating systems) with the following parameters:
- -u <username>. This value must be a valid Unica Platform user, and you must have configured that user with access to the TargetDS and RuntimeDS data sources that the ETL process will use.
- -p <password>. Replace <password> with the password matching the user you specified. If the password for this user is blank, specify two double quotes (as in -p ""). The password is optional when you run the command file; if you omit the password with the command, you are prompted to enter it when the command runs.
- -c <profileName>. Replace <profileName> with the exact name you specified in the Unica Platform in the Interact | PatternStateETL configuration you created.
  
  The name you enter here must match the value you specified in the New category name field when you created the configuration.
- stop. The stop command is required to stop the process. If you use this command, any ongoing ETL operation will complete before the process shuts down.
  
  To shut down the ETL process without waiting for any ongoing operations to complete, use forcestop instead of stop.
The complete command to start the process would therefore take the following form:

command.bat -u <username> -p <password> -c <profileName> stop

Results

The stand-alone ETL process stops.

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