Home
Administrator Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
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.
About the Unica Interact Message Connector
The Unica Interact Message Connector allows email messages and other electronic media to make calls to Unica Interact to allow personalized offers to be presented at open-time, and when the customer clicks-through the message to the specified site. This is accomplished through the use of two key tags: The image tag (IMG), which loads the personalized offers at open-time, and the link tag (A), which captures information about click-through and redirects the customer to a specific landing page.
Installing the Message Connector
The files you require to install, deploy, and run the Message Connector have automatically been included with your Unica Interact runtime server installation. This section summarizes the steps needed to get the Message Connector ready for use.
Deploying and running the Message Connector
The Unica Interact Message Connector is deployed as a stand-alone web application on a supported web application server.

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.
- 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.
  - About the Unica Interact Message Connector
    The Unica Interact Message Connector allows email messages and other electronic media to make calls to Unica Interact to allow personalized offers to be presented at open-time, and when the customer clicks-through the message to the specified site. This is accomplished through the use of two key tags: The image tag (IMG), which loads the personalized offers at open-time, and the link tag (A), which captures information about click-through and redirects the customer to a specific landing page.
    - Installing the Message Connector
      The files you require to install, deploy, and run the Message Connector have automatically been included with your Unica Interact runtime server installation. This section summarizes the steps needed to get the Message Connector ready for use.
      - Configuring the Message Connector
        Before you deploy the Message Connector, you must customize the configuration file included with your installation to match your specific environment. You can modify the XML file called MessageConnectorConfig.xml found in your Message Connector directory on the Unica Interact runtime server, similar to <Unica Interact_home>/msgconnector/config/MessageConnectorConfig.xml.
      - Creating the Message Connector Tables
        Before you can deploy the Unica Interact Message Connector, you must first create the tables in the database where the Unica Interact runtime data is stored. You'll create one table for each audience level you have defined. For each audience level, Unica Interact will use the tables you create to record information about Message Connector transactions.
      - Deploying and running the Message Connector
        The Unica Interact Message Connector is deployed as a stand-alone web application on a supported web application server.
    - Creating the Message Connector links
      To use the Message Connector to provide custom offer images when an end-user interacts with your electronic media (such as by opening an email message), and custom landing pages when the end-user clicks through the offer, you need to create the links to embed in your message. This section provides a summary of the HTML tagging of those links.
  - About the Interact Web Connector
    The Unica Interact WebConnector (also referred to as the JavaScript™ Connector, or JSConnector) provides a service on the Unica Interact runtime server that allows JavaScript code to call the Unica Interact Java™ API. This enables web pages to make calls to Unica Interact for real-time offer personalization using only embedded JavaScript code, without having to rely on web development languages (such as Java, PHP, JSP, and so on). For example, you might embed a small snippet of JavaScript code on each page of your web site that serve offers recommended by Unica Interact, so that each time the page loads, calls are made to the Unica Interact API to ensure that the best offers are displayed on the loading page for the site visitor.
- 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.

Deploying and running the Message Connector

The Unica Interact Message Connector is deployed as a stand-alone web application on a supported web application server.

Before you begin

Before you can deploy the Message Connector, be sure that the following tasks have been complete:

You must have installed the Unica Interact runtime server. The deployable Message Connector application is automatically installed along with the runtime server, and is ready to deploy from your Unica Interact home directory.
You must also have run the SQL scripts provided with your installation to create the necessary tables in the Unica Interact runtime database for use by the Message Connector as described in Creating the Message Connector Tables

About this task

Just as you deploy other applications on a web application server before you can run them, you must deploy the Message Connector application to make it available for serving offers.

Procedure

Connect to your web application server management interface with the necessary privileges to deploy an application.
Follow the instructions for your web application server to deploy and run the file called <Unica Interact_home>/msgconnector/MessageConnector.war
Replace <Unica Interact_home> with the actual directory into which the Unica Interact runtime server is installed.
Following steps are needed in case of configuring message connector with JBOSS
1. Add a database module.
2. Note name of Module given at the time of module creation.
3. goto <INSTALL_DIR>/Interact/msgconnector/MessageConnector.war/WEB-INF/jboss-deployment-structure.xml uncomment section in dependency and give module name same as given at time of module creation. For example: - The module created at time JBoss setup for DB2 is ---> com.ibm, then jboss-depolyment-structure.xml should have entries as shown below: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><deployment><dependencies><module name="com.ibm" export="true"/></dependencies></deployment></jboss-deployment-structure>

Results

The Message Connector is now available for use. After you have configured your Unica Interact installation to create the underlying data that the Message Connector will use to provide offers, such as interactive channels and strategies, flowcharts, offers, and so on, you can create the links in your electronic media that the Message Connector will accept.

Have feedback?
Google Analytics is used to store comments and ratings. To provide a comment or rating for a topic, click Accept All Cookies or Allow All in Cookie Preferences in the footer of this page.