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Nancy Winnick Cluts
Based on a presentation by Jeff Teper and Sanjay Chheda
Microsoft Corporation
February 11, 1998
Contents
Introduction
Creating a Business Internet Presence
Not Your Father's Web Site Anymore!
"Roll Your Own"?
Solutions in Action
An Example: The Cartopia Web Site
Identifying and Profiling Users
Personalization
Administration and Content Deployment
Summary
Creating a Web site for your corporation can be a daunting task. This article describes how a corporate Web presence can maximize its effectiveness using Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and Microsoft Site Server 3.0's personalization, membership, analysis, and content deployment technologies. You will learn how you can use your Web presence to build closer customer relationships, and how to go beyond putting simple promotional material on your Web site by tracking what the customer is interested in and providing targeted information to them. Finally, you will see how you can use your Web site to provide customer support.
This article discusses:
site for details and registration information.)
Internet sites are strategic to every business for communicating with and servicing customers. Your business can use its Web site to do more than simply show ads and publish press releases. Marketing presence, company information, and post-sales customer service are examples of the kinds of Web-site content that is becoming a mission-critical part of company strategy. The Internet provides a broader reach than is available by standard marketing methods such as billboards or magazine advertisements. A Web site costs less to create and maintain compared to some of the "big ticket" marketing strategies such as advertising on television. A Web site is also convenient and quick to update, ensuring that your customers get the most current information available about your products or services.
Personalization is a very hot feature on Web sites today. According to Forrester Research, the mantra is "Personalize or perish." Forrester has concluded that personalized Web experiences keep visitors coming back to Web sites. If you want visitors to return (and you do), personalization is key.
Using Site Server 3.0, you can create a Web site that includes personalized marketing information, brochures, price lists, and so forth. You can contact your suppliers, dealers, and distributors, as well as provide customer support, customer programs, account maintenance, and offer upgrades. Some of the exciting new features of Site Server 3.0 include:
Web sites become more and more sophisticated every day. They have become mission critical to a company providing 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week contact with customers. I've already mentioned some of the features you can add to your Web site to make it more compelling. But what does this mean to you? To create a Web site with the features I've mentioned, you need to supply authentication and access control, you need to set up an infrastructure for user profiles (to personalize), you need sophisticated analysis tools to build a behavioral profile for each user (to determine what content to push), and, most importantly, you need a scalable, robust system that is maintainable.
One option you have is create your own Web site by creating your own tools. If you create your own tools, you have the opportunity to decide exactly how the tool will work. However, you also need to consider the amount of time it will take to create the tools, the cost to build them (developers aren't cheap!), ease of authoring, maintenance, and operational costs. This can add up to a very high cost when you consider how rapidly technology changes. You need robust security, but you also want ease of maintenance. What's a Web site creator to do?
If you aren't going to create your own tools, your option is to use third-party tools. The rest of this article discusses how you can use Microsoft Windows NT® with Internet Information Server and Site Server 3.0 to provide an overall solution to the problem of creating an effective business Web site. Using these products will save you development time, increase the robustness of your site, enable personalized content without writing code, and enable you to separate content from security settings.
Probably the best way to demonstrate how you can use Site Server to create your Web site is to show you some solutions in action. The BackOffice Web site made use of the new features of Site Server and Internet Information Server. You can even read all about how they created their site online at http://www.backoffice.microsoft.com. At this URL, click the GIF entitled "Behind the Scenes" (scroll down a bit; it's on the left), and you can learn how the home page, chat section, and event calendar page were built. You can even click a button to view the server (ASP) code! The BackOffice Web site also contains links to several other Web sites that are employing BackOffice technology; see the Live Showcase at http://www.backoffice.microsoft.com/showcase/ for the demos.
Our demonstration starts with a look at a fictional Web site called Cartopia. Cartopia is an automobile part manufacturer and retailer. The company wanted to attract customers, and build and customize relationships with current customers. The site requirements include the ability to:
Site Server 3.0 provides scalable authentication and access control. It uses a variety of authentication protocols from the nonintrusive to the highly secure. You can use the Membership Directory to store user accounts and permissions. This directory is extensible, scalable, and standards-based (LDAP).
The Site Server Membership tool enables you to track anonymous users through automatic cookie authentication so you can build a user profile and personalize pages for the user. Tracking can be scaled for different Internet scenarios. The tool takes care of creating the user's profile and identifying him the next time that he logs in. The user profile is created in the Membership Directory and the user properties are stored. The same cookie is used to identify the user in the Web Log analysis.
Account validation is also an important feature for a secure Web site. Site Server supports the W3C open profiling privacy standard. With Site Server 3.0, you can create secure areas in your site, sign up users for accounts, and use HTML Forms Authentication and other Membership Authentication Options to authenticate a user from the Membership Directory. This gives you the benefit of easy-to-use tools while maintaining Windows NT security. For example, you can still set content access control through Windows NT's file access control lists (ACLs).
The Active User Object (AUO) is used to integrate user data on your Web site. AUO provides easy script access to user information. It is used by the Personalization authoring tools. AUO takes into consideration multiple data sources and can integrate easily with a legacy business database.
For personalization on your Web site, you can use the Rule Manager and Design-Time Controls (DTC). They enable you to personalize your site without writing any code (hooray!). The Rule Manager enables you to separate business rules from your content. With the tool, you can specify the content source -- whether it's an existing database or the results of a query -- as well as access attributes and user attributes. You can create business rules for information delivery based on the user properties. Personalization also lets you take advantage of direct mail. This means you can provide personalized, scheduled mailings to your customers on your distribution list.
On our fictional Cartopia site, we used a combination of Design-Time Controls to create a registration Web page. Several DTCs are included in Site Server, and you can take advantage of them as needed. We used the Membership Header DTC to create the user in the directory. This DTC subsequently creates all the ASP script necessary to create the user profile. Once you have this script you can use it as is or customize it. We also used the Attribute Editor DTC to access the attributes of the members. Finally, we used the Membership Footer DTC to add groups of users.
You can add rules to an HTML page using another DTC. The Direct Mail tool enables you to send e-mail to members based on user preferences. It uses standard simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) to send the e-mail. You can use either an existing distribution list or a dynamically generated list that is used by the Site Server Analysis tool.
The Site Server Analysis tool helps you understand Web site usage and correlate this data with user profile information. You can use this information to alter user profiles, create a mailing list, create or change user attributes, or even change the design of your site (that is, if no one can find a certain Web page, it's time to do some redesign).
The Report Writer tool can be used to generate reports about your Web site. You can import Web logs or IIS logs into this tool. It comes with a set of standard reports that you can personalize later, if needed. These standard reports include data about personalization and Web site usage, hit counts, time frame between visits, and so forth. The reports generated include both textual and graphical data, and can be extended to include information such as user state or expertise, as well as correlated against site usage.
You can enable visitors to your site to "subscribe" to Internet newsgroups using the Windows NT Option Pack NNTP Newsgroups feature. This is a standards-based, secure area where you can create a sense of community for your users. They can collaborate to provide solutions for each other and you can provide one-to-many support. For advanced collaboration (such as chat or public folders), you can take advantage of Microsoft Exchange.
Now that you've got your Web site set up, what's the best way to get it live? Site Server 3.0 provides a Web-based tool that replicates your content from an internal staging site (in fact, http://www.microsoft.com/ uses this tool). This is a very important feature because it enables you to test and tweak before going live -- there is bound to be at least one link that doesn't work. You can replicate content into a secured directory using Windows NT ACLs, thus ensuring that only those with the correct permissions can alter content on your live server. With Site Server 3.0, you can deploy files, directories, and security information through firewalls and across the Internet. You can also schedule the deployment, manually deploy the content, select the project files and, perhaps most importantly, roll back your content if needed. For example, if you published something that (it turned out) was not accurate or not "approved," you can save your site by rolling back.
A compelling Internet presence for your company helps you create and build customer relationships. You can provide customer service, marketing information, and personalization by creating your own tools or using third-party tools. Microsoft Windows NT, Internet Information Server, and Site Server 3.0 provide an easy, fast, and scalable solution to the problem of creating a sophisticated Internet site. This combination of tools just might be the answer you are looking for.
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