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Showing posts from July, 2018

Experience Profile Anonymous, Unknown and Known contacts

When you first get started with Sitecore's experience profile the reporting for contacts can cause a little confusion. There are 3 terms that are thrown around, 1) Anonymous 2) Unknown 3) Known. When you read the docs they can bleed into each other a little. First, have a read through the Sitecore tracking documentation to get a feel for what Sitecore is trying to do. There are a couple key things here to first understand: Unless you call " IdentifyAs() " for request the contact is always anonymous.  Tracking of anonymous contacts is off by default.  Even if you call "IdentifyAs()" if you don't set facet values for the contact (like first name and email) the contact will still show up in your experience profile as "unknown" (because it has no facet data to display).  Enabled Anonymous contacts Notice in the picture I have two contacts marked in a red box. Those are my "known" contacts that I called "IdentifyAs"

Experience Profile Anonymize or Right to be Forgotten

Experience Profile This threw me off a bit at first as the action that is being taken is not very clear. When you open a profile record in experience profile and click on actions, one of the options is "Anonymize". If you click on this action you are sent back to the search screen and that contact you were just on is gone. At this point, you might be able to figure out what happened. At first when just playing around it is a little concern what happened. The red "X" helps here as well, because what you are doing is executing the "right to be forgotten" or "Anonymize" command on this contact. That means their data (their PII data) is removed from the database. Hence, when you go back to the profile search screen you can't find them anymore. Beware though, if you click on it, it is done. No warning here folks.

Back in the Sitecore world again!!

I have recently been able to get back into the Sitecore world and I am excited! I have been living in the Tridion world for a few years and it has been painful. With that being said it is not like Sitecore does not have it's pain points as well. Here are some I have run into as I start playing with version 9. Keep your license file name "license.xml" Using SIF to install locally only works with a license file named "license.xml". I had a temp license for awhile so in the file name I put the expiration date. I updated the install powershell script for SIF with the new license file name (yes in both places) and run the install. The install was fine until it tried to start the indexer window service. That step failed as the service would not start. When I looked at the logs the service said it was still looking for a file name "license.xml" and it was missing. Sure enough the license file I referenced was not copied over. I have not found the root cau