Kentico v8 personas vs. users vs. contacts

Lawrence LeFebour asked on December 16, 2014 15:41

Hi there, I need some insights on the use of personas in conjunction with users & contacts. My goal is to use personas to target content to specific types of users (e.g. sales, development) but not to exclude the availability of that content to everyone - ideally, content can be 'recommended' to these specific personas in a web-part. We are migrating from an older version of Kentico (v6) where we used custom code to sync our Active Directory users with Kentico. In order to use personas in v8.x, it looks like we need to assign contacts to personas. Can you suggest a method for automatically syncing AD users into Kentico, then having those users be assigned to contacts and then to personas based on AD organization units or other meta data? Would this approach work?

Is it possible to use AD meta data to assign users to Kentico roles for content management, or would that need to be performed manually? Also, can contact groups be automatically created from AD meta data and can contact groups be used similar to personas to promote content to a user? Because a contact can only belong to one persona, it would be handy to be able to use a contact group (e.g. New York office) to promote appropriate content to that user group (through some kind of custom query I assume). Thanks in advance.

personas users contact groups

Recent Answers

Virgil Carroll answered on December 18, 2014 05:45

Lawrence,

I am pretty sure the reason you've not got an answer is because this is a very big topic. I've not played a ton with personas yet since 8 was released, so I imagine this is something you are going to have to run past Kentico to get a better understanding. I can tell you the API gives you capabilities to build your own macros to tie personas to, so you could go that direction. You could build a macro to check for certain properties in your AD sync and promote items to the correct people accordingly.

Hope that helps a little.

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Rui Wang answered on December 19, 2014 19:37

Lawrence

To assign a contact with a persona, you will have to setup rules first, then let the calculation figure out the point in order to assign the correct persona to the contact. The rules can be set based on Attribute, Activity and Macro.

In some cases you don't need persona in order to do content targeting (only Recommend documents to personas requires that feature). When you enable content personalization, you can add personalization variant to webpart/widget directly and the display condition can be based on rules like "Contact is in role" or "Current user is in role" which doesn't require persona. You can find out more here on https://docs.kentico.com/display/K8/Content+personalization

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