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Hi Ben

No, that is not possible.

BR Nicolai

Hi Nicolai,

Is this something you plan on adding? I would say that this is a natiral use of the Profile functionality.

If you cannot segment your communication based on Profile, what would be the use of profile then?

I believe I have already posted a question or a feature request around the Profiling functionality. it looks like right now there's not much you can do with Profiling.

I guess the main reason being that the profile is not saved anywhere?

Thanks,

Adrian

Generally: Profiles are for anonymous users - known users have groups and properties that are much better measures to segment on than profiles.

Hi Nicolai,

In this case I totally missed the scope of the functionality.

My assumption was that "Profile" would mean a criteria for segmenting users, Anonymous or not. The way the Profile information is stored, is a different story.

That was my assuption.

If I understand correctly, you say that if I want to create a rule to display or hide specific content or make any kind of decision based on Profiles, I will have to first check if it is authenticated or not, and decide upon this check if I should check the cookies or the Groups or Properties of the user.

Is this correct?

Thanks,

Adrian

You understand that correctly - but since the information is for known and unknown users, the information does not reside on the known user record.

You can use profiles to hide and show content for any users. You cannot use profiles for querying specific known users with smartsearches.

Hi Nicolai,

Thank you for the answer.

It might sound like a stupid question but may I ask, why?

I imagine these profile points can be saved on the user object somehow.

In the past I have tried to use the User Item type for custom definitions on the user but I could not find a decent way to read, write or import data into those fields. MAybe things have changed in the meantime.

Moreover, User allocation to groups is somehow limited by the length of the UserGroup field and the way the associations are made. I know it is "inherited" from the early days and I understand the challenges of changing that. That's why Profile points sounded like a very good idea.

I recently discovered the User groups based on Smart Searches. Initially it was an Evrika moment. But later on, I discovered that the content of the user groups is not updated as the Smart search is updated. Which makes it appropriate just a for a small number of use cases. Might be a bug or by Design. I will never know.

This type of inconsistencies that cannot be seen as bugs but rather as "design decisions" makes it confusing for the backend user and complicated for us to deal with. I have recently sold the idea of profiling based on the assumption that the Profiles will be useful for both anonymous and registered users. Now I need to find a way to deliver it as I have promised, regardless of how you implemented it in the platform. Profiling for Registered users is what makes an integrated solution better than using an external system/provider for profiling.

This is my opinion on this subject.

Thank you,

Adrian

The profiles work for both known users and anonymous users. But the data reside on the visitor object (Statv2session table) since that data cover both types of visitors. It does not reside on the user object because it only covers known users and not anonymous users.

You can create some custom fields on the user for primary and secondary profiles and run a scheduled SQL on the SQL-server to add the data onto the user.

BR Nicolai

Hi Nicolai,

Thank you for the response. That's a bit of a relief.

This means that we need to have the Statistics activated if we want to get the Profile information.

Second question is, why isn't this profile_information-to_user handled by default?

I know I am stubborn in my approach, but I need to understand why such a powerful feature is not implemented end-to-end.

Thank you,

Adrian

Yes, you need statistics.

It is like that, because it was never needed and never thought of.

Hi Nicolai,

Understood. Is this something you would consider as a feature request?

I have posted a feature request a while ago related to personalisation. Maybe it is useful to prove a use case: http://doc.dynamicweb.com/forum/feature-requests/easier-way-to-apply-personalisation-preset-to-multiple-pages/products-other-personalisation-related-thoughts?M=BasicForum&PID=1605

Thank you,

Adrian