Opening personalization to partners: An architecture of participation for websites

Abstract

Open innovation and collaborative development are attracting considerable attention as new software construction models. Traditionally, website code is a "wall garden" hidden from partners. In the other extreme, you can move to open source where the entirety of the code is disclosed. A middle way is to expose just those parts where collaboration might report the highest benefits. Personalization can be one of those parts. Partners might be better positioned to foresee new ways to adapt/extend your website based on their own resources and knowledge of their customer base. We coin the term "Open Personalization" to refer to those practises and architectures that permit partners to inject their own personalization rules. We identify four main requirements for OP architectures, namely, resilience (i.e. partner rules should be sheltered from website upgrades, and vice versa), affordability (easy contribution), hot deployment (anytime rule addition), and scalability. The paper shows the approach's feasibility using .NET. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.