Web Content Personalization: Xena

The Challenge: Static website data, frustrated users
Crown Solution: Dynamic data for customized web content
Business Benefits: Personalized web experience, reduced IT complexity and costs

The Challenge

Today’s web users are a savvy bunch and expect a flexible, intuitive, personal experience when visiting websites. Most importantly, they hope to find the information they need quickly and easily. Yet too often, the content presented is generic to the company providing it and entirely unrelated to the particular user viewing it. And when users search for the specific information they need, search engines often don’t deliver. But as a marketing tool, your company website is crucial to attracting and engaging your users and giving them a reason to come back.

To make the most of every click on your website, you need cost-effective solutions that can offer a personalized display for every user visiting your site. You can also benefit from offering more powerful, customized search capabilities so your users can zero in on what’s important to them—without having to wade through content that doesn’t matter.

Crown’s Solution

Crown Partners offers Xena, a personalization and full-text search framework that delivers simple, flexible, scalable, robust, and affordable solutions for dynamic websites created with Documentum Web Publisher. Xena is based on Apache Lucene, a popular and trusted open-source, no-cost content indexing and search engine used in 70 percent of websites worldwide. The Lucene index operates much like a database, but without the complexity and cost.

Using dynamic data such as information from registration forms, shopping cart purchases, and keyword searches, Xena personalizes the display on each web page for each visitor. Xena uses various personalization techniques—integrated at design time or contribution time—including:

Hiding or showing page content and navigation bar links
Displaying dynamic data directly on a page
Redirecting the user to a different page
Locking or unlocking pages
Hiding search results for locked pages
Narrowing searches based on categorization

Business Benefits

The most important benefit Xena offers is a more positive, productive experience for your website visitors. Yet Xena offers many important advantages for your IT team and your budget, including:

Easy-to-define new indexes
Compatibility with existing sites and content without changing tagging strategy
Compatibility with content XML and metadata
Location- and state-aware lifecycle environment
Multiple indexes for special applications
Full-text search function
Highly scalable and proven engine
No database required
Usable with .NET and Java
No per-visitor or per-site costs
Ability for contributors to design personalization rules and display without IT
Integration into most existing website runtime frameworks

Additionally, in many cases Xena can replace functionality delivered by expensive and overly complex portal solutions to reduce licensing costs, hardware resources, maintenance effort, and solution time to market.