BroadVision One-To-One: The Ultimate User-Friendly Application System

BroadVision One-To-One is an integrated software application system for the development and operation of dynamic, personalized one-to-one Web sites. The One-To-One application system is designed for Global 2000 businesses, Web content providers, systems integrators, Web developers and software VARs. Web sites developed with and operated by BroadVision One-To-One support personalized electronic commerce, customer self-service and interactive content publishing. Environments appropriate for creating One-to-One Web sites involve business-to-consumer, business-to-business and business-to-employee interactions. Using the One-To-One software product, application developers and business managers are developing a new generation of Web sites that transform anonymous surfing into focused navigation, static brochureware into dynamically personalized content and meaningless hits into one-to-one online relationships.

Web sites developed with BroadVision One-To-One are more appealing to visitors and profitable for companies because they:

• treat visitors as unique individuals;
• remember and track data and transactions from visit to visit;
• increase the level and regularity of interactivity visitors have with a site;
• stimulate transactions and feedback;
• continually improve the level and scope of personalized service the site provides.

BroadVision One-To-One Transforms Your Web Site Into a Friendly and Efficient Place of Business

BroadVision One-To-One puts the Web to work for your business, helping you:

• quickly build scalable, adaptable and secure Web applications from reusable components;
• accommodate ongoing growth in Web traffic and changes in Web site content and services;
• build and manage visitor profiles and dynamically match profile data to Web content to personalize your site for each visitor, each time they visit;
• put your Web site under the real-time control of business and marketing experts;
• target individuals and communities of common interest with personalized editorial content, advertising and incentive programs.

Web site visitors will frequently visit your Web site developed with BroadVision One-To-One because they know they will:

• be informed and served with relevant, personalized content that has been matched to their specific interests and needs;
• be given personal service based on their relationship with the provider of the site;
• save time and money through personalized recommendations and incentives;
• gain unique information from other site visitors who share common interests and backgrounds;
• be able to offer feedback and participate in an interactive dialogue with the site provider.

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Software Designed for You - and for Success

BroadVision One-To-One provides specialized software tools and components - called design centers - that address the requirements of the four audiences that are critical to the success of any Web site:

Business Managers

Non-technical business managers work with One-To-One's Dynamic Command Center on a real-time basis to define and modify business rules and content essential to the site's identity and business purpose.

Content Managers

Non-technical content managers work with One-To-One's Content Manager Center locally or remotely to create, approve, schedule and stage content. The workflow and the intuitive interface ensure the easy and efficient publishing of content essential to a successful site.

Web site developers

Technical Web site developers use One-To-One's Visual Development Center for easy and rapid site development and alteration using object-oriented tools and reusable objects and templates.

Web Site Visitors

One-To-One's Application Center manages the dynamic interactions and sessions between your Web site and its visitors. One-To-One Web sites generate personalized content for visitors in real-time based on their profiles and the business rules defined through the Dynamic Command Center.

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The Visual Development Center Makes Your Site Innovative - And Keeps It That Way

Because businesses have little time for application development and even less for application changes, the BroadVision One-To-One Visual Development Center provides advanced Web site development tools rich in object-oriented features such as:

• allowing visual, point-and-click application construction without knowledge of HTML syntax or low level APIs using the BroadVision property sheet wizards;
• template creators that can freely move between the VDC and third-party HTML editors using the VDC to configure BroadVision objects and third-party editors to create or reuse HTML;
• default templates for basic business functions (order entry, payment clearing, content targeting) that allow rapid application creation and deployment;
• browser-independent, dynamic Web page generation;
• an extensive library of dynamic objects that provide access to One-To-One services, including profile management, electronic commerce services such as virtual shopping carts and order processing, targeted content, and ad insertion. These enhance existing templates or provide extensive sub-classes to build new objects;
• business rules that can be assigned to dynamic objects and interpreted at run-time using visitor profile information to generate personalized content. For example a financial investments site may have the following rule: if net worth > $250,000 then show real estate investment products, else if < $250,000 then show mutual fund products;
• support for HTML, Java, and JavaScript as well as the HTML editor of your choice;
• community objects, for example discussion groups.

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The Dynamic Command Center (DCC) Puts You in Control

Marketing, advertising and editorial managers exercise real-time control over their online applications through One-To-One's unique Dynamic Command Center. Managers can modify any business rule that dictates editorial content, advertising placement, product pricing or promotional incentives directly through a point and click interface, without involving programmers and without taking your site off-line. The BroadVision Dynamic Command Center enables your company to react to market forces quickly and efficiently:

• Marketing managers can set up promotions that are triggered by selective visitor attributes or actions. For example, a site can remind a visitor that their mother's birthday is coming up and offer gift suggestions and incentives such as a coupon for a bouquet of flowers redeemable at an online or local florist and valid through the date of the birthday;
• Add new content and eliminate outdated materials while the site is running without modifying any application logic, HTML pages, shutting down the system or logging off users. The application automatically retrieves the changed content.
• Advertising managers can maximize Web site revenue by selling ad space to companies that target well-represented audience segments. For instance, an electronic shopping site may offer CD club memberships to new buyers of CD players, and earn a commission on each new member.
• Business managers can run reports to monitor content usage and site traffic. Examples of reports include the following: what products/content are hot, what is not, where are customers coming into the site from, what types of customers tend to like or dislike what types of products or content.

Business Rule Management

DCC provides the business manager easy and non programmatic access to the worlds first extensible and most complete set of matching technology, thus increasing their expressive power to:

• simplify rules by using matching agents to recommend content. For example, use matching agents to recommend the mutual funds that best meet the user's mutual fund investment profile based on attributes such as risk, return and size of fund;
• extend the matching rules using matching functions. For example, use matching function to determine the user's net worth by calling out to a mainframe at run time, and use that value to target products and services;
• create powerful moment-to-moment or context-based matching scenarios. For example, show incentives related to sports if the user is in the sports area of the site or show incentives related to stocks if the user is in the stocks area of the site;
• use regular expressions to specify imprecise or fuzzy criteria in rules. For example, target all users with names starting with 'N' and ending in 'Y' or containing the string "Smith".

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The Content Management Center (CMC) Keeps Your Site On Time and Timely

Content is the heart of any web site but getting the content ready and maintaining it is one of the biggest challenges. The CMC is designed to solves these problems. The CMC provides content creators, editors and web-site administrators a comprehensive tool to manage the full life-cycle of content, from creation to editing to production to staging. The CMC provides the following business benefits:

• Java based solution supports to allow the user to access and manage data from any Web browser. Benefits include remote access inside and outside the firewall, ease of installation and platform independence;
• Customizable workflow for content creation and approval through personal and shared in-boxes. Make the workflow process as simple or as complex as your business process dictates;
• Staging, scheduling and coordination of content publishing through programming calendar. Benefits include ease of management through a top-down view of your site and increased content accuracy;
• Supports content created from any tool, including HTML editors, Microsoft Office products and Lotus Domino.
• Allows you to create and manage access groups and control access privileges to content and services. For example, you can use access control to give third-party content creators access to specific content areas only as well as manage access to subscription based versus free content on your site.

Application Center

To engage Web site visitors with a personalized Web environment, One-To-One's Application Center provides application developers an integrated set of highly scalable and flexible Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard based services. The Application Center helps businesses meet the needs of site visitors by providing:

• One-To-One services such as managing content, profiling, matching, and transactions;
• interaction management;
• open adapters that integrate external or existing business systems with a Web application.

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One-To-One Services Satisfy Site Visitors

One-To-One services help satisfy site visitors by enabling businesses to personalize and follow through on visits through managing content, profiling, matching and transactions.

Managing content

Visitors receive fresh and relevant content through One-To-One's content management services. These help you classify the content of your Web site by subject and desired use, so that you can deliver dynamic and personalized information.

One-To-One also helps business managers create and nurture community among your target visitors by integrating online forums into a One-To-One application.

Profiling

One-To-One's customizable visitor profiling services provide the information you need in order to enrich your visitors' Web site experience. These services capture information from external systems, past interactions and the visitor's current session so that you can:

• tailor your content and services to the preferences, requirements and characteristics of individuals
• become skilled at anticipating the needs of visitors and predicting the kinds of business transactions and content likely to interest them;
• offer visitors ample opportunities to provide input and feedback to help you better serve them.

Visitors can protect their privacy by specifying restrictions on how you use the information they provide. Through one-to-one interaction with visitors, you develop the trust and confidence that leads to "customer for life" loyalty and retention.

Matching

One-To-One provides the most comprehensive and integrated matching engine, offering non-technical business managers a non-programmatic interface to manage matching rules. To create one-to-one relationships with visitors business managers need a variety of matching techniques:

• Business manager driven matching: for example, incentives, products and ads are appropriately targeted based on visitor demographic attributes or based on context, such as what area of the site the user is in;
• Agent driven matching: for example, mutual funds recommendations must be based on user investment preferences to have any personal relevance;
• Visitor driven matching: for example, a user searching for news based on keywords or searching for products based on price, features and vendor names

Business Manager Driven Matching

The One-To-One matching engine

Using visitor profile information, you can offer incentives that match your visitors' interests and motivate action such as ordering a product, purchasing software or information online, filling in a visitor survey or visiting another site. With One-To-One, your business managers can tailor your Web site without needing to involve programmers. Managers can independently:

• target incentives, such as price discounts, product-tie-ins, and frequent buyers' programs, to visitors' profiles and behavior patterns;
• feed observation information back into the visitor profile, for example, monitoring when they last visited and displaying the new content since that time;
• track coupon and advertisement usage for billing
• build visitors' awareness and take-up of incentives by providing a secure Electronic Wallet which allows them to review receipts of products bought and incentives received and to navigate directly to the appropriate location to redeem those incentives.

Agent Driven Matching

One-To-One matching agents recommend and rank content, product and services based on user preferences. Matching agents allow users to control what content they see by managing their profile and tuning it to match their tastes. Business managers benefit by creating simpler rules as the matching agent takes care of finding the right content for people.

For example, a user's interest in mutual funds is categorized by three attributes: degree of risk, past performance of the fund and goals, i.e. capital preservation, income or growth. Other example uses of matching agents include news, weather, URL and document recommendations.

Matching agents are deployed in the following fashion:

• Visitors specify their preferences through their profile. Visitors can fine-tune their profile to get more personalized results or as their preferences change over time;
• Content authors classify the content along the same matching attributes using the CMC or the DCC;
• The One-To-One matching engine ranks content based on how closely the content matches user preferences;
• Business managers deploy matching agents from the DCC in the same fashion as they create matching rules.

User Driven Matching

One-To-One includes support for the following types of user driven matching:

• Full-text or keyword search of any content in the One-To-One content database, including editorials and HTML or other types of documents. This is search on the text of the content. Full-text search is useful
• Attribute search of any content in the One-To-One content database. This search on knowledge about the content. For example, products may be searched by price, vendor and features, whereas, editorials, may be searched by author and publication.

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Flexible Transaction Management

One-To-One offers a variety of ways to manage visitor transactions, which may be of a financial or a non-financial nature. For example, electronic commerce Web site applications require transaction support for purchasing, inventory, payment, billing and other processes that involve the management of financial data. In contrast, Web site applications for customer support or content publishing require support for transactions such as capturing data from visitors, resolving problems and redeeming online incentives. The range of transaction management options provided by BroadVision One-To-One meets the needs of both independent Web site providers and Web site aggregators that require a high degree of flexibility and extensibility to offer transactions services to multiple businesses.

Transaction management includes a comprehensive multi-state order flow process from order capture, to pricing, to payment authentication, to payment clearing, to fulfillment, to adjustments and returns. The order flow and the business rules can be customized at each stage to meet your business needs.

Personal Sales Assistant

One-To-One's Personal Sales Assistant feature enables you to manage the complete set of activities required to sell physical or digital goods on your Web site. Activated each time a visitor session begins, the Personal Sales Assistant:

• calculates pricing and dynamically applies promotional rules as defined through the Dynamic Command Center;
• computes tax and shipping according to origin and destination of goods;
• secures credit card authorization and processes on-line or off-line payment ;
• manages customer account billing;
• checks the Electronic Wallet and reconciles redeemable incentives;
• aggregates and then bills micro-transactions for low-cost goods;
• fulfills and tracks orders of physical and digital goods

Interaction Manager

One-To-One's Interaction Manager provides the visitor with dynamically generated, personalized Web pages derived from interpreting application objects embedded in page templates. Behind the personalized screens, the Interaction Manager establishes the "state" necessary for a Web site to conduct a dynamic dialogue with visitors by:

• maintaining a session identifier for the duration of a session;
• providing sophisticated multi-process parallelism and caching to ensure high availability and scalability;
• generating personalized HTML based on business rules and user preferences;
• connecting with applications independent of Web browser or server;
• accessing One-To-One services to get appropriate content and rules.

Open Adaptors

Every Web site needs to integrate with some existing business system, whether it is a customer database, a billing system, a inventory system, a fulfillment process or existing content, such as Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes content. One-To-One Open Adaptors are object-oriented interfaces based on the CORBA standard that allow the rapid integration of external or existing business systems with your Web site applications to seamlessly integrate the back-end services that support visitor requests. This object-oriented approach to integration enables external business systems - either legacy systems or new custom designs - to be quickly integrated by adding new encapsulated "adapter" modules, rather than requiring programmers to modify source code. As a result, One-To-One can maintain a rapidly growing library of open adapters to accommodate changing business needs.

For example, One-To-One shipping, taxing and payment open adaptors can be customized using either parameters or business rules. Examples of parameters include the standard rate for shipping versus the express rate. Examples of business rules include the logic to integrate with a legacy payment system.

Open adapters interface with systems including:

• product and inventory management;
• tax, shipping and handling computation;
• payment processing;
• order fulfillment;
• EDI and fax systems;
• message oriented middleware (MOM);
• online credit card clearing.

N-Tier Architecture That Scales To Meet the Needs of Your Online Business

One-To-One's N-tiered, modular architecture partitions an application across the client browser, the interaction manager, the application services, the database servers and the external business systems. Database servers are used for profile, content, business rules, transactions and observation storage. This N-tiered separation of functionality distributes processing, providing scalability that keeps pace with increasing visitor traffic and workload capacity. It also permits business rules to be modified without affecting external applications, databases or other interfaces. This allows developers to focus on application logic rather than application integration.

One-To-One uses industry standard CORBA as its distributed object layer for unparalleled scalability and flexibility in application development. Once you have deployed One-To-One's application services on a supported server, you can access these services from applications running on any UNIX or Microsoft Windows system on which CORBA is deployed. This distributed architecture can support millions of users and still maintain application performance.

Security at All Steps

Security is a primary concern for both site visitors, who must feel comfortable sharing confidential information, and site hosts, who must protect their data against security breaches. One-To-One provides N-tiered security, corresponding to each tier of our architecture. At the client-browser, users can be authenticated through username/password, digital certificates or cookies. Communication between the client and the Web-server is secured through SSL and SET. One-To-One sites can secure their systems from intrusion by employing firewalls. Sensitive user information, such as passwords and credit card numbers are encrypted in the database using RSA technology.

Support for Strategic Interactive Platforms and Standards

• The capabilities of One-To-One are accessible through the leading standards for Web developers: HTML, Java and JavaScript.
• One-To-One applications can be accessed from any HTTP server that is compliant with either NSAPI, ISAPI or CGI standards.
• One-To-One applications can be written in any CORBA-compliant language and deployed on any CORBA-compliant platform such as C++ and Java.
• One-To-One services are deployed using relational database products from Oracle, Sybase, Informix and Microsoft.

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Technical Specifications Requirements

Server Hardware and Operating Systems:

• Solaris 2.x on Sun Sparc
• NT 4.0 on Intel x86
• SGI IRIX 6.x
• HP UX 10.x

Client Hardware and Operating System (for Dynamic Command Center and Visual Development Center):

• Intel x86 w/ MS Windows 95 and Windows NT.

Server Requirements

• Disk Storage: 80 MB
• Server Memory Requirements: 64 MB RAM minimum

DBMS:

• Oracle RDBMS Version 7.x
• SQL Server 6.x
• Sybase SQL Server 10.x, 11.x
• Informix 7.x

Embedded Software:

• Iona Orbix
• RSA BSafe
• RogueWave Tools.h++ and dbTools.h++

Adapters for Third-Party Software:

• Tax Computation: AVP Tax Software
• Payment Handling: CyberCash, Verifone, Omnihost, Cash Register

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BroadVision, Inc., World Headquarters, 333 Distel Circle, Los Altos, California 94022, Phone: 415-943-3600, Fax 415-943-3699. For a regional listing of BroadVision addresses and telephones please visit our Web site: http://www.broadvision.com

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