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Reusability in Unica 7.5

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Mar 30 2009

As a consultant for a leading marketing firm offering our clients real-time multichannel customer interaction, I am continually asked to build things in Unica that are reusable. One of the ground floor tenants of automation is the ability not only to automate a process, but to ensure that what is automated does not require high maintenance. Reusability is the buzz-word for low maintenance and should apply as well to the automation of your Unica applications. This article is the first in a series of articles about how to take full advantage of your Unica 7.5 environment - that is, how to make things reusable.

At the highest level, reusability for Unica 7.5 would pertain to your ability to take the entire environment - for instance a production environment - and recreate that environment elsewhere. That is exactly an exercise which we recently performed for one of our clients. Below are the steps to moving your Unica application from one environment (ENV#1) to another environment (ENV#2).

  1. Restore backup copy of database from ENV#1 to ENV#2. The Unica application system tables need to be brought over from ENV#1 to ENV#2 along with a fairly well synchronized backup of the file system.
  2. Copy the file system from ENV#1 to ENV#2. Copy the entire Unica directory from ENV#1 to ENV#2 (e.g. /Affinium/*.*)
  3. Change Security Manager Settings in ENV#2. Use Affinium Manager/Configuration Manager to update server information for all of the Unica applications. Update the configuration file (usam.conf) for Affinium Security Manager so that:
    • The application points to the correct database. You can do this by modifying the uasm.data_source=jdbc:://:;databaseName= value in the configuration file. The correct user accounts are identified. You can do this for ENV#2 by changing the value of uasm.data_source_login= so that it reflects the proper administrative account for ENV#2.
    • The correct password is identified for user accounts. You can do this by running encryptPasswords -d
    • Start up application in ENV#2. When you first start up the application the Unica ID by type table will need to generate the next id for objects such as sessions, flowcharts, offers, etc. So you should experience a brief "flickering" of the application when logging in for the first time.

So what does this mean for you? If you haven't done so already you need to ensure that your Unica 7.5 application is being backed up properly. Your backups for the database and the file system may be used to restore one environment to another environment. Restoration of your Unica environment serves to provide remediation in the event of a failover event or merely to refresh a development or QA environment so that it is current with the production environment. So I will ask you to respond regarding how successful you have been in backing up and restoring your Unica environment. Please send me your comments or give me a call and we can discuss more in depth.

A special thanks goes to my friend at Unica who worked with us to make this vision into a reality recently at one of our client sites.

In my next post I will talk about how to build more reusable components into Unica 7.5 beginning with your Campaign application.

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