White Papers

White papers are available for both business and technical users.

Business White Papers

With the Benefit of Wisdom
ATG
Delivering complete and compelling customer experiences can deliver tangible economic value for businesses, but doing so requires businesses to treat the customer experience from beginning to end as a continuous cycle. Find out how you can make this happen with the benefit of ATG Wisdom.

Optimizing Online Service to Build Effective Customer Relationships
Jupiter Research
There is no question that customer service plays an important role in the shopping decisions consumers make across sales channels. But what exactly are customers looking for in terms of service and where do they hope to get it? See what Jupiter Research has to say.

Multi-Channel e-Marketing...Finally
Ian Davis
All too often today, e-marketing consists of little more than an e-mail blast with a link to a Web page. Other than that simple link, e-mail and the Web are isolated from each other, from other customer touch points, and from other marketing activities happening at the same time. Further, anti-SPAM legislation also constrains a marketer's efforts to reach out to prospects, forcing marketers to build enough trust with their audience to be granted permission to market to them. How can an e-marketing effort be successful amidst these business, technical, and legislative realities? e-Marketers need to conduct much more targeted, personally relevant campaigns that present a consistent image across all e-channels and surround the target audience with their message.

Real World Scenarios: How consumer-facing enterprises use scenarios to drive e-business
Lisa Kilborn
Customers choose to do business with enterprises that provide consistent and satisfying end-to-end experiences. This whitepaper introduces the concept of scenarios and defines the term, outlines the key attributes of a high caliber scenario engine, and presents three hypothetical scenario use cases, each focused on a different industry (Financial Services, Media/Entertainment, and Retail).

Application Hosting Services
Designed to accelerate deployment of knowledge management solutions, Application Hosting Services is run by an experienced in-house team of engineers and make it possible to implement knowledge-based self- and assisted-service in as little as two weeks. AH includes installation, management, and ongoing maintenance of the hardware, software, and network infrastructure required for a Primus solution.

Communication Center
With the Internet acting as a communications conduit, consumers are now afforded the opportunity of communicating directly with companies anywhere, anytime and any place. There lies the challenge.

Self-Service Comes of Age
Ian Davis
The term "self-service" can mean different things to different people, depending on their perspective and their industry. This paper describes what distinguishes a standard Web site from a high value self-service site; outlines four building blocks of self-service; introduces and discusses the importance of proactive service; and explains the role of self-service in creating and maintaining a rich and satisfying customer experience across channels. After reading this paper, you'll have a clear view of the self-service big picture, a means by which to assess your current online service offerings, and a better vision of what steps you can take to offer truly compelling online service, and thus improve customer loyalty.

Fulfilling the Promise of Web Content Management
Bill Morrison
For many enterprises, the Web content management system has become a primary limitation to overall e-business success - causing companies to waste time, disappoint customers, and lose money. This white paper will discuss the historical pressures that led to the rise of Web content management systems, how changes in those forces have created many of the problems encountered today, and how enterprises can overcome those problems in the future.

Patty Seybold Group's: Pro-Active, Real-Time Customer Self-Service
Mitchell Kramer
ATG has taken a new approach to customer self service. It's an approach that leverages the lessons learned from early order management and product support systems. It's an approach that builds on ATG's innovative technologies' Personalization, Scenarios, and Portal. It's an approach that uses new search technologies and provides tight touchpoint and business process integration. ATG calls it pro-active, real-time customer self service.

ATG, Web Services and .NET
Ian Davis
Web services offers an exciting and cost-effective way for application integration, and is gaining industry-wide backing. This paper considers the role that Web services can play with commerce and self-service applications.

ATG Scenario Manager Role
Andrea Mulligan
ATG recommends that its customers institute a Scenario Manager role to better manage the process of identifying, defining, and implementing scenarios. The Scenario Manager should be your scenario expert, able to manage communications between and with business and technology stakeholders, and capable of implementing scenarios in the ACC. This paper explains the recommended skills and responsibilities for the Scenario Manager and provides recommendations for identifying whether your organization needs someone in this role.

Knowledge Management Best Practices: Turning Information into a Corporate Asset
The most effective knowledge management systems are able to access information from multiple documents and databases, capture it in a centralized knowledgebase, and continually improve it for ongoing use by individuals seeking answers. Typically, these individuals comprise the support agents in customer support environments, as well as the customers, employees, partners, and/or vendors they serve.This paper draws on our decade of implementing knowledge management systems for support organizations large and small to discuss the six best practices to success.

Extending ATG Portal with Portlets
Ian Davis
The functionality of Portal applications can be greatly enhanced through the use of portlets. Because ATG Portal is built on industry standards technology, it's easy to extend the out-of-the-box functionality to create a feature-rich portal application by creating additional portlets from ATG partners, or those built as part of a project.

Microportals: The Big Need For Little Portals
Ian Davis
Portals are becoming an increasingly popular method of automating communications with customers, partners and employees. Groups of similar portals that share some functions, have specialized functions administered by business users that are usually outside of a central IT function, are what we're calling, Microportals.

ATG Scenario Modeling Framework: Increasing the likelihood of relationship management success
Andrea Mulligan
The days of high-tech spending with little concern for return on investment or profitability are gone. More and more business people are being asked to identify initiatives that will leverage existing technology and provide a significant return on technical investments that have been made over the years. The ATG Professional Services organization developed the ATG Scenario Modeling Framework in an effort to help business users understand the capabilities of the ATG applications, how to identify appropriate business initiatives that are suited for ATG, and how to clearly express "what" those initiatives should do, in the form of comprehensive business requirements, for the technology team.

Unlocking the Value of Your CRM Investment
Hans Wieser
The goal of CRM as a strategy is to maximize customer equity. You maximize equity by increasing lifetime value and slashing costs of service and communication. What better way to reach this goal than by embracing the Internet and making it the leading point of your customer's dialogue. With this document, we intend to provide an orientation for business people assessing their needs for online marketing automation and Self Service. The reader should be familiar with core concepts of CRM as an enterprise strategy, and personalization as an interaction concept.

Return on Investment (ROI) with Primus Software: Actual Customer Results
Providing good customer service is expensive. But Primus® software has enabled scores of companies to reduce their CRM costs dramatically while improving their customer satisfaction ratings. These results speak for themselves. Read this paper to explore how Primus could help your business reduce costs while keeping your customers satisfied.

ROI from a New Wave of B2E Portal
Ian Davis
Many organizations are implementing employee portals to facilitate collaboration, improve knowledge sharing, and increase productivity. But which employees are they targeting? What is the scope of the exercise? Where is the ROI coming from? This paper argues that while the ROI from a narrowly focused portal initiative is worthwhile, organizations that adopt a portal across multiple roles and departments will greatly increase their ROI and drive down the total cost of ownership.

Butler Group Knowledge Management Research Paper: ATG Enterprise Portal Suite
Jeremy Newman, Butler Group
Butler Group supports ATGs claim that its Enterprise Portal Suite provides a complete portal solution. This paper concludes that the ATG Enterprise Portal Suite offers a high degree of scalability and is based on proven technology.

Maximizing Revenue per User with a Scenario-based Wireless Service Delivery Platform
Ian Davis
Wireless technologies are evolving rapidly. The opportunities associated with these new wireless technologies bring with them not only exciting new value propositions, but also the need for innovative new business strategies. The new Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and Wireless Applications Service Providers (WASPs) who can harness new technologies to provide compelling customer propositions will see the wireless Internet reach a much wider consumer market than fixed-line Internet ever did.

Providing a Superior User Experience with Web Self-Service
Getting accurate information to employees and customers quickly can lower operational costs and increase customer satisfaction. Learn how the Web can provide a superior user experience for easy enterprise-wide knowledge sharing. This document describes the attributes of a superior Web-based knowledge management software and the technology that can support it.

B2X: Online Relationship Management for an Extended Enterprise
Ian Davis
Your organization extends further than ever before. Employees, partners, distributors/resellers, customers, and more all require careful management and two-way communication. Fostering successful relationships with these diverse groups can be a challenge. But personalized portals can help optimize the online experience for everyone in your extended enterprise. This insightful white paper will help you take online relationship management to the next level.

Maximizing Customer Equity in the Financial Services Sector with Personalized Portals
Hans Wieser
In the competitive financial services industry, it's harder than ever for customers to differentiate one player from the next. Financial Services providers who cultivate deeper relationships with the right customers can build long-term customer loyalty. This white paper explores how the ATG Enterprise Portal Suite enables strong, personalized online customer relationships in all areas of the financial services and helps organizations achieve a significant return on investment.

ATG's Dynamo Scenario Server: Scenario-Based e-Commerce, CRM, and Merchandising
Mitchell I. Kramer, Senior Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group
There are two primary methods by which CRM and merchandising programs have been delivered, but both have significant limitations. However, through its innovative Scenario Server, ATG Dynamo 5 now gives business managers a powerful ability to design, develop, and manage scenarios. This is the first such implementation of this powerful technique. It's a real breakthrough.

Technical White Papers

ATG Search

ATG Search provides a best-of-breed search engine that integrates with your ATG Commerce, Service and Portal solutions for quick and easy deployment. It provides users with powerful tools to search for information across the enterprise ensuring that they find the product, service or other content they are looking for, for increased sales, better service, and better productivity.

The ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine™ - Putting the customer into the customer experience

ATG
ATG is a well-known leader and innovator in the development of Java-based frameworks and technologies for web development. This experience comes from many years of building web technology and software solutions that resulted in the creation of the Dynamo Application Server (DAS), and its very successful use in large-scale, high concurrency, high throughput web applications.

The Dynamo Application Framework™ - Accelerating enterprise Web site development

ATG is a well-known leader and innovator in the development of Java-based frameworks and technologies for Web development. This experience comes from many years of building Web technology and software solutions that resulted in the creation of the Dynamo Application Server (DAS) and its successful use in large-scale, high-concurrency, high-throughput Web applications.

Understanding Web Content Management Systems

ATG
As the complexity of Web applications has increased, so have the tools required to manage them. Over the years, Web content management has evolved dramatically from the days of flat files and FTP. Today, organizations need to consider how to manage a complex collection of content and application assets; code resources, traditional textual content, media files, application data, etc; that can be delivered in multiple formats (HTML, XML, PDF), through multiple delivery channels (Web, email, print), possibly in multiple languages. At the same time, customers are expected to be able to navigate through this complexity to find precisely what they were looking for, or perhaps something they didn't even know they needed, in the shortest time possible. Managing all this requires tools that have been designed to support these kinds of applications. In general, there are five essential components to any Web content management system (WCMS).

Introduction to ATG Content Administration 7.0

ATG
ATG Content Administration 7.0 is a full-featured Web-based content management system. Because of its tight integration with the ATG Application Suite, it provides unmatched flexibility and control over managing personalized content and data. It ships with a full set of content Workflow, Deployment, Versioning, and Editing features, as well as an accessible Web-based business user interface. With CA7, your organization can start editing and deploying content right out of the box, or you can tailor the product using the frameworks available to developers.

ATG Commerce: Performance and Scalability on IBM WebSphere Application Server

ATG Load and Performance Group
In November 2003 ATG conducted a performance study of ATG Commerce 6.1 running on WebSphere Application Server. We conducted our tests under controlled conditions at IBM's Solution Partnership Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, testing on both AIX and Red Hat Linux and using both large and small servers. This white paper discusses the importance of scaling and performance and details the outcome of our study. In short, we found that the ATG-IBM solution exhibits nearly perfect scaling, typically limited only by the capabilities of the operating system.

ATG 6.2.0 Content Administration Scalability and Sizing Guide

Lisa Gassaway and Ben Flynn
This paper presents the results of a study exploring the performance and scaling capabilities of ATG Content Administration. ATG found that ATG Content Administration does not require a large investment in hardware to support the content management needs of most businesses. Furthermore, because ATG Content Administration exhibits good vertical scaling, growth in capacity can be achieved easily in multiprocessor environments. Read the paper to see the full analysis.

Implementing ATG Web Services to Support Commerce, Self-Service, and Personalization

Sam Perman and Matt Landau
Web services are emerging de facto standards for communication and data exchange between applications. As organizations begin to use Web services to solve complicated business problems, ATG has enhanced its products to allow these organizations to take advantage of Web services. This white paper provides an overview of ATG's Web services capabilities and how the enterprise can integrate Web services with ATG's powerful personalization and commerce capabilities.

ATG Siebel Integration

Rishi Bhaskar
Customer service expectations are at an all time high with the advent of e-mail and the Web. Customers assume that when they log a call to your call center, you will have a record of the e-mail that they sent yesterday, as it pertains to the product they ordered from your Web site. To create this experience you need the ability to share data across channels within your enterprise. ATG Siebel Integrator connects your ATG solutions to your Siebel e-business applications allowing you to synchronize user profiles across your enterprise maintaining a unified view of your customer.

Using Scenarios for Faster Development

Joseph Vigneau
ATG Scenario Personalization reduces development time while promoting code reuse. Scenarios can be built and modified by people with domain-specific knowledge, using the events and actions supplied by ATG along with enterprise-specific events and actions. This reduces the amount of valuable developer time required to build your solution. Built on open standards, ATG allows developers to use and enhance their existing skills to produce better applications faster.

Moving from JHTML to JSP

Joseph Vigneau
Version 5.6 of ATG's software introduced the DSP Tag Library, which is an implementation of JHTML in the form of a JSP Tag Library. The DSP Tag Library lowers the JSP learning curve for developers familiar with JHTML, and empowers JSP developers to benefit from the power of ATG services, including droplets and form handlers. This white paper provides a comparison of JHTML and the DSP Tag Library for JSP. The JHTML to JSP Converter, a tool to ease the transition from JHTML to JSP, is also discussed.

Understanding ATG Data Anywhere Architecture

Pat Durante
This paper explores the data access problems faced by many companies, discusses the technology behind ATG's Data Anywhere Architecture", and then considers the business implications for companies seeking a unified view of customer data.

Targeting and Personalization in ATG Dynamo

Natalya Hung
The ATG Dynamo e-Business Platform provides a rich set of features that allow companies to create rules for targeting content to particular users. These rules can be created using a graphical user interface or directly through code. Leveraging the ATG Data Anywhere Architecture", Dynamo provides the ability to direct virtually any material stores in Dynamo to the right person using targeters.

Multi-channel Enterprise Portals

Andrew Rickard
The enterprise portal serves as an effective medium for presenting content from multiple systems in a clear and concise way. This characteristic has made these portals popular among organizations requiring a platform that is used to centralize access to information. As a result, some have hailed the enterprise portal as the desktop of the Internet generation.

The Dynamo Application Framework

Nathan Abramson
The Dynamo Application Framework (DAF) reduces the cost of building, modifying, and maintaining J2EE applications. It contains numerous services and functions implemented on top of the standard J2EE platform, saving developers the expense of hunting down or writing those services themselves. It also enables a development methodology that is uniform across the entire platform.

Caching Data for Scalability Without Losing Data Integrity

Jeff Vroom
It is crucially important that a Web site be scalable to support the number of users attracted to the site during peak demand. While some amount of fine-tuning can always increase site capacity incrementally, choosing the wrong architecture may create unsolvable architectural barriers that place a hard limit on site capacity. This paper describes common scalability options and pitfalls with the ideal goal of helping to create a site with linear scalability.

Scalability of ATG and ATG Scenario Personalization

Bill Morrison
Many companies are in the process of redefining their business models and, appropriately, examining their technology platforms to support their long-term business vision. ATG applications are often a key technology in these plans, selected in part because of their strong capabilities in commerce and self-service in addition to the scenario-driven relationship management technology. As part of a company's planning process, executives want to be certain that ATG products have the capacity and scalability to meet expected requirements of a growing business.

ATG Dynamo Application Server: A Robust Platform for J2EE Applications

This white paper discusses ATG Dynamo support for the J2EE platform. It reviews the ATG implementation of J2EE specifications and its advantages, and highlights some of the feature rich J2EE tools available to Dynamo developers. It also explores the end-to-end use of components in the Dynamo platform, the interoperability of Dynamo and J2EE components, and the advantages of the ATG Dynamo J2EE implementation.

Integrations Through the ATG Dynamo Scenario Server

Implementing a new scenario action or event will extend the functionality of the Dynamo Scenario Server (DSS.) This white paper describes how this enables the use of the DSS as a point of integration for other applications. Readers of this paper should be familiar with the Dynamo Message System (DMS,) Dynamo Server Page (DSP) design, and basic JAVA programming.