Combining Identity Information Inside and Outside of the Firewall
Since we’re heading to Digital ID World next week, we thought it might be interesting to show a demo of why virtual directories can help companies build social media driven applications. This post is a follow-up to my previous blog posts on “Virtualizing Social Networks” (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) by using a virtual directory to incorporate social media information into a virtual directory like Radiant Logic’s RadiantOne VDS. Our demo shows how you can leverage Twitter to promote products to your users based upon the people following and followed by the user.
Here is the general scenario. Company A is building a portal and would like to expose enhanced information to their customers. They are interested in enriching their user profiles by combining social network information into the data. This makes the information available in the portal more relevant for the users. They decide to start by incorporating information from Twitter into the system. This will allow them to promote products purchased by people following the user and whom the user is following. The following identity/data repositories are involved:
- Enterprise Directory containing a list of all users in the portal
- Order database
One of the key requirements is that they want to minimize the application development costs and also position themselves for incorporating other social networks. They decided to leverage a virtual directory to create a view into the identity and data repositories which allows them to easily consume this information within their application. This also allows them to incorporate additional social networks without making other application changes.
Our demo highlights how you can easily incorporate data from Twitter and combine the data with information coming from both the enterprise directory and the order database without needing to make significant application changes or modify the underlying data sources. The following diagram highlights the logical design:
We used the following approach to create the demo:
- Created an Enterprise Directory with the list of customers
- Joined the customer directory to the order database to get a list of products purchased by the user
- Joined the customer directory to Twitter to get the list of followers and who the user is following
- Set the Twitter handles of other users in the VDS store to Twitter handles that match so that we show the relationships (note that we could use something like ICS to do more sophisticated matching without necessarily needed the matching Twitter ID)
The demo shows how to create two different directory tree structures for consumption by the portal:
The “Following View” shows the orders purchased by the user and the people following or being followed by the user on Twitter. The “Purchased View” extends this information to show what products have been purchased across the user’s social graph.
As a sneak peak, here’s a video walking you through what we are showing:
I hope to see you next week. Be sure to stop by the Radiant Logic area to see the demo in person.
- Todd
