After toying with SmartTarget and Fredhopper for a few weeks, I can tell you from personal experience that it’s bloody complicated. Technically, it’s all nice enough, but there are so many (sub)systems involved and documentation and config files are all over the place.

So I thought it might help people if I explained how to perform some basic tasks. Today, we’ll be creating our own ‘footprint’. In case you don’t know what footprints are, checkout this post.

Quick summary: a footprint is a way for an editor / content manager / marketer to override the claims which are used to determine which personalized content items to show. Oh, and by the way: footprints are available within Experience Manager only!
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Ever since the acquisition of the ecommerce search and recommendation engine Fredhopper by SDL in 2010, the market has eagerly anticipated what the result of this merger would mean for them. The combination of Tridion and Fredhopper was released in 2011 and baptized SmartTarget. But it wasn’t until the release of the latest version, SmartTarget 2014 SP1, that this integration was seen as stable and production-ready.
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