Granular and high level guides to OWCS personalization required

Question

I've searched for a guide but can't find one (I sure there must be one somewhere).
My company is new to Webcenter Sites and we haven't deployed everything yet.  My developers suggest that Webcenter sites doesn't handle personalization very well but I can't see how that could be the case.
Could someone please point me in the direction of some guides, such as an overview of how personalisation works in webcenter sites and then also a granular guide from planting cookies and reading them etc.
I'd just like to know how it works and what skills I need to put in play to achieve our personalization strategy.
Grateful if you can help.

Answer 1

No worries.
So strictly speaking OWCS doesn't set any cookies (unless you use the SETCOOKIE API), but the app server does in order to maintain sessions.  The visitor context within Sites is managed on the session too, so all you need to do is somehow link your sessions together from one browsing session to the next, and your'e home free.  One way of doing this is by asking the user to log in. But another, more powerful way, is to set a cookie on the user's browser, with some identifier for the user.  If you're using "remember my login" functionality, you might as well just user the userid, but if you are doing implicit personalization, you can even use a unique id.  Here's how this works:
The visitor accesses your site. You look for the "i-know-this-guy" cookie and don't find it, so you set it to some system-generated value
You then bind the "i-know-this-guy" cookie to the visitor's visitor context by assigning it as an alias to the context, with vdm:setalias
Sites will now AUTOMATICALLY analyze all past visitor sessions that have ever been tagged with that alias and merge them together with the current session. Presto! instant profile for user
You can personalize against this profile, or you can augment it once the user actually logs in (again, by assigning their userid as ANOTHER alias to the session).
Once this is set up, you can do all sorts of cool things with the visitor context, like record history data for him, enhance the profile, and so-on. 
Once the visitor context is the way you like it (or as you're improving it), you can target content for the user using the commercecontext tags.
One word of warning: if you're doing implicit p13n you need to be aware of possible session stealing attacks, so when you switch from the i-know-this-guy cookie to actually having profile data assigned to the user, you probably want to remove the cookie and provide some functionality that asks the user to log back in.  While technically this is not necessary, it's a Good Idea.
Tony