[Mentor Sree Charan Tekumanda] Adobe Real-Time CDP Community Mentorship Program 2024

[NimashaJain]

Hello Team,

Welcome to the Adobe Real-Time CDP Community Mentorship Program 2024! This is the featured Community Discussion/Contextual thread for your Adobe Real-Time CDP Community Mentor, Sree Charan Tekumanda!

Sree will be your dedicated mentor, providing valuable support and guidance on your Adobe Real-Time CDP queries as you upskill yourself and prepare for Real-Time CDP certification throughout the program.

Know your Mentor Sree Charan Tekumanda (aka @sreeCharan73)

Sree has extensive Data engineering and Modeling experience. He is a certified AWS Solution Architect, Databricks, and Adobe RTCDP Architect. He is an expert in strategizing digital applications and experiences.

He is looking forward to revolutionizing Customer Experience together with you all.

Aspirants mapped  

1) Aditya Chabuku ( @Aditya_Chabuku )
2) Ryan Ku ( @RyanKu )
3) Chris boehmer  ( @cboehmer83 )   
4) Hitesh Kumar ( @Hiteshkumar98   )
5) Arya Rajendra Kumar ( @Arya_Rajendra_TechM  )
6) Nitin Indrajith Vishwakarma  ( @nitinkarma )
7) Grandhi Lakshmi Pravallika ( @LakshmiPravallika  )
Niharika Chhabra ( @NiharikaCh ) 
9) Chetan Gaikwad ( @chetan01 )
10) Praveen Prabhakaran ( @wolflytics  )
11) Rajendrasing Bhadoriya ( @rajendra168 )
12) Brandon Olvera ( @BrandonOlvera )
13) Austin Vaught ( @AustinVa1 )

How to participate in the program

• Post your Questions in this thread to connect with your Mentor, Sree, and fellow Aspirant peers.
• Stand a chance to win the ‘Most Engaging Aspirant’ recognition from your mentor by participating in a weekly quiz.
• Test your knowledge by replying to the unresolved questions in the Real-Time CDP and AEP community and tag your Mentor to get recognized as an ‘Exceptional Contributor’ by your mentor.
• Stick to the schedule to cover one module/week and clear Adobe Real-Time CDP Certification during the program: July 15 – Aug 30

Suggested Next Steps for Aspirants:

• Update your Community Profile photo with your latest headshot to stand out to your Mentor and Peer Aspirants.
• "Like" this thread to confirm your participation in the program.
• Introduce yourself to Sree and your Aspirant peers by Replying to this Thread! Break the ice by introducing yourself (location, org/ company, etc.) and your experience with/ interest in Adobe DX stack. 
• Post your Questions to this thread as you begin learning more about the  Adobe Real-Time CDP Business Practitioner Professional Certification (Exam ID: AD0-E602)
• Stick to schedule and ensure you track your progress in the exam prep guide.
• Test your learning by replying to weekly quiz by your mentor
• Practice the modules by replying to unresolved queries in the AEP community & RTCDP Community and tag your mentor. 

Remember that every post / like / comment you make in your contextual thread and the Real-time CDP Community throughout the program helps increase your chance to be recognized by your Mentor and win exclusive Adobe swag, so bring your best efforts!

We wish you all the best as you embark on this learning experience!

[sreeCharan73]

Hello Team

Wishing a great learning ahead for all of us. Please feel free to post any queries on AEP RTCDP or Adobe Exp Cloud and let’s together find some good solutions/ideas.

Best Regards

Sree

[Aditya_Chabuku]

Hi @sreeCharan73  & others.

I'm Aditya Chabuku, working as Sr. Developer at TTC, Toronto, Canada. I'm 2X Certified AEM SME & Community Advisor with 9+ years exp in AEM Sites, Assets, Adobe Target Development and I'm looking forward to learn RTCDP.

Thanks @NimashaJain  for this opportunity.

Regards,

Aditya Chabuku

[sreeCharan73]

Hello Aditya

I see that you do have great activity as a community advisor. Glad to be part of the learning experience. 

[cboehmer83]

Hi everyone! I'm Chris, and work at Wiley running the Paid Digital Team here. We're newer to the Adobe DX stack, but have been utilizing it over the last year or so and want to learn & upskill in this area. Looking forward to it!

[sreeCharan73]

Hello Chris

The Adobe stack for DX is good, if you have it. Gotta learn the most and deliver the best experiences for the customers.

[wolflytics]

Hi @sreeCharan73 and community,

I'm Praveen working at Cox Communications, Atlanta (Georgia), and have been using Adobe over 15 years, mainly on Analytics. I'm exploring the value of AEP stack vs. in-house application and which use-cases does AEP stand out clearly. I'm part of the POC in my team and have started to ingest some data in AEP to explore the technicalities and capabilities. I'm already using Event Forwarding to export to AWS.

Looking forward to learning more and strengthening my understanding of CDP and AEP.

Regards,

Praveen

[sreeCharan73]

Hello Praveen

I've been in the same place, with many clients. Although the usecases are the KPIs for such applications, time to Market/time to value is the power of Adobe stack. Hope the PoC goes smoothly as planned, let us know if we could contribute to any ideas. Event forwarding is just a start, if you have reviewed what CJA could offer over Analytics, with the power of identity stitching, it would unlock more usecases. If you haven't read this before, worth a read,Comparison with Adobe Analytics | Adobe Customer Journey Analytics,

[BrandonOlvera]

Hi @sreeCharan73 & others!

I'm Brandon Olvera, working as a Customer Data Success Lead at Nasdaq. I'm based out of Houston, TX! I have a strong core drive to improve the world through digital solutions. I use Adobe RT-CDP every day in my current role and can't wait to lear more tips, tricks, and best practices. 

Best, 

Brandon 

[sreeCharan73]

Hi Brandon

Good motivation for all of us.Let's chat over some great ideas, on using AEP as RTCDP + Apps for delivering some really good solutions for CX.

[chetan01]

Hi All 
I am Chetan, I work at Epsilon & based out of Bangalore. I have been working on different products of Adobe Marketing Cloud since quite some time. Had a long standing wish to understand AEP & RT CDP in detail. 

Nice to meet you all. 
Cheers, 

[sreeCharan73]

Hello Chetan

Good to have the "Adobe Experience", makes it a great start for learning "the Platform". Since AEP is built around and to be the real-time data warehouse for all Exp. Cloud applications & much more. Let's talk more.

[chetan01]

I was going through the key concepts - schemas, datasets & so on. 
As I understand, schemas are the foundation and then one has to create datasets to ingest data. 
Now, there are 2 approaches to create a dataset:
1. Using XDM Schema 
2. Using CSV File. 
In case of 2 above, it seems we don't need a schema in place to create a dataset & can directly create a dataset. 

My questions:
Question1: Wanted to understand, what would be the use case/situation when one could not create a schema & directly create a dataset from CSV (i.e. go as per approach 2). 

Question2: Is it a best practice to create a schema first & then create dataset ? Is there a preference or recommended approach. 

Ref: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-platform/ingestion/tutorials/ingest-batch-data

[NimashaJain]

@chetan01 Awesome Question

@sreeCharan73 Can you look into the query?

[sreeCharan73]

Excellent question, @chetan01 

I will try to first answer the questions, in the reverse order

2. Yes it is always a best practice and an ideal thing to create a schema for the required datasets. This is more relevant for datasets that are stored and used for Profile Store.
The ideal approach/method would be as follows,

a. to have a data profiling activity to identify the common attributes across datasets, their possible data types, size & patterns. 
b. Identify primary and Possible secondary identities for the schema.

c. Classify these attributes into AEP Datatypes, Field Groups and then re use them to create the required schema. Refer the documentation here for further best practices on Schema modeling.

d. Create schema based on the type of the data - Individual Profile or Experience Event. And create datasets on the schema, as required.

1. Now coming to where we could possibly skip having a schema. Lets take the same process of creating a schema, in order to profile the data, you could utilise AEP Query Service, to make that possible, one would need a dataset in AEP. Since there is no schema defined yet, we could use the CSV to Dataset workflow and create the dataset. based on the lifecycle and use of the data, perform profiling, create a schema and reingest data into schema based dataset. 
In a similar way, we could use the 2nd option of directly mapping CSV data to dataset for all such adhoc analysis/usecases.

Glad to answer this one, hope it clarifies & keep the queries coming. 

[chetan01]

Thank you @sreeCharan73 for explaining this so well. This is a great insight on where I could use this feature. Thanks again !

[sreeCharan73]

Hello

@AustinVa1 , @BrandonOlvera, @rajendra168, @wolflytics, @chetan01, @NiharikaCh, @LakshmiPravallika, @nitinkarma, @Arya_Rajendra_TechM, @Hiteshkumar98, @cboehmer83, @RyanKu, @Aditya_Chabuku

Below is the section-wise details about the AEP RTCDP Business Practitioner exam:
Professional certification | Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform

Since most of the team are already having the foundational understanding of AEP RTCDP.

The Experience League documentation is a huge ocean of knowledge on the topics, however lets focus on the important topics required for a good start.

Let's dive into the topics, with related links to the Adobe documentation.

AEP Data Architecture:

• AEP Overview
• RTCDP Overview
• Basics of Schema Composition | Adobe Experience Platform
• Best Practices
• Data Ingestion Overview | Adobe Experience Platform

Stay tuned for some trivia, starting this weekend.

[RyanKu]

Thanks @NimashaJain for the introduction. Nice to meet everyone and thank you for being our mentor @sreeCharan73 !

Ryan Ku, Sr Manager Digital MarTech at Rogers in Toronto, Canada. I have limited experience (less than a year) with the Adobe Experience Cloud products but am jumping in to learn the new Adobe Experience Platform suite. Looking to learn as much as I can to help our organization succeed in personalization across web and mobile app and optimize performance for campaigns / paid media.

[sreeCharan73]

Hello @RyanKu 

As you might've understood, WebSDK, CJA, Target and AJO are very sophisticated tools to help create omni-channel campaigns, delivering consistent and personalised experiences to the end customers. Since, AEP is the sole data platform that boosts these apps, makes it a must-know. 

Hope this activity helps to get you into the game of AEP.

Regards

Sree

[chetan01]

Hello @sreeCharan73 
Hope you are doing well !

While going through the XDM schemas & Datasets, some of the aspects are not 100% clear to me. 

I am looking to unify a profile for a simple use case for a beauty products retailer as given below. 
I am looking at creating schemas & datasets, creating basic relationships (similar to PK, FK in RDBMS). The said retailer has web & physical stores. 

To keep things simple:
I am considering a Web schema & an associated dataset. This dataset would hold data when consumers register & update their profile. 
Schema 1: For Web
Below is the schema:
Cust_ID | Phone_number | Email_Address | First_Name | Last_Name | Gender | Dob

Cust_ID -> primary identifier generating from a backend CRM system.
Phone_number -> Non primary identifier
Email_Address -> Non primary identifier
This schema is in a way the main schema. 

Schema 2: For Store
Another schema & dataset is for a store dataset to ingest feed coming from the store. 
Two key aspects here:
1) No Cust_ID since store systems are not tied to CRM
2) Customers may chose to give either phone number or email address depending on their preference. 

Hence, the data would come in the following manner. 
Case A) Feed using Phone number as a primary key. 
Phone_number | First_Name | Last_Name | Gender | Skin Type | Products Purchased

Case B) Feed using Email Address as a primary key. 
Email_Address | First_Name | Last_Name | Gender | Skin Type | Products Purchased

My Ask: 
Q1) Unify web & Store: Connect the web schema & store schemas together using either email address or phone number for a customer as and when the data comes in. How would one approach this ? I want to ultimately use skin type, products purchased from store in the segmentation. 
Q2) Schema Relationships: Does the answer lie in building relationships between the schemas ? What use would the relationships serve given that (Email, Phone number are identifiers) and are present in Web Schema. 
Q3) Priority of updates: I want to give preference to web, app data over store data. Since, store data may have typos & common errors (e.g. Name is misspelt in store data). I believe, this would be related to merge policies? 
Q4) Enabling Primary Identifier: Do I need to enable the store dataset to profile & give a primary identifier ? Would email & phone work as identifiers without use of Customer ID coming in from store. 

Thank you so much !! Just lot of questions currently. 

[sreeCharan73]

Hello @chetan01 

Thank you for asking this one. This focuses on the backbone of AEP, the Identity Service.

1. Unify web & store: 
This is the primary advantage of AEP as RTCDP, we should have the right fields marked as identity.  Since the PK of the records are not consistent, we should approach this using identityMap as the Primary Identity and have the email and phone as secondary identities on this schema. 

2. Schema relationships:

this is basically for non people Entities like product(here as example) and other lookup (multi dimensional) entities. This is a very good feature which enables advanced segmentation, but should be dealt with care.

3. Priority of updates:

Yes, you are correct. Merge policy is indeed the answer. Create a merge policy of type "Dataset precedence" and use this merge policy for all segmentation and activation needs.

4. Enabling Primary Identifier:

Yes, primary identifiers are tied to the relevant schema, so we could have phone or email as primary identifier on the store schema, however since the primary identifier cannot be null, if the values are only available inconsistently (either email or phone) then as I mentioned above, try having the IdentityMap as the primary identifier and utilise Data prep to map them, as it comes.

Please check my post below for the links to learn more about this.

Regards

Sree