Sitecore 7.2 Personalisation Buttons Not Showing

Sitecore has the fantastic ability to personalise content for users, however this is not enabled by default.
I recently had to jump into a Sitecore 7.2 solution and for the life of me couldn’t figure out why personalisation options weren’t showing.

sc72 Component No Personalise Button Showing

I finally remembered that for 7.2 personalistion requires analytics (DMS).
If you get to the point where you’re looking at the screenshot above and wondering where Personalise is, just follow these steps:

  1. Download the corresponding DMS version for your version of Sitecore from the SDN.
  2. Extract the DMS download (in my case DMS 7.2 rev.150408)
  3. In SQL Server Management Studio attach the Sitecore.Analytics database.
  4. Copy the 3 .config files into YOURSITECOREWEBSITE\App_Config\Include
  5. Update the connectionstring.config for the analytics database.
  6. <add name="analytics" connectionString="Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=Sitecore_analytics;Integrated Security=False;User ID=USERNAME;Password=PASSWORD" />
    

Now if you go to edit a component you will get:
sc72 Component Personalise Button

If you are dealing with a client where they don’t want an Analytics Database to be installed or configured, you can simply add the 3 config files and in Sitecore.Analytics.config change:

<!--  ANALYTICS DISABLE DATABASE
      Disables the database so that no reading or writing to the database occurs.
      Default: false
-->
<setting name="Analytics.DisableDatabase" value="false" />

to:

<!--  ANALYTICS DISABLE DATABASE
      Disables the database so that no reading or writing to the database occurs.
      Default: false
-->
<setting name="Analytics.DisableDatabase" value="true" />

Doing this also means you do not need to add the connection string for the analytics database, but this will mean you will lose the ability to personalise on any historical events such as previous visits or goals and is therefore not recommended.

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