Managing Information Targeting with WSS and MOSS

One of the main problems with sharing information among many users is that there will always be a lot of information, but the average user is only interested in parts of that information. A common way of solving this problem is to create specific places for each type of information or interest group, such as local intranets for each department. However, this creates a new problem: Now each user must know where to look, or even worse, information may be stored multiple times, maybe in different versions. This is clearly something to avoid.

MOSS has a solution to this: targeting. Almost every piece of information in a SharePoint site can be targeted for a specific audience. But SharePoint 2007 has other ways of targeting information, which also work in WSS. You can target any of these: audience groups, SharePoint Groups, AD distribution lists, and AD security groups. The following list shows the types of objects that you can control using targeting.

• q News: This list can be configured to only show sales-related news items to the sales team, while the IT staff see only IT-related news, and other users can view both sales and IT news.

• q List items and Library items: All lists and libraries can enable audience targeting. To display a filtered view, you must display these lists and libraries using the Content Query Web Part. For example, you can have an Announcement item filtered for everyone but the Sales team.

• q Office Links: A link displayed in MS Office 2007 Send As or File Open dialog box can be filtered so that it is only available to specific audiences.

• q Navigational Links: The links on the Quick Launch bar can also be targeted. The user will, therefore, only see the links that apply to his or her specific tasks.

• q Web Parts: Almost all Web Parts available to a SharePoint site have an option for targeting. It is usually found in the Web Part configuration section Advanced. Even the Web Parts on the Sites area page, which lists sites, can be targeted for a specific audience, if you need to do this.

More about Audience Groups (MOSS Only)

It is easy to confuse audiences with security. Let's make this very clear: The audience feature is not a security feature. It is a filter that displays or hides information based on membership in audience groups. For example, if you know the URL to a news item that is hidden from you by this audience feature, you can type it manually and still see the news item.

The audience is built on rules that identify users based on properties and memberships. For example, you may have an audience named Sales where all users with the property Department = Sales are members. A user can be a member of multiple audience groups; if so, that user will see all information targeted for any of those groups.

You may have as many audience groups as necessary, but when you have a lot of groups, it is easy to get confused. Make sure that you plan your audience groups and take note of why you created those audiences. It is easy to forget that after a while. Audiences are like fresh fruit. It is great to have when it tastes good, but old fruit only attracts flies.

By default there is always one audience group - All site users. As this says, it will contain all users with access to SharePoint. You cannot remove or modify this audience.

Creating Audiences

In a previous section in this chapter, you learned about user profiles; now it is time to use some of this knowledge. The information in the user profile is often used for selecting members for an audience. For example, say you want to create the audience mentioned above: Sales, based on the Department property. If you import the user properties from Active Directory into the user profile, you have the property in two places. So, the big question is which one will SharePoint use when compiling the audience group? The answer this time is the user profile. Actually, most of the time SharePoint will use the properties stored in the user profile database when compiling the rules that define audience groups.

Follow the steps in the Try It Out below to create the Sales audience group, based on the Department property setting in the user profile.

Try It Out Create an Audience

1. Make sure that you have at least some users in Active Directory with the Department property set to Sales.

2. Make sure that this information has been imported into the user profile, as described earlier.

3. Start SharePoint's Central Administration tool, then open the SSP instance (typically SharedServices1); click Audiences. This will open a page with all settings and management tasks related to audiences. It will list the current status; for example, the number of audiences, when to run the compilation process (i.e., rebuild the audience groups), and any errors encountered.

4. Click the Create Audience link. This opens the first of a series of web forms where you define the audience group. For this example, fill in these values:

   1. Name: Sales: This will be the name for this audience. It will be visible anywhere audiences are listed, so give it a descriptive name.

   2. Description: "People from the sales department"; make sure to enter a clear description here, so other administrators 12 months from now understand its purpose.

   3. Owner: This is an optional setting; the user defined as an owner can modify this Audience.

   4. Include user who: Select Satisfy all of the rules. As long as you only have one rule, this setting is not important. But if you want to build a more complex set of rules, you must be very sure if you want "all" or just "any" of the rules. For example, assume that you create two rules: Department=Sales and Department=Finance, and choose the default, "Satisfy all of the rules." Do you really have any user who has both Sales and Finance in their Department property? Probably not, so this audience will not find any matching members.

   5. Click OK to open the next web form.

5. The Add Audience Rule page lets you choose between two types of operands: User and Property. Depending on what you select, the rest of this page will adjust to the options available for that particular operand (see Figure 8-6). In this example, you should choose these settings:

   
   Figure 8-6

   1. Operand: Property

   2. Property: Department. All of these are fetched from the user profile. If you have previously completed the example where you create the new user profile property IQ, it will be listed here.

   3. Operator: = (the equal sign). The four choices are =, Contains, <>, and Not contains.

   4. Values: Sales. This value is not case-sensitive.

      Important 

      If the property is not always spelled in the same way, such as "Sales" and "Sales Dept" and "Sales Department," choose the Operator "Contains" and set the value to "Sales".

   5. Click OK to save and close this first rule. You will return to a page with the current settings for this audience group. If you need to modify the rule, click on it. If you need to create a second rule, click Add rule. But for this example, you are now done.

   Important 

   With a brand-new audience, you may be tempted to click the link View membership on this page. Unfortunately, it will tell you that there are no matching users found. The reason, as given, is that this audience is not yet compiled. Instead, first click Compile audience, then click View membership.

6. Click the breadcrumb link Manage Audience at the top of the page to return to start page for audience management.

7. Note that the status says Uncompiled audiences = 1. This is a clear indication that you should now compile the audience. This will start a process in SharePoint that will look for all users matching the audience rules. Typically, you will schedule this process, but if you are impatient, you can click Start compilation now, then wait until this process is done (check the Compilation Status). You can also click Refresh sometimes to reduce the adrenaline level.

8. When the Compilation status is idle and the number of Uncompiled audiences is 0, everything is completed. To view the membership of this group, click View audiences to list all existing audiences. Locate Sales; click to the right of its name to open its quick menu, and select View membership. Verify that all the users you expected are here. If not, check the properties in the Active Directory, then the properties in the User Profile, and finally check the rule for this property (use Edit in the menu, or click the View Audience Properties link at the top of the page).

This was rather straightforward, right? If you want to create an audience based on membership in a distribution list or a security group, you follow exactly the same steps as you did above, except for step 5, which will look like this:

5. On the Add Audience Rule page:

   1. Operand: User

   2. Operator: Member of

   3. Values: Filobit\Sales Team (i.e., the complete name for this group)

   4. Click OK to save your work.

So, where did SharePoint go to find the membership of this security group? Remember that the user profile contains nothing about groups, only user accounts. That leaves only a data connection, typically Active Directory, which is the case in this example. So, if you want to create audiences based on groups, you don't need to make sure that the user profile database is up to date.

The other option for the operand User is Reports under. Use this operand if you want to create an audience based on people working for a given person, such as the sales manager. This time, SharePoint will look at the settings in the user profile database, not in Active Directory, so now you must be sure that the profile database has been updated. By default, this property is imported from Active Directory, so the correct way to update these settings is to enter this value in Active Directory, start the import to the user profile database, and then compile the audience. Note that the user account you enter in the Reports under field for the audience rule will automatically be added to the audience. In other words, if you create an audience based on the fact that Anna is the manager, SharePoint will include every user in the profile database with the Reports under setting equal to Anna, including Anna herself.

Important 

If this group contains other groups, they will also be included, as long their group members can be viewed in the current domain. If you have multiple domains, you must use Universal Groups to be sure that SharePoint will see the members in the remote domain.

Applying Audiences (WSS and MOSS)

Now comes the fun part - testing that targeting of information for a given audience actually works. Before you continue with the following Try It Out, make sure that you have at least one audience group besides the default All site users. Note that in some cases you must enable audience filtering, for example when targeting single list items, while in other cases the audience filtering is enabled by default; for example, when targeting a complete Web Part and its content.

Try It Out Target Information to a Specific Audience

1. In the first example, you create a news item targeted at the Sales audience only. Since news items are pages filed in a list, you must start by enabling audience filtering for the content of that list. Then you can target list items for specific audience groups. Finally, to display the content of the list, you must also enable audience filtering for the Content Query Web Part used to display the content of that list. Sounds complicated perhaps, but hopefully this example will clarify things:

2. Open the SharePoint intranet site; for example, http://srv1.

3. Make sure that the list has audience filtering enabled:

   1. Go to the News page on the intranet, and click View All Site Content.

   2. Click Pages (i.e., the list where news files are stored).

   3. Click Settings Document Library Settings Audience targeting settings.

   4. Enable audience targeting. The Pages list has this enabled by default. Then click OK.

4. Create a news item targeted for a specific audience group:

   1. Click on the News link, click Site Actions Create Page.

   2. Enter a Title, and a Description; the URL name will, by default, be the same as the Title. Select a Page Layout of type Article Page (any type will do fine here), and then click Create.

   3. Next, enter the content of this news item. This is defined by the page layout you selected in step f. Add some text in the Page Content control, and possibly a picture.

   4. To define what audience this news item is targeted for, you must edit its properties: Click the menu Page on the toolbar, then select Page settings. Scroll down until you see the section Audience Targeting. Either enter the audience group Sales directly, or click the directory icon to the right of this field, and select Sales, then OK. Go to the end of this web form, and click OK.

      Important 

      Before you click the final OK in the previous step, you can click the Check Spelling button to check for any spelling errors. You can also check the spelling in the news item content before publishing it by opening the Tools menu and clicking Spelling.

   5. When you are happy with the content of the news item, click Publish.

5. Enable audience filtering in the Content Query Web Part that displays these news items. Note that the News page has by default two Web Parts for this: one that shows the latest news, including some of its details, and one that shows the last 20 news items.

   1. Click News to make sure that you are looking at the right page on your intranet.

   2. Click Site Actions Edit Page. This News page opens and is automatically checked out to you (i.e., any modifications you make will not be visible to others until you check the page back in).

   3. Click Edit on the Web Part News Roll Up, then select Modify Shared Web Part. A configuration pane for the Web Part opens to the right. Expand the Query section, and enable the Apply audience filtering setting, then click OK to save and close the page.

      Important 

      To display news items that do not have any audience targeting defined, set the checkbox Include items that are not targeted, before you click OK.

   4. Since the News page is checked out, you must now click Publish on the toolbar to check it in and to approve the modifications to it.

Important 

If you don't see the news item any longer, you are probably not a member of the audience groups that the news items are targeted for.

This was one of the most complicated audience targeting procedures you can do in SharePoint 2007, so if you understood this, then the rest will be easy. Just one more comment about targeting news items - the News page has two Web Parts for displaying news, as previously mentioned. If you want both of them to filter items, then you have to enable audience filtering on both, as described in steps 5a–c above. You will learn more about the News page and its news items in Chapter 9.

The next Try It Out is much easier and will teach you to target complete Web Parts. For example, on the intranet's Home page there is a Web Part named "I need to … ;" let's show this Web Part to members of the intranet's Owner group, plus the Sales audience group. The problem is that you do not have any audience group for owners yet. But this is really no problem, since SharePoint 2007 allows you to use both SharePoint Groups and AD security groups along with audience groups. "So why do I need audience groups at all?" you ask. Because in some situations you may not have a suitable SharePoint Group, or security group; then an audience group will be the solution for you!

Try It Out Target Web Parts to Both an Audience Group and a SharePoint Group

1. Open the intranet Home page.

2. Click Site Actions Edit Page. This page is now checked out.

3. On the Web Part "I need to … ," click Edit Modify shared Web Part.

4. In the edit page for the Web Part, expand the Advanced section. At the bottom, you will find the Target Audience field. Click the directory icon (at the right), then do this (see Figure 8-7):

   
   Figure 8-7

   1. Make sure that the Find field is set to Global Audiences, select Sales, and then click Add. The name is now listed next to the Add button.

   2. Change the Find field to SharePoint Groups, and click the magnifying icon at the end of this line. All SharePoint Groups will now be listed; select the Owners group (i.e., the <site name> Owners), and click Add.

   3. Click OK to save and close the page.

5. You are now back at the Web Part configuration pane. The groups are listed in the Target Audiences field. Click OK to save and close this page.

6. Check in and publish the modified Home page by clicking the Publish button on the toolbar. Verify that only members of the Sales audience group and Home Owner SharePoint Group will see the Web Part on this page.

So, the natural question now is who can see these targeted news items and the "I need to" Web Part? The answer is: any user who is a member of the Sales audience group or the Home Owner SharePoint Group, but no other users. Do you see how elegant and powerful this feature is? It will help you create a web site that automatically (some would say "automagically") adjusts its content to the current user. This is indeed a very useful feature for an intranet or portal site but will be very valuable in many other types of web sites as well. Remember that Audience groups are exclusive to MOSS, while target filtering using SharePoint Groups and security groups also works on Web Parts, lists, and libraries in pure WSS environments. However, you must enable auditing for these lists or libraries before the Audience property shows up.

Important 

Remember: Targeting list and library items requires that you present the content of these lists using the Content Query Web Part. Audience filtering will not work with the standard list and library Web Parts.

But there are more types of objects where you can use the targeting feature of SharePoint 2007 (both WSS and MOSS), using audience groups, SharePoint Groups, distribution groups, and AD security groups:

• q The File Open and Save As links in the Office 2007 dialog box.

• q Navigation links in a web site's Quick Launch bar.

• q Navigational links on users' My Site.

The first of these, links in Office 2007, is very cool, and makes it easy for you as an administrator to control which links will show up in the users MS Office applications, such as MS Word, when opening or saving documents (under the heading My SharePoint Sites). Note that this feature does not work with previous versions of MS Office! For example, say that the Sales team has a web site on http://srv1/sitedirectory/sales containing all the quotes and contracts. To make it easy for the salespeople, you can add a link to their MS Office application that points directly to that web site, or even directly to a document library, as described next.

Try It Out Target Links with MS Office 2007

1. Log on as a SharePoint administrator, and start the Central Administration tool.

2. Open the SSP, typically named SharedServices1.

3. Click Published links to Office client applications, in the User Profiles and My Sites section.

4. Click New, then fill in the following web form (see Figure 8-8):

   
   Figure 8-8

   1. Type the Web address: http://srv1/sitedirectory/sales/Contracts. This is the URL that will open in MS Office. Note in step c below that you can point to several types of locations.

   2. Type the description: Sales Contracts. This text will be presented in the users' Save and Open dialog boxes, under My SharePoint Sites.

   3. Type: Document Library. Define what type of location this URL is pointing to; for example, Team Sites, Portal Sites, or Document Library.

   4. Target Audience: Sales. As before, you can choose between an audience group (requires MOSS), SharePoint Groups, security groups, and distribution lists.

   5. Click OK to save and close this form.

5. Now you just have to wait up to 24 hours before this link shows up in the users' MS Office applications. To test it, start MS Word 2007, click the Office button Open, select My SharePoint Sites, and the link will be listed here.

The second type of link is a navigation link, displayed on the Quick Launch bar on a web site. These types of links typically point to libraries and lists, in this site, as well as subsites. For example, look at a default WSS team site; what you see in the Quick Launch bar are the links Shared Documents, Calendar, Tasks, and Team Discussions. You can add new links, and they can be targeted, that is, only displayed for users in a specific audience or group. For example, say that you want to add a navigation link on the Sales team site that points to a public web site on the Internet. Then do it as shown in the Try It Out.

Try It Out Add a Navigation Link to the Quick Launch Bar

1. Open the web site where you want to add the navigation link; for example, http://srv1/sitedirectory/sales.

2. Click Site Actions Site Settings, then click Navigation in the Look and Feel section. Note that to publish a page in MOSS you instead click Site Actions Site Settings Modify Navigation.

3. At the end of the next page (see Figure 8-9) is the section Navigation Editing and Sorting. Each link you add is listed under a given heading in the Quick Launch navigation bar. To add a new heading, do this:

   
   Figure 8-9

   1. Click Add Heading in the tool bar, and a web form will open.

   2. Title: Market Info. This will be the header line in the Quick Launch bar. You can connect this header to a URL, if necessary. For example, you could add a URL to this header that displays a list of all document libraries. Check one of the default headers to see how it works. If you just want to use the title as a header in the navigation bar, leave the URL field empty. If you pointed to a URL, you can also choose to open that URL in a separate window. In this example, you leave both the URL and "Open link in new window" empty.

   3. Description: Enter a description of this header; it will be visible as a tooltip, when you hover a mouse over the header.

   4. Audience: Enter the target group for this header. Note that if you plan to add one or more links under this header, they should all use the same Audience definition to make sure that they are consistently filtered.

   5. Click OK to save and close the page.

4. Now that you have a header, let's add a link to it. Mark the new header "Market Info," then click Add Link, and add these values to point to an external web site, which will open in a new window:

   1. Title: Financial News. This will be the navigation link.

   2. URL: http://www.financialnews.com.

   3. Check Open link in new window.

   4. Description: Enter a description of this link; it will be visible as a tooltip, when you hover a mouse over the link.

   5. Audience: Enter the same target group as for the header.

   6. Click OK to save and close.

5. Click OK to save and close the Site Navigation Settings page.

6. Open the site, and make sure that the new header and its link only show up for users in the targeted group (see Figure 8-10). If not, reopen the navigation page, and edit the Audience definition for these links.

Figure 8-10

The third type of targeted link is also a type of navigation link; it will display a link at the top menu of a user's My Site that points to a specific location. For example, instead of using the Web Parts in My Site to display the user's Inbox and Calendar, you can add a menu link that points to the user's Exchange mailbox by Outlook Web Access (OWA), or add a menu link that points to the user's team web site. The same type of targeting as for the previously mentioned links above also applies here: This link can be targeted to an audience group, a SharePoint Group, a distribution list, or a security group.

The example below adds a menu link on My Site that points to the user's OWA but only for users who are members of the Sales audience group. In this example, the URL to the OWA is http://dcs/exchange.

Try It Out Add a Navigation Link to My Site

1. Log on as an administrator, then open SharePoint's Central Administration tool.

2. Click on the SSP, typically SharedServces1, then click on Personalization site links.

3. Click New, and fill in the following web form (see Figure 8-11).

   
   Figure 8-11

   1. Type the Web address: http://dcs1/exchange.

   2. Type the description: OWA. This will be displayed on the user's My Site top menu.

   3. Owner: Filobit\Administrator. SharePoint will then change this line to just Administrator when the user name is found in the Active Directory. This is the administrative owner for the link.

   4. Target Audience: Sales.

   5. Click OK.

Next, log on as a user who is a member of the Sales audience group, and look at My Site. It will now contain a new top menu link named OWA. Click on it, and it will open Outlook Web Access for that user.

Important 

This works with both Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007. In OWA 2007, users will also see a link back to My Site.

Another practical use for this navigational menu link is to create a link that points back to the start page of an intranet. Such a link should typically not be targeted but be displayed for all users. Note that it may take a minute before this menu link shows up on all users' My Sites.