Defining SPS Profiles

User profiles in SharePoint help track the interests and expertise of your knowledge workers. In an external portal, profiles are not usually shown to other users, and they are chiefly of interest to site administrators. In the enterprise portal, on the other hand, profiles contain interesting information and can be valuable to users as well, who can use the profiles as a means of connecting to people with similar interests.

As an administrator, you can create user profiles for other members of your online community. You control the properties for profiles and the access granted to property profiles for various groups of users. For instance, users can have private and public property values in the same profile.

SharePoint can import a user profile directly from Active Directory. To do so:

1. From the portal home page, click Site Settings in the top navigation.
   
   
2. In the User Profile, Audiences and Personal Sites section of the Site Settings page, click Manage Profile Database .
   
   
3. On the Manage Profile Database page (see Figure 7.14), schedule the import to synchronize SharePoint with Active Directory with either a full or incremental import. For an enterprise portal, you may already be storing helpful attributes about users in Active Directory, such as job titles, departments, or locations. By importing from Active Directory, you make these part of your SharePoint profile.
   
   

   Figure 7.14. Manage Profile Database Page

   

   
   

By making this part of the portal profile, you can use the data to target content and help users build communities of interest by finding others based on profile attributes. Alternatively from this page, you can add user profiles one at a time, although this is not usually an efficient option.

In the most likely scenario for a public web site, users can enter and edit their own profile information, as shown in Figure 7.15. They open this page by selecting Edit Profile from the Actions menu on the My Site page.

Figure 7.15. SharePoint User Profile

Users can view one another's shared profile information, as in Figure 7.16. This figure shows the public view of the profile with private fields hidden.

Figure 7.16. Public Profile in SharePoint Portal Server

You can change the user profile template ”for example, by adding additional properties. On the Manage Profile Database page, click Add Profile Property in the Profile Properties section of the page (Figures 7.17 and 7.18).

Figure 7.17. Add User Profile Property Page

Figure 7.18. View Profile Properties Page

After you add fields to the profile, you may notice that finding the field you want is harder. Profile sections let you group fields to make profile properties easier to find (Figure 7.19).

Figure 7.19. User Profile with New Field Added

Note that the public fields are indicated on the profile page with a special icon. In the example, I made the Hire Date visible to everyone.