Personalizing Your Portal: Overview

Article
10/16/2013

Personalization means providing a "me"-centered user experience of the resources (data, documents, and people) in your company. It includes:

Remembering user preferences in your applications.
Showing such things as human resources news items based on your organization and business role within the company.
Showing "My Customers", instead of a general customer list.
Giving insight based on your social networks, such as informing you about what the people you know are doing.

Sites in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 remember who you are and which information you care about and work with. Based on the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services platform, Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers customization and personalization that is flexible and reliable. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a rich set of features focused on ensuring that users have easy access to relevant information from various entry points.

Here are the three main features in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 personalization model. This section contains overview information about these features.

User Profiles User profiles allow you to search for and connect with people within your organization, based on information published about them. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a new search scope for searching people. Index Server crawls the user profile store to get the user's information.

In Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can import user profile information from the Active Directory directory service, other LDAP servers, or from applications registered in Business Data Catalog, or you can enter it manually. You can customize the default user profile by adding properties according to the needs of your organization, or you can map it to Active Directory or to external data such as Territory or Geography.

Audiences Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows you to target content to people according to their membership in a particular audience. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports targeting to rules-based audiences, distribution lists, and Windows SharePoint Services groups. Except for Windows SharePoint Services groups, these audiences can span one or more portal sites in a deployment.

Using targeting, you can target content in the portal site for viewing by one or more specific audiences. By default, you can display targeted content on the home page and on personalization sites.

My Site My Site is a collection of Profile pages, personal sites, and personalization sites created in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. The Profile page of the My Site displays your user profile information. Your personal site provides personalized and customized information. Office SharePoint Server 2007 also supports personalization sites. Personalization sites are personalized views of portals such as MyFinanceWeb or MyBenefits. Personalization sites display targeted content to users based on their membership in a particular audience or by slicing data.