How to Create Audience in Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server

Audience feature is one of the most useful features of Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server. Microsoft Sharepoint Portal server is based on collaboration strategy. It can be very well integrated for a corporate, school, college or a small business. All departments and users can be work together and Sharepoint site can help them to organize by maintaining work flows. You can create a whole website within a minute. There are several ready-made web-parts which are the basic building blocks of Sharepoint site. As a case study we can consider a web-part which is displaying few company statistics, which should not be accessible and visible to all users except few specific users of the site. Creating an 'audience' and including users within that group can very well satisfy this requirement.

Where to Find Audience in Sharepoint Portal - Audience management is placed under 'Site Settings' of portal server. If you have portal administrative authority you can create or manage portal audiences. Once you go inside of 'Site Settings' you will find the link 'Manage Audience' under "User Profile, Audiences, and Personal Sites" heading.

Audience Settings - From the 'Manage Audience' place you can manage and compile audiences. There are five different user-friendly links have been provided to manage the audiences. A brief description about the statistics about current audience will also be displayed here. You will get a similar picture as below:

Number of audiences: 7

Uncompiled audiences: 0

Compilation status: Idle

Compilation time: Ended at 5/1/2007 4:00 AM

Compilation schedule: At 4:00 AM every day, starting 10/24/2005

Compilation errors: No error

Once you create an audience rule you have to compile that audience in order to complete the audience building process. We will discuss abut compilation later in this article. The above statistics helps you to get an overall picture about all the audiences created in your portal server. From the 'Refresh' link you can refresh this statistics to get the latest details.

Create Audience - This link will guide you to create the audience. In first screen it will ask about the name and description of the audience you are going to create. It will also ask you about the rule applicability. You need to specify if this audience will satisfy all the rules (will be created in next screen) or will satisfy few specific rules.

In the nest screen you need to build the rules for the audience which will help you to group the users under a specific audience. Rules are very easy to set up. Any rule is divided into three parts - Operand (User or Property), Operator (the list of available operators will change depending on the operand selected under operand) and the value. Suppose, you have select 'user' in the operand section and 'Reports Under' in operator section then in the value section you should put the name of the user under whom these users report. If you select 'Property' in operand section you have to specify which property of the user profile you are going to use. For example, you can select the property 'Department' which contains (operator) 'Sales'. In this above example the new audience will compile all users whose department contains the word 'Sales'.

View Audiences - From view audience link you can view all existing audiences, edit the existing audiences or create new audiences. If you put the mouse over the audience name you will be able to see the different maintenance options available in a drop-down box. You can delete the audience if that is no longer used. You can add new rule to the audience and change the audience name & description. Here you will find a good option of viewing membership. This membership view option will help you to see the existing members of that audience.

Specify Compilation Schedule - If the website is very active and getting new users everyday under different categories, it is necessary to schedule a compilation time for all audiences. By doing a compilation it will help you to put the users under appropriate audiences.

Start Compilation - If you want to compile the audiences at this right moment you have to use this option to compile them instantly.

How to Use Audiences - As we said earlier that we need to hide a web-part from general users. Only users with specific rule can see that web-part. Let's say a web-part which contains the actual price of a product, need to be visible to only sales team. So we create an audience called 'Sales Group' and 'Sales Group' contains the users for whom the department contains the word 'Sales'. Now on the main page of website once you add the web-part click on the modify Shared web-parts and select the appropriate web-part. Expand the option 'Advanced' at the bottom of properties pane. The last option under 'Advanced' is 'Target Audience'. Click on the 'select' button to select the audiences from the list of existing audiences of this site. So this particular web-part will be visible to only those users who are falling under selected audiences. Click 'OK and save the changes made for this web-part. This web-part will be visible to only those users who are under the audience 'Sales Group', no one else can see this web-part.