Personalization in MOSS 2007 and Configuring Personalization

Personalization means providing a user centered experience of the Portal. Keeping user settings and preferences same every time the user logs in.

There are three main features in MOSS 2007 (SharePoint) personalization
1. User profiles
User profiles allow you to search and connect with people within your organization based on information published about them. MOSS 2007 provides a new search scope for searching people. Index Server crawls the user profile store to get the user’s information.

2. Audiences
MOSS 2007 allows you to target content to people according to their membership in a particular audience. It 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.

3. 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 display targeted content to users based on their membership in a particular audience or by slicing data.

How to Create Personalized views in MOSS 2007
SSP(Shared Service provider) is necessary for creating personalized views in SharePoint

i. Audience Targeting

Importing user profiles in SharePoint from Active directory Through master connection

• Open SSP
• Under User Profiles and My Sites click on the link labeled “User profiles and properties”
• On the User Profiles and Properties page click on “Configure profile import”
• Provide a default access account, specify an account that has read access to your directory. Note: This account needs to also have Manage User Profiles rights, verify click on “Personalization services permissions” under User Profiles and My Sites on the SSP Admin page. To keep things simple until you have a grasp of the service you should use the SharePoint Admin account.


• Click OK On the User Profiles and Properties page click on “Start full import”
• Verify that import started and wait until import has completed before moving on to other personalization admin tasks (this may take a few hours)
• After import is complete to view the results click on “View user profiles” on the User Profiles and Properties page
  

User Profiles can also be imported from SQL server or other sources using Business Data Catalog (BDC). TO learn more about configuring user profiles, Click here

Creating Audiences from User profiles
Once profile import is complete we can go back to setting up personalization services in the SSP

• Go to the Shared Services Administration page for your SSP.
• Click on “Audiences” under the section Audiences
• On the Manage Audiences page click on “Create audience” Note: Audiences should not be created until after you’ve completed a profile import.
• create a new audiences rules based on user profile data such as department, role etc.
• once done creating audiences click on “Start compilation” from the Manage Audiences page.
• After compilation is complete to view the results click on “View audiences” from the Manage Audiences page.

To display targeted content on SharePoint sites using web parts

• Go to the site home page and add the Content Query Web Part. Content by query web part supports audience filtering by default.
• Modify the Content Query Web Part Under Query
• change List Type to Document Library
• Under Query -> Audience Targeting check “Apply audience filtering”
• Click OK Verify the items you targeted in the document library only show for people in those audiences.

ii. My Sites

To create a My Site

• Click on My Site in the global actions bar which is in the top right corner of every SharePoint page.Wait while your My Site is created
• After creation is complete check to make sure the name of the site created is titled with your name
• If not then open a new browser window with your credentials and click the My Site link again or copy the URL behind the My Site link into the browser window.Note: My Site is highly personalized so it works best when its created using your credentials and not those of an admin account or alternate account
• Follow the links in the Getting Started with My Site web part

iii. People Search

To configure People search in MOSS

• Go to Shared Services Administration for your SSP Under Search section click on “Search settings”
• On Configure Search Settings page find the default content access account
• If this is not set then provide a default content access account Verify default content access account has Use personal features rights.
• On Configure Search Settings page click on “Content sources and crawl schedules”
• On the Manage Content Sources page hover over “Local Office SharePoint Server sites” and click the arrow to drop the ECB menu
• In the drop menu click Start Full Crawl Verify that crawl started and wait until crawl has completed before moving on to search for people.
• Once crawl is complete to main portal site and click on Search in the top navigation area to go to the Search Center
• In Search Center click on tab labeled “People”
• Type in a term you added to your profile while exploring your My Site such as a project, skill or responsibility Hit Enter or click the
• Go button Verify that you and others who match that search term was returned as search results