Sharepoint 2013 : Managing and Configuring Profile Synchronization (part 9) - Audiences - Audience Targeting Rules and Logic, Targeting Content to Audiences

6.2 Audience Targeting Rules and Logic

This section illustrates how rules are created, and the logic behind the rule, using a couple of examples.

For the first example, suppose you want to ensure that new employees receive relevant content such as on-boarding information. You could create an audience called New Hires, using the following rule:

This rule could be changed once per year to include everyone hired in the past year. The second example uses an audience called Marketing, with three possible ways to define this group of people:

Given the different rules that might define the marketing department in the company, consider how you can maximize the effectiveness of the rule or rules. For example, you could include users who satisfy all the rules: each person must report to the specific marketing manager, and have membership in the Marketing group in Active Directory, and have the word “marketing” as part of their department name. Alternately, you could choose to include users who satisfy any of these rules. If any one of the rules is satisfied, that user will be a member of the audience. The second approach is obviously more inclusive, allowing a larger number of users to be included in the audience.

6.3 Audience Compilation

Once created, the audience needs to be compiled; compiling the audience populates the audience with users that satisfy the audience rules. This compilation process can automatically occur on a schedule. The audience compilation process scans the user property values, compares the values to the rules for membership, and adds users accordingly. For example, if a user currently in the marketing department was not in the marketing department during the last compilation, then the new compilation will recognize the change to the user’s profile and add the individual as a member of the audience.

Follow these steps to set up an audience compilation schedule in the User Profile Service Application:

At any time, you can start a manual compilation of all audiences by clicking Compile Audiences in the People section. Any individual audience can be manually compiled from that audience’s properties screen by clicking Compile Audience.

6.4 Targeting Content to Audiences

This section describes several targeting options, along with instructions for implementation:

• Personalization Site Links and Publish Links to Office Client Applications — In the My Site Settings section of the User Profile Service Application, the Personalization Site Links and the Publish Links to Office Client application options both allow content to be audience targeted.
  
• Web Parts — Any Web Part can be targeted to an audience. In the Web Part’s properties tool pane, the Advanced section contains a Target Audiences field at the bottom. You can choose from audiences, distribution lists, and SharePoint groups for content targeting. This means that if an audience for a Web Part simply needs to be an Active Directory or SharePoint group, then it is not necessary to define this audience in the User Profile Service Application.
• Web Part Pages — SharePoint publishing sites contain a library called Pages. By editing the properties of any individual page in the library, you will see a field called Target Audiences. Pages that have been targeted to an audience are displayed only to that audience. You can choose from audiences, distribution lists, or SharePoint groups. This means that if an audience for a Web Part page simply needs to be an Active Directory or SharePoint group, then it is not necessary to define this audience in the User Profile Service Application.
• Navigation Links — Within the navigational structure of the site, individual links may be audience targeted. In the Look and Feel section of the Site Settings page, click the Navigation hyperlink. You can choose a link in the navigation, and then click the Edit button. (Some items are not editable because they are part of the built-in site structure.) The Navigation Heading dialog is displayed in Figure 13. Type an audience name and click OK. You can choose from audiences, distribution lists, or SharePoint groups for targeting. Audiences based on an Active Directory or SharePoint group do not need to be defined in the User Profile Service Application.

  FIGURE 13

  
• Trusted My Site Hosted Locations — In larger SharePoint deployments with geographically distributed User Profile Service Applications, administrators manage a list of Trusted My Site host locations, which can be targeted to audiences. This setting is found in the My Sites section of the application.