Audience Targeting Explained and Demonstrated

The creation of audiences may be outside of the control of the humble site administrator, but she should understand how they are compiled and how they can be used. This section provides an example of creating an audience, compiling it, and then configuring a document library to use audience targeting, and the configuration of a web part on a home page to use audience targeting. This example combines tasks that would be performed by library administrators, site administrators, as well as farm administrators, but is necessary to fully provide an example of the process of using audiences. It is also important to note that audiences do not affect the access permissions of documents, but simply filter content that appears in web parts, and that is also illustrated in this example.

For this reason, in this author’s experience, audiences are not used that often, except in sites where there are a variety of different groups accessing the content from the home page, and there is value in filtering the data each person sees in specific web parts based on their membership in one or more audiences.

This example starts with the task of defining and compiling the audience, which needs to be done by a user with Central Administrator site access, typically someone in the farm administrator role. The audience is then defined as follows:

1. From Central Administration, click Application Management, and then click Manage Service Applications.
2. Scroll down to User Profile Service Application and click it.
3. Click Manage Audiences in the People section.
4. From the View Audiences page, click New Audience on the toolbar.
5. Give the audience a name and description and assign an owner, as shown in Figure 21.28. In this example the name Project X Audience is used. Decide whether the audience should include users who satisfy all of the rules or any of the rules, and then click OK.

   Figure 21.28. Creating an Audience screen 1.

   

6. On the next page, leave User selected in the Operand section, select Member Of in the Operator drop-down menu, and enter the AD group that contains the users for the audience. In this example, the AD group Project X Group is entered as shown in Figure 21.29. This group contains User1 and User4. Click OK to complete.

   Figure 21.29. Creating an Audience screen 2.

   

7. After this is completed, return to the Manage Profile Service page, and then from the People section, click Compile Audiences. After this completes, the audience will be ready to use.

This next section can be performed by an administrator with full control permissions on a site (for example, a site administrator or other user in the Owners group, or of course, a site collection administrator). To test the audience, follow these steps:

1. From a document library that has audience targeting enabled, upload a new document by clicking the Upload button, and then provide target audience information in the Target Audience field, as shown in Figure 21.30. Click Save. Repeat for additional documents if desired.

   Figure 21.30. Defining a target audience for a document.

   

2. The item is now tagged with a specific audience (Project X Audience, in this example).
3. Navigate to the home page of the site, click Site Actions drop-down list, and then click Edit Page.
4. Click Add a Web Part from the Left zone, and choose the web part that corresponds to the document library you have enabled audience targeting in and in which you tagged one or more documents in step 1. In this example, the web part is New Document Library, as shown in Figure 21.31. Click Add to add the web part to the page.

   Figure 21.31. Adding a web part to the home page to test audience targeting.

   

5. Next, as shown in Figure 21.32, hover over the title section for the new web part just added (New Document Library in this example) and hover over the down arrow and select Edit Web Part; the Editing Panel will open on the right side of the screen.

   Figure 21.32. Editing a web part on a home page.

   

6. Expand the Advanced menu in the panel, scroll down to the section titled Target Audience, and enter the name of the audience to use for this web part (in this example, Project X Audience). Click OK.
7. Now only the documents that have been tagged for this audience will appear in this web part, if the logged-in user is a member of the audience. For example, assume User2 is logged in to this site. Because she isn’t a member of the Project X AD group, and therefore not included in the Project X Audience, she won’t see the documents tagged for the Project X group show up in this web part.
8. Click Stop Editing to save changes. (Note that if you are using a publishing site with content approval, additional steps will be needed)
9. Test the performance of the audience targeting by logging in as a user who is a member of the group (User1 or User4 in this example) and then as a user who isn’t a member (User2 in this example). Note that the document tagged for the audience won’t appear in the web part for the user who isn’t a member of the group.