Managing Personalization Features
With all of the capabilities and features surrounding personalization in MOSS 2007, your planning efforts can help make managing the various personalization aspects of your deployment easier and scalable. As users learn how to use these features, they will find new and creative ways to connect and collaborate in the context of their daily activities. It’s a good idea to provide a channel for feedback and requests to be collected and reviewed so that they can be taken into consideration during the ongoing information architecture management and planning of your deployment. You may find that these features will enable users to find more optimal ways to work together.
Managing user profiles and properties
User profiles and properties are managed by the SSP administrator. After reviewing your directory services, identifying your business data relevant to personalization and the default MOSS 2007 profile properties, and then comparing each to your collaboration needs, you should have a good idea of the profile properties you will implement. To access the administrative interface for scheduling user profile imports and managing user profiles and profile properties, as shown in Figure 6.14, follow these steps:
Note
Incremental profile imports will not pick up deleted user accounts. You must do a full import to pick up profile deletions.
Managing user profile properties is also done by the SSP administrator for each SSP. There are many default properties in MOSS 2007, and you’re likely find that there are quite a few properties in each user profile recorded in your directory services. After you have completed your first profile import, you should review which properties were mapped and which properties are important to your organization, and compare to your planning efforts earlier in this chapter. There will likely be some changes to the profile properties in the system, so let’s take an example and get more familiar with profile property management by following these steps:
1. | On the top navigation bar of SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration, click Application Management. |
2. | On the Application Management page, in the Office SharePoint Server Shared Services section, click Create or Configure this Farm’s Shared Services. |
3. | From the Manage this Farm’s Shared Services page, select the Shared Services Provider (SSP) for which to configure profile import settings. |
4. | On the Home page of the SSP, in the User Profiles and My Sites section, click User profiles and properties (see Figure 6.15). |
5. | From the User Profile and Properties page, in the User Profile Properties section, click View profile properties. |
The View Profile Properties page displays the list of default properties in property sections, as shown in Figure 6.15. You can see a mixture of default MOSS 2007 properties as well as user profile properties imported from your directory services after your first full import. Profile properties are organized by a property type called Section. Each property is assigned to a section, which helps make them easier to manage. On the View Profile Property page you can manage either sections or properties. To get familiar with how to manage the user profile properties, let’s use geography as an example. If your organization were comprised of offices in several locations across the United States, it could be useful to personalize or target information to each region. For this particular scenario, suppose it would be useful to have users control what location they are associated with.
1. | Click New Property from the toolbar. |
2. | On the Add User Profile Property page, locate the Property Settings section and add the following information:
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3. | In the User Description section, type a descriptive explanation of what the property is and why it may be useful, as shown in Figure 6.16. |
4. | In the Policy Settings section choose Required from the Policy Setting drop-down list and Everyone from the Default Privacy Policy drop-down list. |
5. | In the Edit settings section, select the Allow users to edit values for this property radio button. |
6. | In the Display Settings section, check all three available check boxes:
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7. | In the Choice List Settings section, select the Define Choice List radio button and add the following values as shown in Figure 6.17:
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8. | Click OK. |
On the View user profile properties, scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see your new custom property in the Custom Properties section, which is where they appear by default after you create one. Just to the right of the new Region property is a light blue arrow pointing up. Click the blue arrow as many times as needed to move the Region property just above the Contact Information section. This puts the Region property in the Details section of the user profile. Now that you have created this new property, it’s time to see what the user experience is like. From the portal site, click My Site in the top-right corner of the page, and then do the following:
1. | Click My Profile in the top navigation of your My Site. |
2. | Below your details on the page, click Edit Details. |
3. | On the Edit Details page, begin filling out your user profile properties. |
4. | For the Region property, click the Browse Region icon. |
5. | Select the Region from the property picker (see Figure 6.18). Figure 6.18. Region property picker on the Edit Details page of your user profile
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6. | Click OK. |
7. | Scroll back to the top of the Edit Details page and click Save and Close. |
This new property is now available to the SSP administrator for use when creating rules for audiences and for content targeting.
Setting Profile Services policies
MOSS 2007 comes with the capabilities to collect information about people from many diverse sources. To that end, you should carefully review and decide what information is appropriate for the people in your organization to see or have available to them. Information, like employee payroll for example, should not be available to all employees. Sensitive information like this should be available only to certain users and administrators to preserve privacy, while other information can and should be shared freely with other people to encourage collaboration. Each organization may have different requirements depending on the type of business and decisions you make while keeping privacy and relevancy in mind. The decision about what information to share is an important one.
MOSS 2007 provides a set of policies that are configurable so that your Profile Services administrator can control what information is available to meet the needs of your organization for each profile property. Your policies may vary between SSPs, so you should review during the planning phase your collaboration needs across the organization in order to develop your plan for implementing the right set of policies.
The personalization features and properties exposed in user profiles and personal sites come with a default recommended policy. You may want to change the default policies based on the needs of your organization. There are two parts to each policy:
Policy Setting: Some personalization features provide information that is critical for key business processes within an organization. Other information may be inappropriate for sharing across an organization. Some information will be useful for some people to share, but not other people, so that different policies are needed for different people. You can decide to change the policies by feature or property to meet the business needs of your organization. The specific options are
Required: This feature or property must contain information, and the information is shared based on default access. Forms containing these features or properties cannot be submitted until the required information is provided. For example, the Manager property is often mandatory so that it can be used to provide information for the My Work Group feature and audiences based on an organization’s reporting hierarchy.
Optional: The feature or property is created and its values may or may not be provided automatically. Each person decides whether or not to provide values for the property or leave the property empty. For example, the phone number of a user is often left blank, and each person can decide whether or not to provide a telephone number visible to other people. The My Colleagues feature is optional, but rather than being blank the list of colleagues including everyone in the current work group is visible by default to people with access, and each person can decide to opt out by removing colleagues from the list, or expand the list by adding additional colleagues.
Disabled: The property or feature is not visible to anyone but the SSP administrator. It does not show up in personalized sites or Web Parts, and cannot be shared.
User Override: Properties with the override option selected allow users to change the default access policies for user profile properties. With this option selected, each person can decide who can see the values he or she entered for the property. If override is not selected, only administrators can change default access settings.
Replicable: Properties and features with the replicable option selected can be replicated to other SharePoint sites, but only if the default access is set to Everyone and the User Override option is not selected.
Default Privacy Setting: Visibility policy determines who can see information for a particular personalization feature. Available policies include:
Everyone: Every person with viewer permissions to the site can see the relevant information.
My Colleagues: Every person in this person’s My Colleagues list can see the information for this person.
My Workgroup: Every colleague in the person’s work group can see the information.
My Manager: Only the person and their immediate manager can see the information.
Only Me: Only the person and the site administrator can see the information.
Some organizations allow individual SSP administrators to configure policies, and other organizations want to implement a consistent policy across the organization. By setting expectations for policies during initial planning, you can avoid later confusion, surprises, and misunderstandings. Whatever your decision, you should make the policies clear to people in your organization when they begin using MOSS 2007 so they can expect that certain information about them and their work will be available to others.
Policies can vary depending upon the purpose of the sites in your SSP. Consider your information architecture planning and site hierarchy when deciding what policies to use. For example, a site based around collaboration is likely to have a less restrictive set of policies than a site designed as a document repository where interaction is defined by mature business processes.
You will also want to consider who is using your sites. Customer-facing sites will have entirely different policy considerations compared to collaboration sites, and a central portal site for a large organization may have less need to share information than a departmental site. Many of these issues will be handled as part of security planning, but privacy policies and security considerations are sufficiently related that it’s a good idea to consider them together.
Policies with fewer restrictions mean that people will be viewing public profiles more frequently, which affects how often you must update user profiles and compile audiences. In organizations with a large number of users, this could affect performance and capacity planning.
Site and SSP administrators should record their policy decisions on the People, Profiles, and Policies planning worksheet for every feature and property, and share that information with IT professionals in the organization. Some issues that could affect IT planning include:
Expected frequency of updating user profile information
Frequency of compiling audiences
Effect on performance and capacity of servers running Profile Services
The effect on security planning
Profile Properties such as preferred name, account name, work phone, department, title, and work e-mail are key methods of enabling collaboration and developing organizational relationships. Many of them are also used by MOSS 2007 in enabling other features such as colleagues and audiences.
By default in MOSS 2007, users can’t override these properties because it’s important to administrators of Profile Services that access to information stay consistent and predictable.
By default, most out-of-the-box properties are visible to everyone having access to the portal, but only people who have been selected as colleagues can view sensitive information such as home phone numbers.
Organizations have different needs. A company with many employees in the field, for example, may find that mobile phone information is important for everyone to see. Other organizations may keep all non-work phone numbers completely private. Organizations focused around small-team collaboration may want to limit more properties to a core group of colleagues.
When managing the policy settings for a property, consider the following factors:
Consider making a property required if:
The properties are used by key people features.
The properties are associated with key business data for applications in the Business Data Catalog.
The properties are used in creating audiences.
Administrators for Profile Services expect consistent and meaningful values for those properties.
Consider disabling a property if:
The property will rarely be used.
The property will distract from more important properties. You can change the display settings for properties to hide them from users viewing public profiles, the Edit Details page, or the My Colleagues Web Part.
Consider selecting Optional if you decide to provide default values for properties but you still want users to be able to remove the information, or if you want to allow each user to provide the relevant value for the property.
When planning default access policy, consider the following factors:
If you want to use the property in search so that people can be found by searches for the property, set the default access policy to Everyone. Properties with more restrictive access will not be used by search.
If the property is useful across work groups and other divisions in your organization and doesn’t contain sensitive information, consider making it visible to everyone.
If the property is mostly useful for collaboration within an immediate work group or within a particular group of individually selected colleagues, consider making it visible only to colleagues.
If the property is of a private or sensitive nature, consider making it visible only to the immediate manager, or in some cases, only the individual user. What is considered private information can vary from organization to organization.
When deciding whether to allow users to override the policies for properties, consider the following factors:
Configure key user profile properties that need consistent values and clear administrator control so that users cannot override them. Override should be enabled only when the access to a property is not central to the needs of an organization.
People should be able to override the access policy for a property if the sensitivity of the information can vary between different users, and the administrator cannot predict a single policy for all users. For example, an employee’s hire date might be considered private to one employee and a point of pride to another.
People should be able to override properties that may be relevant to different groups of people over time, by changing the default access policy.
Another thing to consider is what information will be replicated from the SSP to user information lists on SharePoint sites. You can limit replication of information by making policies more restrictive, or by limiting the information that is replicated. Only properties can be replicated. Properties with the replicable option selected are replicated to other SharePoint sites, but only if the default access is set to Everyone and the User Override option is not selected. Every site that uses the SSP will use the replicable properties in user information lists. Properties set to Everyone that are not replicable can be seen in the public profile, but those properties do not appear in user information lists. If a property is not replicated, the values for the property in the user information lists for SharePoint sites remain, but changes are no longer replicated and must be made by the site collection administrator. When planning the initial deployment of user profiles, decide which properties you want in the user information lists, and record those decisions.
Configuring My Site settings
The My Site feature is activated by default at the Web application level. Some organizations may decide to deactivate the feature for the farm or for individual sites. When deciding whether to use My Site, the following factors are important:
Site purpose
Web application performance
The most important question to consider when deciding whether to use the My Site feature is the purpose of your sites. Sites that are designed to enable people to work and share information easily will almost certainly benefit from My Sites. Each person in the organization will be able to easily find people and information related to them.
On the other hand, sites that are not built upon collaboration might not benefit from personal sites. An example is a large document repository that doesn’t contain team sites or workspaces, doesn’t target content by audience, and isn’t a place where people go to find or share organizational information about themselves or their colleagues.
Because My Site is activated at the Web application level, it’s usually a good idea to retain the feature if any of the sites on the Web application will benefit from using it. One exception to this is a Web application that is optimizing for other functionality of MOSS 2007. Although the My Site feature is not particularly resource-intensive, Web applications with a large number of users, a high volume of content, and relatively little need for personalization or collaboration might benefit from deactivating the My Site feature. When you are planning for personalization you should talk to IT administrators in the organization about performance and capacity considerations if this is a concern.
As soon as the My Site feature is activated, any user profiles from an existing installation of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services are replaced by the public profiles that are part of My Site. A My Site link is added to the top menu bar for all sites in the site collection, along with the My Links menu.
You activate or deactivate the My Site feature from the Manage Web application features link in the SharePoint Web Application Management section of the Application Management tab in Central Administration. You can also limit the ability to create My Sites by removing the right from the authenticated users group for the SSP, or deleting that group from the Personalization Services Permissions page.
You can turn off My Sites at the site collection or site level by deactivating the Office SharePoint Server Standard feature in Site Settings, but you will also lose the search functionality for the site. This can be a good option for sites such as large document repositories. In that case, the documents on the site can still be crawled so that they appear in searches from other sites in the server farm, but without having to support My Sites features that aren’t relevant for the site but are available on other sites in the farm that have kept the features active.
Configuring Trusted My Site host locations
SSP administrators for personalization consider the interaction between personalization sites across all site collections in all farms using the SSP, and how personalization sites are made available within My Sites. They also make decisions about the presentation of the My Site as a whole. Their considerations include:
Personalization links
Trusted My Site host locations
Personal sites settings
These settings are managed from the User Profiles, Audiences, and Personal Sites sections of the SSP.
From the Shared Services Administration page, you can add additional trusted personal site locations. This enables SSP administrators to select My Site locations from multiple site locations. This is needed in any scenario with more than one SSP, such as a global deployment with geographically distributed sets of shared services, where each SSP contains a distinct set of users. By listing the trusted personal site locations for all other SSPs, you can ensure that My Sites are created in the correct location for each user. This also enables you to replicate user profiles across SSPs.
Creating published links to Office clients
Just as personalization sites can appear on the My Site navigation bar based on targeting of the personalization sites on the personalization links list, it is possible to target the links on the Links Published to Office Applications page. This list, available from the User Profiles and My Sites section of the Shared Services Administration page, is used to include links to Office Server sites from Office client applications. Examples of links that show up in client applications include:
Sites, including team sites, portal sites, and project workspaces
Data connection libraries
Document libraries or document repositories
For example, if a personal site directory is added to this list, that location is provided as a choice whenever someone shares a document from an Office client application. This enables users to use the same personal site from multiple client computers. Similarly, data connection libraries added to the list show up in the Microsoft Excel client, and document libraries show up whenever saving documents from any Office client application. By default, links to Office client applications appear for all users in the SSP. Those links become much more powerful when they are targeted to users who most need them so that users see only the personal sites, data connection libraries, and document libraries relevant to their own work.
When planning the initial deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007, consider each of these kinds of links and plan to add links to cover each kind. Plan to add links to cover sites, data connection libraries, and document libraries for all the site collections by using the SSP.
Configuring personalization links
Anyone with permission to create sites within a site collection can select the personalization site template, but not all of these sites will be relevant for all users in the site collection, much less all users within the same SSP. Personalization sites that are relevant for users across the SSP can be added as links to the My Site top link bar. Every person using My Site will see links to all personalization sites that were linked by the SSP administrator, regardless of site collection, except for personalization site links targeted to specific audiences.
Personalization sites planned for initial deployment are important enough to add to the My Site link for the people who use the corresponding site collection, but not all people in the SSP will consider the same personalization sites to be relevant. My Site links to personalization sites can be targeted to specific audiences so that only relevant people see them. For something like human resources information that applies to everyone in an organization, a My Site link to the personalization site may make sense for everyone. For a personalization site that shows personalized content to the sales team, it makes sense to target the My Site link so that it appears only for members of that team, or for members of the sales site collection.
The decision about what personalization sites will be linked in My Site navigation should be recorded during the site structure planning, along with decisions about targeting to audiences.
Setting personalization services permissions
The SSP administrator can control who has personalization service permissions from the User Profile and My Sites section of the Shared Services administration page from within Central Admin. You may decide you want to allow one person or a group of users the ability to manage any or one of the following:
Create Personal Site
Use Personal Features
Manage User Profiles
Manage Audiences
Manage Permissions
Manage Usage Analytics
Most organizations focus on enabling user collaboration and give all information workers the rights to Create Personal Sites, Use Personal Features, and Manage Permissions. Managing User Profiles and Managing Audiences should be reserved for site collection administrators or SSP administrators.
To manage personalization services permissions and give all authenticated users rights, follow these steps:
1. | Click SharedServices1 from SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration. |
2. | Click Personalization services permissions in the User Profile and My Sites section. |
3. | Click Add Users/Groups. |
4. | Type NT AUTHORITYAuthenticated Users into the Users/Groups text box., |
5. | Select the Create personal site, Use personal features, and Manage permissions check boxes. |
6. | Click Save. |