Summary

It’s good practice to sketch out a plan for deploying functionality before actually beginning any deployment or configuration changes. It’s up to you and your planning team to determine what documents and data come out of your planning phase, but having some kind of worksheet for planning personalization features is a good idea. Your Audiences, User Profiles, and Policies work-sheet should contain some if not all of the following information:

• A list of connection sources for user profiles, such as Active Directory, LDAP, and business applications like SAP or Siebel that track people in your organization. Include the location, authentication type, accounts, and any other information needed to connect each source.

• A list of the people features that are available from within user profiles, along with the policy setting, default access policy, and override and replication policies for each feature.

• A list of user profile properties managed by the SSP administrator, along with the same policy information used for features. Add columns for each connection source to record the property mappings you want to use.

• A list of portal sites and site collections and a note recording who is planning the user information list properties for each site collection.

• If the SSP administrator is planning user properties at the site collection level, record a list of properties and decide if they are best stored in the user profile so that they are available for site collections across the SSP, or added later to the user information list for a site collection. The properties in user information lists in a site collection are based on replicated properties of user profiles, but are not connected to user profiles. Properties added to the information list are not stored in the user profile. These properties are not imported, so you don’t have to worry about planning property mappings.

Careful planning ensures your success in deploying and managing the personalization features in MOSS 2007. With the combination of user profiles, their policies, audiences, My Sites, and personalization links, you can be sure information workers in your organization have the latest relevant information available.