Setting up Audiences: A Pain or what?

[vbajock]

This audience thing seems like a kluge. I can't add individual users to an audience, I have to set up an AD group, which means now I have to get the Network Admin involved and he has enough to do without having to jack with Sharepoint. What if I want more than one AD group to particpate in an audience? Can I do that?

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

Yes it can be a pain setting it up! What has been done in our organization is that we have delegated rights to a specific OU in the A.D where, we setup our groups for SharePoint (to be used with audiences etc), so that for example one ouf our SPS admins can actually create the securitygroups for SPS audiences and add users and other groups to it.
The SPS admin ONLY has rights to modify that particular OU and only have read rights in the rest of the Active Directory.

So what we have done here is that we created for example a group within this SPS specific OU, and there we can add several AD groups and users etc, and create separate AD groups for different audiences etc.

Delegating this kind of rights, will keep the load of the A.D admins (Network Admins) and since the rights are delegated only within this specific OU, only thing that can be "broken or messed up" is that OU and nothing else.

hmm..did I make any sense? hehe to early in the morning and to little coffee!

Regards,
Thomas

 

[dlongnecker]

I agree with Thomas that audiences are a bit of a pain, but, so far, have provided us with that "sizzle" effect and the joys of being able to push custom content to specific groups of people.

The idea of delgating group creation to a specific OU is a great idea... for bad or worse, I'm an administrator anyway, so I can change/modify groups as I go. One thing we're doing is rather than creating a lot of SPS-specfic groups, we're finding that our normal groups of people (departments, application-specific, administrators, executives) are already broken out into our Exchange groups.

We're using those groups (since everyone is already familiar with them and their names) to delimit our audiences--this way, content managers who were used to emailing to those groups don't have to learn new names and we're steepening the learning curve.

To get more than one group to participate within the audience, you can create a global group in AD and place the other groups inside of it... then create the audience off that global group.

I'm still discovering the power of audiences and, so far, have found that the extra time dedicated to creating audiences truly gives your portal site that flair and functionality.

Regards,

David

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David R. Longnecker
Web Developer
CCNA, MCSA, Network+, A+
Management Information Services
Wichita Public Schools, USD 259

 

[vbajock]

How are audiences usually organized - should I create them by department?

 

[dlongnecker]

This is a difficult question... and, like most infrastructure questions, relies on how your organization is setup.

We're a very large public school district, so our audiences are quite complex. Here are some examples and experiences we've had.

Building-based (all users @ school a, all users @ school b)

Department-based (administrative departments such as MIS, Curriculum, Finance)

Subject-based (all math teachers, all science teachers, all reading teachers)

Grade-based (all 7th grade, all elementary, all middle, all 12th grade)

Thankfully, we had existing Exchange group setup for this same hierarchy, so the transition was simple and natural...

For a corporate environment, it could be something like.

All Portal Users
All Executives
All Office Staff
All Department A
All Department B
All Sub-Department A
All Project A
All Project B

etc.. or

All Portal Users
All London Office
London/Accounting
London/HR
London/Marketing
All Brisbane Office
All Singapore Office
All Dublin Office
All Madrid Office

Thankfully, the choices are pretty limitless and can be designed to match whatever organizational structure you need. Most anything you can delimit in Active Directory, you can assign a "member of" audience to it in Audiences.

Our structure, at least, is still a bit too complex for audiences we wish to specifically target. For example, to specifically target 7th grade reading teachers _is_ possible, but requires an extra overhead to find those specific individuals and place them into an AD Global group. We, at this time, do not have groups that contain these individuals. At that point as we're still migrating into the product... baby steps!

Hope some of these ramblings help a little bit.

Regards,

David

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David R. Longnecker
Web Developer
CCNA, MCSA, Network+, A+
Management Information Services
Wichita Public Schools, USD 259