Getting Started with Personalization in MOSS 2007
The first thing you should do is make sure you've created a Shared Service Provider (SSP).
To check this do the following:
- Go to MOSS 2007 Central Administration
- Click on Shared Services Administration in left navigation
- If this list is not empty then click on an SSP
- If this list is empty then click New SSP and create a Shared Service Provider
Once on the Shared Services Administration page for your SSP you should see at least 3 sections titled: User Profiles and My Sites, Audiences and Search. To get started you'll need to import user profiles from the directory.
To import user profiles:
- Under User Profiles and My Sites click on the link labeled "User profiles and properties"
- On the User Profiles and Properties page click on "Configure profile import"
- Provide a default access account, specify an account that has read access to your directory.
Note: This account needs to also have Manage User Profiles rights, verify click on "Personalization services permissions" under User Profiles and My Sites on the SSP Admin page. To keep things simple until you have a grasp of the service you should use the SharePoint Admin account.
- Click OK
- On the User Profiles and Properties page click on "Start full import"
- Verify that import started and wait until import has completed before moving on to other personalization admin tasks (this may take a few hours)
- After import is complete to view the results click on "View user profiles" on the User Profiles and Properties page
The SSP administrative portion of My Site should have been configured when you created the SSP. So while waiting on profile import to complete you can explore the non administrative parts of My Site.
To create a My Site:
- Click on My Site in the global actions bar which is in the top right corner of every SharePoint page
- Wait while your My Site is created
- After creation is complete check to make sure the name of the site created is titled with your name
- If not then open a new browser window with your credentials and click the My Site link again or copy the URL behind the My Site link into the browser window.
Note: My Site is highly personalized so it works best when its created using your credentials and not those of an admin account or alternate account
- Follow the links in the Getting Started with My Site web part
Once profile import is complete we can go back to setting up personalization services in the SSP Admin page. Now that we have profiles we can do things with them like create audiences.
To create audiences:
- Go to the Shared Services Administration page for your SSP.
- Click on "Audiences" under the section Audiences
- On the Manage Audiences page click on "Create audience"
Note: Audiences should not be created until after you've completed a profile import.
- Walk through the steps to create a new audiences based on user profile data
- After you're done creating audiences click on "Start compilation" from the Manage Audiences page
Note: Audiences must be compiled before they can be used.
- After compilation is complete to view the results click on "View audiences" from the Manage Audiences page
Now that we have created new audiences we should put them to use on SharePoint sites by targeting content.
To target content on SharePoint sites:
- Go to SharePoint site
- Go to the document library on the site
- Go to Document Library Settings
- Click on "Audience targeting settings" under General Settings
- Enable audience targeting
Note: You can do this for any list type not just documents.
- Go back to the document library
- Edit or upload a new document
- Click the Browse button in the Target Audiences field
- Select an audience you created or search and use an existing distribution list
Note: Distribution lists and security groups will only display after you've completed a profile import.
- Click OK to update the document's properties
To display targeted content on SharePoint sites:
- Go to the site home page and add the Content Query Web Part
- Modify the Content Query Web Part
- Under Query change List Type to Document Library
- Under Query -> Audience Targeting check "Apply audience filtering"
- Click OK
- Verify the items you targeted in the document library only show for people in those audiences.
Now that you've had a chance to see how audience targeting works let's move on to People Search.
To setup people search:
- Go to Shared Services Administration for your SSP
- Under Search section click on "Search settings"
- On Configure Search Settings page find the default content access account
- If this is not set then provide a default content access account
- Verify default content access account has Use personal features rights
Note: To verify click on "Personalization services permissions" under User Profiles and My Sites on the SSP Admin page. To keep things simple until you have a grasp of the services you should use the SharePoint Admin account.
- On Configure Search Settings page click on "Content sources and crawl schedules"
- On the Manage Content Sources page hover over "Local Office SharePoint Server sites" and click the arrow to drop the ECB menu
- In the drop menu click Start Full Crawl
- Verify that crawl started and wait until crawl has completed before moving on to search for people
Finding people:
- Once crawl is complete to main portal site and click on Search in the top navigation area to go to the Search Center
- In Search Center click on tab labeled "People"
- Type in a term you added to your profile while exploring your My Site such as a project, skill or responsibility
- Hit Enter or click the Go button
- Verify that you and others who match that search term was returned as search results
One area of personalization we haven't touched on at all yet is publishing links to the Office client. Links to SharePoint lists, libraries, and sites can be published to Office 2007 clients as places to easily retrieve or save documents.
To publish links to Office 2007 clients:
- Go to Shared Services Administration for your SSP
- Under User Profiles and My Sites click on "Published links to Office client applications"
- Click New to add a link
- Provide a URL, name and type for the link
- If you want to the link to only show for a specific set of people then specify and audience
- Click OK
To view links in the Office 2007 client:
- Open Word 2007
- Open the File Open or Save As dialog box
- Click on My SharePoint Sites on the left
Note: In order for the service to find the SSP you must set the My Site you created earlier as your default My Site.
- Verify link are presented
Note: The service that updates the client runs daily, this is configurable, so if you don't see the link wait at least 24 hours.
Last but not least are Personalization Sites. Personalization sites are the culmination of all the personalization pieces put together to offer users highly personalized mash ups. There is no quick and dirty way to get started with Personalization sites as they do require planning and understanding of your site's content. To get an idea of what they are about and how they connect to the other pieces of personalization and your portal, go to “Plan for personalized content and sites” in the MOSS 2007 Technical Library on TechNet. You can also play around with the features by creating a sub site under your portal using the Personalization site template.
This was just a quick getting started overview of personalization. The MOSS 2007 personalization platform is much richer than can be explained in a getting started blog post. If you want to dive deeper into a particular area of the personalization features that isn’t already covered by the TechNet content referenced above, please leave a comment here.
Greg Mattox, Program Manager
