User Profiles and Audience Targeting in SharePoint 2007

Within any organization, a user is more than just the account he or she uses to log in to the network and the unique ID (for example, CustomerID, VendorID, or EmployeeID) he or she is assigned. A user has a name, a phone number, an address, a title, and maybe even a photograph and food preferences. An organization usually maintains such information in disparate databases. For instance, HR would have information such as emergency contacts and mailing address, whereas payroll may have tax and salary information.

This valuable information usually is locked away in systems that do not talk very well with each other. If all this information could be stored in one system, specific content could be targeted to specific users. So, for example, a new law that applies only to offices in California would be viewed only by users whose PositionState field is CA.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), or simply SharePoint 2007, provides just such a solution by introducing the concept of User Profiles. User profiles allow you to associate metadata with every UserID. In MOSS 2007, this metadata can then be kept in sync with the other systems in the organization using BDC, an Active Directory domain controller, or an LDAP server. Having such metadata from disparate systems aggregated and synchronized into one single system—MOSS 2007—presents a very valuable proposition to any organization.

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