Using SharePoint Audiences to Hide Web Parts

Milan Gross — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 15:12:00 GMT

Continuing to work through my backlog of belated postings, this one addresses a little known feature of SPS. Audience targeting is a feature of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 that allows content managers to filter specific listings and news items in portal areas so that they are displayed to some users and hidden to others. The same feature can also be used to target entire web parts to audiences so that only certain groups see the data. This is not intended as a security mechanism because, while the web part may be hidden to a user, they would still have access to it if they know the URL to reach it. Support for audience targeting is provided for most web parts hosted in a SharePoint Portal area but not in WSS sites. To target a web part to an audience follow the steps to define and compile an Audience (which can be found here) then follow these steps:

Add the web part to an area page
Click Edit Page
Click the context menu for the web part and choose Modify Shared Web Part
Expand the Advanced section at the bottom of the properties pane
Click the Select button under Target Audiences at the bottom of the Advanced section
Choose an Audience to target
Click OK
Click Apply

If you are not a member of the audience you should no longer see the web part after you refresh the page. Only members of the audience will see the web part displayed.

Configuring Shared Services in SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Milan Gross — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:06:00 GMT

Time and again my students have asked me for a succinct summary of the steps required to configure shared services in SharePoint. The frustration stems partly from the complexity of shared services and partly from the sparseness of the documentation on this subject.

Shared Services allows multiple SharePoint portals to make common use of six features without the duplication of data and resource use that would occur if all portals hosted these features independently. The services shared are: Search, Alerts, Personal Sites, Profiles, Audiences, and Single Sign-On. Most of these services are configured automatically on every child portal as soon as a parent portal is chosen to provide shared services. Support for Search and Alerts in the child portals is not automatic and require several additional steps to configure. Below are the most commonly used operations required for configuring a basic single-farm shared services environment.

Configure a portal to provide shared services

In SharePoint Portal Central Administration, go to the Manage Shared Services For The Server Farm page.
Check the Provide Shared Services check box and choose the portal that will become the shared services provider.

There can only be one parent portal that provides shared services. All other portals within the farm automatically become child portals that consume shared services. At this point all of the shared services should work across all of the portals except for Search and Alerts which will only return results in the parent portal.

Configure the parent portal to crawl each child portal

Perform the following for each child portal in your farm:

Open the Configure Search and Indexing page under Site Settings on the parent portal
Click Add Content Source
Select the index that the content source will belong to
Select “Web Page or Web Site” as the crawl type
Click Next
Enter the URL of the child portal, for example http://blue.mindsharp.info.
Leave the remaining defaults selected.
Click Finish
Perform a Full update of the new content source

At this point you should now be able to perform searches on each child portal that return results for content within the specific child portal. You can also get results for all portals by searching on the parent portals and set alerts on any portal.

Configure the parent portal to crawl embedded site collections in child portals

Perform the following for each child portal in your farm:

Open the Configure Search and Indexing page under Site Settings on the parent portal
Click Add Site Directory Content Source
Enter the URL of the child portal
Click Finish
Perform a Full update of the new content source

At this point search results will include content from the site collections under child portals. However, this may only be visible at the parent portal level until the child portal search scopes are configured to include additional content sources.

Configure child portal search scope

Perform the following for each child portal in your farm:

Open the Configure Search and Indexing page under Site Settings on the child portal
Click Manage Search Scopes
Edit the “All Sources” scope or create a new scope
Select “Include all associated portal contents” and “Include all content sources”
Click OK

At this point you should be able to search for any content in the farm from within any portal in the farm. One additional consideration is that site group permissions on the parent and child portals can be different which may affect user’s search results.