Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Updating User Profiles
Chapter 8: Planning Your Information Structure 177
After the first import from the directory, you can schedule incremental updates
based on the frequency of users being added to Active Directory. In most cases,
scheduling incremental updates daily and full updates weekly is sufficient.
Planning Audiences
Tip Removing a user from Active Directory and fully updating the user profile
does not remove a user profile from the profile database. Nevertheless,
a user who is removed from Active Directory is not able to access the
SharePoint Portal Server because users are authenticated through Internet
Information Services, which authenticates users through Active Directory.
Audiences allow organizations to target content to users based on any property in
Active Directory or by group membership. Hence, you can build an audience based
on who is a member of a Windows Server 2003 security or distribution group. Moreover,
you can create an audience based on any property assigned to the user
account in Active Directory. For example, you can create an audience based on the
Department field in the user account so that those who are assigned to the Accounting
Department become members of the Accounting Audience.
Audience Rules
Audiences are created based on a set of rules that you define, based on:
■ Windows security group, distribution list, or organizational hierarchy
■ User profile public property
■ Organizational hierarchy
■ Distribution lists
A rule is a simple query based on properties of user profiles or the membership
of users in security groups and distribution groups. If you have already created security
groups or distribution groups in Active Directory, you can create audiences
based on those groups. For example, you can define a rule for an audience group
that reports to or under a specific manager (using the format of domain\managerUserName).
You can also create an audience that belongs to a specific department
if you have assigned a value to the Department field of user profiles.