Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

178 Part III: Planning and Deployment
Compiling Audiences
After you create or make changes to an audience, you must compile it for use. Compiling
an audience group is simply a matter of executing queries to find users who
meet the criteria defined in rules.
Audiences can be compiled at will, or they can be compiled by using a schedule
that you create. Any changes to security or distribution group membership, security
or distribution member properties, or user profile public properties will not be
reflected in the audience until it has been recompiled.
To a point, you can customize the appearance of the portal site by using audiences
and permissions. But the real purpose in using audiences is to target information
to an individual user based on the audience rules. When planning for
audiences, you’re basically asking the question, “Who needs to see which information?”
and then seeing whether audiences (as opposed to permissions or sites) is the
best way to quarantine the information to those users.
Targeting vs. Alerts
Targeting and alerts provide an efficient way of pushing and pulling information.
The distinction between the two can be summed up as follows:
■ Using alerts, users can choose to be notified about certain types of content.
■ Using targeting, administrators or managers can push specific content to users
and employees.
Targeting and Access Control
In some cases, you can control who can access specific content through access
rights and managing security, but you should be aware of differences between managing
security and targeting content and try to use each task as intended:
■ Access control lists (ACLs), rights, and permissions. Are used to manage
security and to limit access to resources. Users’ ACLs are verified each time
they navigate and access the content or perform actions on the portal sites.
■ Audience Targeting. The filtering of content delivery. Targeting content is
based on audiences, not on ACLs, and even Active Directory distribution
groups can be used for audiences. For example, all users have access to the
Links For You Web Part on the home page of a corporate portal site, but the
content of the Web Part can vary for different users based on the items that are
targeted to different audiences.