Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

9.1. Understanding User Access Management and Personalization

Before you learn how to manage access to any SharePoint site, you need to understand two very important concepts in SharePoint related to the users who connect to your sites:

• The difference between access management and personalization

• How users log in to a SharePoint site

Understanding these concepts helps you learn how to effectively manage a site, protect the site's integrity from users who shouldn't have access to certain information, and make the user experience as productive and problem-free as possible.

9.1.1. What Is the Difference Between User Access Management and Personalization?

Imagine you work for a company where users from around the globe share information related to their various business activities. There are different divisions such as Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Legal. Members of a specific division can log in to their portal site and stay up-to-date on projects and initiatives as well as work with others in their divisions and teams. For this to happen effectively, you must configure the SharePoint environment to support the following:

• User access management: There are rules that determine what a user can do on a site. To ensure that users can access only the content they need to perform their work, you apply permissions to each divisional site. Within a specific division, users may have different roles and privileges. For example, some users only view content, while others can add or approve ...