Beginning SharePoint® 2007 Administration: Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

8.2. Managing Information Targeting with WSS and MOSS

One of the main problems with sharing information among many users is that there will always be a lot of information, but the average user is only interested in parts of that information. A common way of solving this problem is to create specific places for each type of information or interest group, such as local intranets for each department. However, this creates a new problem: Now each user must know where to look, or even worse, information may be stored multiple times, maybe in different versions. This is clearly something to avoid.

MOSS has a solution to this: targeting. Almost every piece of information in a SharePoint site can be targeted for a specific audience. But SharePoint 2007 has other ways of targeting information, which also work in WSS. You can target any of these: audience groups, SharePoint Groups, AD distribution lists, and AD security groups. The following list shows the types of objects that you can control using targeting.

• News: This list can be configured to only show sales-related news items to the sales team, while the IT staff see only IT-related news, and other users can view both sales and IT news.

• List items and Library items: All lists and libraries can enable audience targeting. To display a filtered view, you must display these lists and libraries using the Content Query Web Part. For example, you can have an Announcement item filtered for everyone but the Sales team.

• Office Links: A link displayed ...