Chapter 39
Personalization Sites
This lesson covers one of the most powerful and least used features in all of SharePoint, the personalization site. A personalization site is a special kind of site template. Its purpose is to create sites inside your portal, but present each of these sites as an individual experience to each user, with content customized for her.
Imagine for a moment you have a company portal. This portal has a human resources site. You would like people to have a personalized view of the site. For example, you would like to arrange it so each person sees state income tax documents based on the ZIP code of his home address. Or perhaps your business has different employee bonus schedules for different types of employees. Salespeople get one bonus schedule and the janitor another. You can present a bonus schedule to each employee based on job title.
For another example, you could have a collaboration site in which everyone is uploading documents related to some large project. A personalization site could present a special view that shows only those documents authored by the user who is logged in. It could also show a view of the logged-in user's tasks for a project as assigned on a task list and imported into Outlook and presented on a site in the portal. There are endless possibilities for content that is presented differently for each user. That is the purpose of a personalization site.
A personalization site can be built anywhere within the portal, just like ...
