7. User Profiles, My Sites, and Audience Targeting
In this Chapter
MOSS maintains user information in user profiles. MOSS user profiles store user information, including name, contact information, skill sets—just about anything you might expect a user profile to contain. User profiles serve a critical role in SharePoint and have the following characteristics:
Powerful and flexible. MOSS user profiles can be pulled and synchronized from a wide variety of external data sources. Frequently, MOSS imports user profile data from a company’s Microsoft Server Active Directory (AD). However, using custom code and the Business Data Catalog (BDC), profiles can be imported from just about any data source you can imagine, including more than one at once.
Extensible. SharePoint administrators can extend profiles using the administrator’s interface via Central Administration (CA) and the Shared Services Provider (SSP).
Editable. Using My Site functionality, users can edit their profile information. System administrators determine which specific profile properties can be edited and which can’t. For example, users typically can’t edit their e-mail address (because this is managed in AD), but they can edit their department.
Manageable. Can be managed via a Web user interface (UI) or a comprehensive application programming interface (API) that programmers use to manipulate and edit user profiles.
My Site basis. Serves as the basis for My Site functionality.
Those points describe the “what,” but how about the “why?” User profiles provide the basis for a number of useful SharePoint business features. The profile store is searchable. Anyone can look up information about an employee and look at that employee’s profile using People Search. SharePoint allows employees to control some of their user profile data. Combine these two together and SharePoint provides a powerful out-of-the-box (OOB) employee directory with no customization. Finally, using SharePoint profiles, a company can slice and dice profiles into groups called audiences. Among other things, content authors and producers can specifically target content to these audiences. This streamlines SharePoint and its business value by showing information to people based on their interests, as recorded in their user profile, instead of an arbitrary one-size-fits-all approach common to most line-of- business applications.
To some users, this concept may sound familiar but under a different name – Active Directory. It’s very natural to ask, why not just use Active Directory? This chapter answers that question, but the short answer is that MOSS uses these profiles for efficient search and to provide a central user repository that can be extended without touching a company’s core membership directory. Generally speaking, AD is used to authenticate users while MOSS user profiles extend it. Only authenticated users may access SharePoint and AD normally plays that role.