How to Create Audience in Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server

Audience feature is one of the most useful features of Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server. Microsoft Sharepoint Portal server is based on collaboration strategy. It can be very well integrated for a corporate, school, college or a small business. All departments and users can be work together and Sharepoint site can help them to organize by maintaining work flows. You can create a whole website within a minute. There are several ready-made web-parts which are the basic building blocks of Sharepoint site. As a case study we can consider a web-part which is displaying few company statistics, which should not be accessible and visible to all users except few specific users of the site. Creating an 'audience' and including users within that group can very well satisfy this requirement.

Where to Find Audience in Sharepoint Portal - Audience management is placed under 'Site Settings' of portal server. If you have portal administrative authority you can create or manage portal audiences. Once you go inside of 'Site Settings' you will find the link 'Manage Audience' under "User Profile, Audiences, and Personal Sites" heading.

Audience Settings - From the 'Manage Audience' place you can manage and compile audiences. There are five different user-friendly links have been provided to manage the audiences. A brief description about the statistics about current audience will also be displayed here. You will get a similar picture as below:

Number of audiences: 7

Uncompiled audiences: 0

Compilation status: Idle

Compilation time: Ended at 5/1/2007 4:00 AM

Compilation schedule: At 4:00 AM every day, starting 10/24/2005

Compilation errors: No error

Once you create an audience rule you have to compile that audience in order to complete the audience building process. We will discuss abut compilation later in this article. The above statistics helps you to get an overall picture about all the audiences created in your portal server. From the 'Refresh' link you can refresh this statistics to get the latest details.