Process to define personalization requirements

I'm often asked by customers how SharePoint can be used to personalize content for users. Although there are plenty of features in SharePoint to achieve personalization, you have to be able to come up with the rules that define an audience and then how you will identify the information that is relevant to each audience.

Wouldn't it be great if all information and content mapped to a comprehensive taxonomy and that we could automatically align the taxonomy with groups of people? Because this is not usually a simple thing to achieve, we need to prioritise the work required to start targeting information and content to users based on a number of factors.

Therefore, before we start talking about SharePoint personalization features, we need to identify the audiences, taxonomies, information /content sources, business priorities and the relationships between each of these.



You can start the process from an audience or content perspective (left vs. right). From an audience perspective, membership can be broken down into two types:

Optional (opt in/out)
Fixed (based on business rules)
Active Directory group membership or some other line of business application that manages access to information based on a user's role is a common way of defining audience membership but this often doesn't align to a taxonomy such as an EDRMS file plan.

Some audiences will be broad in scope while others will be very narrow.

There will be more than one taxonomy (internal and external), so look for areas of the taxonomy's that can be linked to audience properties.

Audiences will often not agree on which information is of most value. Prioritized personalization of information based on value to the business vs. level of complexity will help users understand the big picture.

Priority will be based on a number of factors:

Volume of content (architectural impact)
Value of content in helping make informed business decisions
Structure of content (formal taxonomy vs folksonomy or none)
Accessibility of the content (API's, iFilters, federated search etc)
Once all of these requirements have been identified, then we can architect a solution...