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One of the challenges with most portals, including intranets, is maintaining relevancy of the information that the user sees and interacts with. You'll hear a ton about search relevancy but relatively little is said about what is displayed on the home page. Some organizations approach the home pages as simple landing pages, a place for links to other places. Others try to serve up relevant content, but all too often there are substantial portions of a corporate intranet home page that just aren't relevant. If you're in Indianapolis, how important is the company picnic taking place in New York?

In our information overload culture we've gotten adept at blocking out advertising and other non-content items on a page and still ad blocking software is in widespread use. We can filter information ourselves but the more we can filter information for users the better they like it. The more focused we can make our content the better the user experience. Luckily SharePoint has several ways that we can deliver customized content to users and groups.

One Size Fits All

Perhaps in some things one size does fit all. Golf balls are regulation size so in that sense one size does fit all. However, in most things we want to be unique, expressive, and interesting. If you don't believe me walk into mall and notice the wide array of mobile phone covers that are available. There's enough face plates that you can have any color that you want. That's not all. Your mobile phone should be unique like you so there's holographic screen protectors, and other kinds of "bling bling" to make it unique.

While I can't advocate putting "bling bling" on the home page of your portal, one cannot ignore that individuals are just that - individual. They need different information at different times and for different reasons. Part of developing a portal is focusing on development of a solution that adapts to the major groups of users and tries to meet their specific needs.

In SharePoint there are three basic ways of accomplishing this as discussed in the following sections.

In-Part Personalization

Perhaps the easiest way to manage personalization is to have the web parts that you include on your page manage the personalization themselves. Whether it's a web part for the weather that asks for your ZIP code and remembers it from visit-to-visit or a web part that remembers your search preferences, web parts in SharePoint can have personalized information that allows users to personalize their unique preferences -- if the web parts support it.

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