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Although the easiest to manage In-part Personalization does have the disadvantage that the web part itself must be coded to support the personalization - it's not something that you can add in later. The out of box personalization support in SharePoint means that support for personalization in the web parts that you develop is transparent. Literally, there's only one attribute that changes to make a property of a web part work for user level personalization.

In part personalization is great for web parts that you create - however, it simply doesn't work for some third party solutions and some of the out of box web parts. It also can negatively impact performance if there are a large number of users customizing a larger number of web parts on a page. As a final note, this is truly personal personalization, meaning that it must be done on a user-by-user basis and it must be done by the user. That means most users won't take advantage of the functionality unless the web part makes this process very easy.

Peacock of Parts

A somewhat more challenging approach, but one that offers the ability to layer on personalization no matter who wrote the web part or when they wrote it, is the targeting engine in SharePoint. Targeting in SharePoint is best known through the MOSS audiences implementation. Audiences are compiled groups of users to which web parts and information can be targeted to. The implementation of audiences is on top of a public interface called IRuntimeFilter2. Without going into too much detail, it allows you to add additional editing controls in the editor zone and supports the events necessary to make sure that these extra editing controls receive their data back when the properties are saved. They can then be validated.

Once targeting is enabled (through having a value in the correct property) the IRuntimeFilter interface (which is a part of the IRuntimeFilter2 interface) is called to determine whether the web part should be displayed on the page. The net effect of the personalization framework is that SharePoint can show or hide web parts to individual users or groups of users. This means that you can have a web part that is only displayed to operations team members (even if the rest of the organization has access to the data). Similarly you can surface or hide information based on the time of day, or any other criteria that can be tested.

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