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This is a great strategy when you have a way that you want to be able to filter all of the web parts in the system. So showing different things based on location, time of day, or other criteria will work great. If you need to change what information is displayed in the web part - such as the weather for Carmel, IN vs. Daytona Beach, FL - this isn't the strategy for you. Although you can show or hide a ton of web parts - one for each city. It's really not practical.

Pages for People

Another, lower tech solution, which requires neither web part support for personalization nor the SharePoint targeting infrastructure is to have each user have their own page. With MOSS My Sites are available which do essentially this. Each user can have their own personal portal starting page. However, the challenge with this is that changes are hard to implement across the system. If each user has their own page just adding a new web part to the portal means adding one web part for each of your users - if you have 10,000 users you've just turned a simple change into 10,000 operations. Still, the greatest flexibility is offered by having each user have their own page so that they have the flexibility to configure the page exactly as they would like -- without concern for impacting other users.

Drawing the Target

In reality there may not be one answer to how you want to personalize your web part pages. In order to produce consistently relevant content to users you may need a variety of strategies. You might create different portal sites for each of the different departments so that users have the option to see content relevant to their department, implement My Sites for a personal view, and customize the home page so that the current weather conditions and predictions for the user's current location are shown. There isn't a single right answer to getting the right content to users at the right time.

Having a set of tools that allow you to filter and direct the information that users see is essential to driving relevance and therefore driving engagement in your portal. Go target your users.

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