Content targeting - Technical overview

The Bonzai Intranet content targeting feature uses standard SharePoint components of user profiles and metadata to allow content to be targeted to users. From a technical perspective the content targeting feature is designed in the following way:

• All users have four custom user profile fields that add to their profile. These fields are used to store the content target options for the specific user.
• Four Term Sets are created to store each category of Content Target Options. These terms sets are linked to the custom user profile properties, to the content target options columns attached to Bonzai Intranet Content Types and also provide the values that users can choose from in the Content Target funnel.
• Four site columns are created and attached to the appropriate Bonzai Intranet Content Type. These site columns point the Terms Sets above and allow authors to be able to attach the appropriate metadata to content

This approach provides the following benefits and capabilities to Bonzai Intranet:

• SharePoint Search can be used to aggregate and target content since both user profile fields and columns are crawled. This allows for many possibilities including aggregation of content that is targeted across anywhere in Bonzai Intranet
• User profile fields can be populated on behalf of users by populating the data in the user profile. A typical example would be to synchronize data from Active Directory to the User Profile Service and have the targets option pre-filled on behalf of users
• A maximum of 4 content targeting categories can be created to target content