I’m not quite running with SharePoint yet, but I have definitely improved. It is quite a powerful tool, if you just know where to look. At SRT we have multiple customers, and would like to have pages for each of them. We would like these customers to be able to access the pages that are for them, but we don’t want them to see the pages for our other customers. Also, all our SRT employees should be able to access all of the links.
Turns out this is pretty easy to do with user groups.
First, in Site Settings->People and Groups you have to set up the groups that you want. Add the people to each group that you want to be able to see your web part.
Then to get the links on the main page up, add a Summary Link Web Part to your page for each group of links you have:
Next, you need to modify this web part:
This brings up a menu on the right side of the browser. Open the Advanced tab, and scroll to the bottom:
Here you see that there is a box for “Target Audiences.” In this box you need to put in the user groups that you want to have access to this web part. Make sure to semi-colon (;) separate the list of groups, if you comma separate them, SharePoint will not be able to find them unless there is a comma in the group name. You can then click the “Check Names” button to make sure that the groups you put in are correct.
Now when a user logs in, she will only be able to see the web parts that her group is the audience for.
I haven’t been able to figure out how to propagate these groups to other site collections in a web app, which would be a useful trick.
Also, one quick rant: Firefox does not play well with SharePoint sites. They are semi-functional, but some of the menus do not work properly even while just viewing the site. This is not completely surprising, but it would be nice if I could use my browser of choice, rather than being restricted to the behemoth that Microsoft gives to us.
