Target Audiences in Search & Preview

SharePoint audiences are groups of users selected for some common purpose. For example, a given audience might represent all workers in a given department or all secretaries from all departments. Any given user might belong to any number of audiences.
Many Search & Preview features can be configured to appear only for one or more selected audiences. In this way, Search & Preview will automatically adapt itself to each individual user. Audience support for Search & Preview includes (but is not limited to) the following areas:

• Search-tab visibility
• All types of custom properties (searchable, search-result, grouping, sorting and refiner)
• Search scopes
• Search-result actions
• Best Bets
• Quick filters
• Search Box scopes

For all types of items where audience support is provided, you will find a setting called Audiences, which includes an input field and a set of tools to help you make valid audience specifications. For example:

To limit the audiences to which a given item (search tab, property, etc.) will be shown, enter the name of each approved audience in the Target Audiences field, with each audience name separated by a semicolon. The current item will be shown to all users that belong to at least one of the specified audiences. Leave the Audiences setting blank for any search item that should appear for all users. In addition to the input field, the following buttons are provided to help you create a valid list of audiences:

Click here to check or auto-complete your current list of audiences against those currently defined for SharePoint. All exact matches will be shown in underlined, black type; incomplete unique matches will be completed and then shown in underlined, black type; audiences that cannot be found or uniquely identified (possibly due to a misspelling in the field) will show a red, squiggly underline and must be corrected.

Click here to open a pop-up window that shows a list of all available audiences. Make a selection from this window to add an audience to the list in the Target Audiences field.

Please see your SharePoint documentation for complete details about how to create, configure and use audiences.