Audiences in SharePoint 2010: Get a hold on them via PowerShell

Audiences are part of a User Profile service application and they are used for content targeting in the SharePoint platform. By using them you can show WebPart just for a group of users (the audience). On the administrative level via the Central Administration users can be directed to their MySite home ___location via the 'My Site Host Location'. This is extremely useful in a global SharePoint architecture with regional SharePoint farms and users redirected to their regional My Site host.

Please find detailed information regarding the content targeting at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261958.aspx and the 'My Site Host' at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263115(office.12).aspx.

In the following I would like to show a couple of PowerShell commands with which you can ge a hold on the audiences.

In SharePoint 2010 there is a AudienceManager object as part of the 'Audience Namespace' represents the entry point to the Audience feature in SharePoint 2010.

1. First you have to create an SPSite object

$SPSite = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite(https://...)

2. Then you have to set up the server context

$srvCtx = [Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext]::GetContext($SPSite)

3. Finally we are ready to create the corresponding AudienceManager object

$auManager= new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceManager($srvContext)

4. Now we are ready to get a list of all audiences

$auManager.Audiences | fl

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Many thanks and changed accordingly.

• Anonymous
  July 20, 2011
  Method in step 2 is GetContext as opposed to GetContent

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 12, 2011
  It should really be: $auManager= new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceManager($srvCtx)