MOSS 2007 Enterprise SP1. Symptom: Audience Targeting seems to ignore Active Directory (AD) groups and allows all to view targeted content. All announcement items are viewable to all users regardless of AD group targeted on an individual announcement item. Scenario: Created stock Announcements list called “Global Donuts” and enabled Audience Targeting on the list. Added a new item “Donuts are in the Break Room now!” and targeted “Chicago Office” AD group. Users in the “New York” office group (who are NOT in the “Chicago Office”) can see the announcement and all other announcements. “Chicago Office” is a member of the “All Employees” AD group. “New York Office” is a member of the “All Employees” AD group. There appears to be two “copies” of the AD group “All Employees” in SharePoint, confirmed by using Select Audiences UI in and the following query: SELECT * FROM MemberGroup WHERE (DisplayName = N'All Employees'). Two records return from this statement, each with different SourceReference – one correct and one incorrect - indicating this group was moved to a new AD OU in the past. We confirmed there is only one “All Employees” in the AD domain. Is it correct to assume that the duplicate “All Employees” copies are causing SharePoint to ignore the Audience Targeting? If so, how do we correct the problem? Finally, how do we prevent this problem from happening when a group is moved in AD?

Lik'in the avatar... Had similar problems...AD groups were getting messed with so we ended up moving to sharepoint user groups so we'd have control over them. A thing to check on the AD side...check to ensure that the New York Office is not a member of the Chicago Office AD group. Best regards, S'

New York Office is not a member of the Chicago Office AD group. All users are exclusive; no one is a member of the other group. Copying several hundred groups to SharePoint user groups and managing groups in two places is not a feasible workaround, not to mention the thousands of audience targets set for groups throughout a SharePoint implementation. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/target-content-to-specific-audiences-HA010169053.aspx states: An audience can be identified by using SharePoint groups, distribution lists, or security groups or by using a rules-based system to create a global audience.

The following are additional threads about this problem: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/5ee42337-aa33-4c26-a023-26bec39c0e0c http://vspug.com/mcotw/2008/07/28/do-you-use-sharepoint-audiences-beware-of-ad-changes/ http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/bcb57f88-ae00-40bc-833a-5ddadab77268 All of these are unresolved at this time. Therefore I will take this to Microsoft Support shortly...

Just want to add that if you access your portal by URL which is NOT mentioned in alternate address maping than all audiences settings stop to work and contetnt become visible to everyone...