MOSS Audiences with SharePoint Groups and AD Groups

I’ve done a number of posts on Audience targeting, and many people have commented or e-mailed me with issues regarding using SharePoint Group based on AD groups. They typically want to use target audience at a web part level using SharePoint Group based on AD groups, without import anything in MOSS repository. This works for AD users, but not for AD Groups. Similar problems are also described in posts like http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/30055451/sharepoint-2007--audienc.aspx ,
and in http://objectmix.com/sharepoint/297158-sharepoint-2007-audience-targeting-domain-groups.html.

It is obviously some kind of issue here, Christopher White seems to be onto something, he says:

“By using the SPUser.Groups property you can easily enumerate the groups that a user has been assigned to. However one problem with this approach is that if the user is a member of a domain group that has been allocated to a SharePoint group, then this group does not appear in SPUser.Groups.”

So, if the SP Groups audience targeting mechanism were based on the ".Groups" property then this could be the problem. But only MS can know this...

One reader have opened an incident to Microsoft on this. I will keep you informed.

© Copyright 2007, Tomas Elfving