How could I... create different content for customers from different industries

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Daniel Rae Posted: Wed, Mar 26 2008 9:37 AM

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Hello,

I was having a think about how best to provide content for our customers, many of whom are from varying industries, e.g. Healthcare, Aviation, etc.

Does anyone have any idea how I could approach the idea of providing different content (blogs and forums) for different types of users?

I suppose I could use roles - assign a different role to people from different industries, and adjust the permissions of blogs and forums to make industry specific forums only visible to customers in that industry.

How would I identify people's industries? Perhaps incorporate a pulldown menu at the registration scheme and in the edit profile screen?

Looking for some inspiration!

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rhoward replied on Wed, Mar 26 2008 11:51 AM

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Hi Daniel,

There are a couple of different options here:

• Create multiple separate communities - The benefit here is you get rid of the "noise". For example, people in the aviation community won't be interested in the healthcare community (most likely).
• Use Groups in Community Server 2008 - This is really the same concept as above, but allows you to have a single site that support multiple micro-communities. This usually works best for cases where you have a common group of people with overlapping interests.

As for identifying people in different industries I would probably recommend creating a role for each industry. You could then do cool things like add specific tiles to the user's profile to show what industries he or she is in -- really though this could be done through group membership too. The membership in a specific group would identify people's industry of choice.

Hope that helps!

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Daniel Rae replied on Wed, Mar 26 2008 12:00 PM

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Great thanks for your input!

The seperate communities isn't really an option because we need SOME noise. They are all our customers, so I'd like them to have access to the same company nwes and certain forums.

Groups in CS2008 is something that really interests me. I see a lot of potential for "sub-groups", for example, custoemrs from different areas of healthcare (such as pathology or cancer care) in a sub group of healthcare.

So could you make a content reagion in the homepage viewable only by people from a certain group? To create a "healthcare home page" and an "aviation home page" ?

Just waiting for the full release before I plan the upgrade!