WSS Personalization

[HiAspire]

I have read that MOSS 2007 allows more personalization of SharePoint to creating my sites, my links, as well as audience targetting, but if anything can be done with WSS 3.0 in terms of adding some minor personalization to the homepage to boost usage within a company.

Can we pull in a web part that allows for user-specific bookmarks to applicable SharePoint pages for customized shortcuts without having to drill through a large organizational site? Or add custom queries to the homepage to pull up that detail based upon username? It doesn't seem like this would take too much hacking in terms of another table to store that info but I haven't seen anything related to that otherwise.

Can we pull user-specific tasks through various subsite projects into a homepage view of everything associated with the person logging in?

I have seen some references to template changes to make the discussions more like a typical forum people are used to, but also wondering about pulling in other communications enhancements to make the application more useful to more users.

Thanks

 

[HiAspire]

We are looking specifically at the XML Web Part for user-generated bookmarked shortcuts to their own sharepoint destinations.

I know a dynamic XML file can be generated in various programming languages -- querying a separate database for specific links stored in a small table for each user and then filtering those results into personalized XML code with their link names and URLs. A common hyperlink could also be added to SharePoint pages to open up the bookmarking application form for entering personal URLs to save.

The only bridge to cross in making that work seems to be passing user identification to the entry form and dynamic XML file being generated to filter that output for a specific user.

Unfortunately I mostly know PHP which I do not believe can pickup the Active Directory login we use for SharePoint. It can lookup the IP for each machine but all our PCs also use the same connection address so cannot differentiate by that. It looks like there might be some possibilities with .asp/.net to do what I'd need but I'm not as familiar there (yet anyway if that's the only way to go).

Just wondering if anyone has tried to use a dynamic XML to bring in some personalized content for different users in WSS, and if so how? We are trying to make something that wouldn't require much altering of SharePoint and just bringing the filtered results in as you would any XML file.