Designing successfully for findability from the actor’s perspective requires that we obtain an intimate understanding of our users, the tasks they need to accomplish and the content they need access to. We need to recognize what their goals and motivations are, and what methods they wish to employ to interact with the environment. Once we do, we can then start to design for things like personalization based on individual attributes such as job role or geographic location in ways that are both active (allowing the user to define parameters that result in the pull of information) and passive (surfacing content based on what the system knows about the user).
SharePoint (particularly the 2010 release) marries a broad enterprise footprint and a lowered technical barrier to entry to provide tools for easy individualization of intranet experience by functional role.
