Or rather how to prevent Target Audience feature in Web Part from missing.
I bumped into this problem where I wanted to set a web part to show only to a certain group of users.
Checking the Web Part properties does not show the Target Audience column. The behavior of this Target Audience web part property is that it will be shown (which we thought it was supposed to be shown by default), only when there is User Profile Service Application associated to your web application. (which usually will be provisioned automatically if you configure the farm via wizard).
One reason for not associating this is for to prevent user from accessing My Site when they hit “About Me” site action menu.
For some reason, this will also turn off the Target Audience in the Web Part. So. In order to turn on back the target audience feature. Here are the steps.
Resolution:
- Go to SharePoint Central Admin
- Go to Application Management and hit “Configure service application associations”
- In your web application row, hit the application proxy group to show the associations.
- Tick “User Profile Service Application” and hit OK.
- Your web part should immediately show Target Audience property
