Feature Overview

Microsoft Modern Audiences are available in the Unified Experience. Modern Audiences allow you to target your content to a specific population by using user groups from your organization created in your Office365 solution.

See Microsoft documentation on Modern Audiences

Here is the list of Unified Experience features that support Microsoft Modern Audiences:

• Navigation
• Application
• Footer
• News Feed

Use Case:

Let's take Consultao, a company with a division that includes HR and sales teams. Several groups have been set up in Entra ID:
- A common group "HR/Sales"
- An "HR" group (subgroup)
- A "Sales" group (subgroup)

Consultao has 15 applications in its Unified Experience, 7 of which are intended only for sales, 3 for HR, and the remaining 5 applications are for the entire division.
The Consultao administrators will therefore assign the common group "HR/Sales" as the audience for the 5 applications visible to the entire division, the "HR" subgroup as the audience for the 3 applications intended for the HR department, and the "Sales" subgroup as the audience for the 7 applications intended for the sales department.

Thus, the applications will only be visible to users concerned with those applications.

Overview of Microsoft Audiences

Microsoft Audiences are based on Entra ID groups. Entra ID groups represent your organization. They include organizational structures, access to shared resources, membership in projects or cross-functional groups, as well as your employees' permissions.
Group management and user assignments are done through the Azure Active Directory portal of your Tenant.
There are two categories of groups managed in Entra ID:

• Security Groups are used to grant access to resources such as SharePoint sites.
• Microsoft 365 Groups are used for collaboration between users, both inside and outside your company. They include collaboration services such as SharePoint and Planner.

More information about Entra ID groups here.

Required Permissions for the Feature to Work

Delegated Permission User.Read.All

The Unified Experience uses the delegated permission "User.Read.All," which allows the application to read the properties of the signed-in user. This permission is a prerequisite for the Jint installation, which is necessary for all Jint features.

Permission Group.Read.All

To use this feature, Jint requires an additional permission: Group.Read.All. This permission allows applications to list groups, read their properties, and the group memberships of the signed-in user. More information about the Group.Read.All permission can be found in the official Microsoft documentation here.
 

To grant the Group.Read.All permission in the configurator, go to one of the sections concerned by modern audiences (except News Feed).

Then, create a new item or open the edit form of an existing item. Enable Modern Audiences if not already done.
If you have not yet granted the necessary permission to your application to retrieve Microsoft groups,
a message and a link to update your application's permissions will be displayed.

Click the link, which will automatically submit an authorization request for the Jint application on your Tenant. It will summarize the permissions you are delegating to Jint.

After approval, the last page may report a connection problem. The permission has been granted successfully. This is only a redirection issue.
Return to the configurator and refresh your page. You can now select Microsoft audiences in the "Modern Audience" section.

You can check your configurator application by going to the Entra ID portal, in the "Enterprise applications" section.

You can view the list of permissions granted to our applications in the SharePoint admin center, under "Advanced" > "API Access".
 

Configuring Audiences

To configure an audience, go to one of the relevant sections of the Unified Experience.
Open add or edit mode of an item to display the form.

In the Modern Audiences section:

• Search for Entra ID groups to add as Audience

• Use autocomplete to quickly select the correct Entra ID group

• You can add multiple Entra ID groups to an item's audience

Configured Audiences can be viewed in the "Audience" column. They are distinguished from classic audiences by their blue icon indicating that it is a Microsoft group.

You cannot configure both modern and classic audiences on the same item; only the last saved information will be considered.
You can delete an audience by clicking the delete icon in edit mode.
Items without configured audiences will be visible to all users.
 

Subgroup:

A subgroup is a group that itself belongs to another group in Entra ID.

Audiences in the Unified Experience work with subgroups. Thus, if a user belongs to a subgroup, they will have access to all content configured with audiences corresponding to both the group and the subgroup.

Example: Groups B and C are two subgroups of group A. A user in group B accesses content targeted to groups B and A. A user in group A accesses content targeted to groups A, B, and C.

Guest Users:

Guest users in your tenant are also considered in the modern audience filter.
Simply add your guest users to the corresponding groups.