My Sites
If you’ve figured out one thing from this book, it’s that SharePoint is a solid platform for collaboration between teams, departments, and even external trading partners such as customers and suppliers. In addition to powerful team collaboration features, SharePoint provides functionality targeted directly at users, namely, My Sites.
As their name implies, My Sites are sites in SharePoint and share a lot of the features common to every other kind of SharePoint site. As with any other SharePoint site, they can be personalized. Users can add and remove Web Parts. Users can define content types, add document libraries, add picture libraries, upload documents, create workflows, and so on.
On the other hand, My Sites are quite different:
One My Site. There is just one My Site for each user, and it’s always available no matter where you are within SharePoint. Users can always get to their My Site with just one click.
Site collection. Each My Site is its own site collection. This difference tends to have the greatest impact. Many Web Parts and other MOSS features operate within the confines of a single site collection. For example, content types can’t be shared across site collection boundaries. SharePoint Designer (SPD) work-flow solutions can’t interact with different My Sites. The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) can’t be used to roll up data from multiple My Sites for easy reporting. SharePoint allows administrators to define space quotas at a site collection level. This means that each site collection can have its own quota and that SharePoint provides reports showing how individual users are storing content into their My Site.
Templates. It’s relatively difficult to create new My Site templates. If you don’t like what you get OOB, you normally need to work with a programmer to design something that meets your needs. That said, Microsoft fully supports customizing My Site templates; there are compelling business reasons to do so. Consider a public school. The needs for a student would vary from the needs of a parent which, in turn, would vary from those of a teacher. Using SharePoint, you can create separate templates for each of these types of users, tailoring it for their needs. SharePoint allows you to create different My Site templates based on the needs and role of the users in your organization.
Public and Private. Each My Site has both a public and a private view. Anyone can go to anyone else’s My Site. However, only the owner has access to the private view. My Site owners configure their own public view and have a great deal of control over how they are presented to the organization as a whole.
Accessing My Sites
SharePoint enables My Site functionality OOB. Users access their My Site using the My Site link that normally appears on every SharePoint page in the upper-right corner (see Figure 7.10).
Figure 7.10. My Site link.
SharePoint provisions the My Site site collection when a user accesses his My Site for the first time. After that process is completed, SharePoint presents users with a new My Site as shown in Figure 7.11.
When users access their own My Site, SharePoint shows their home view as My Home (see Figure 7.11). Like any other site collection, My Sites can have multiple subsites, document libraries, custom lists, and various Web Parts. In addition, My Sites have a special set of functionality around the user profile. As you can guess, this ties directly into the MOSS user profile described in the previous section.
Users can modify their profile from the My Profile link on their My Site home page as shown in Figure 7.12.
The profile view serves two roles:
Allows My Site users to update their profile.
Provides a read-only view of the profile that other users see when they visit someone else’s My Site. This read-only view allows a one-stop-shopping experience or resume for visitors to a My Site when they want to find out information about that user.
Users edit individual sections of their profile, or their entire profile, by clicking on the Details link in the Quick Launch (see Figure 7.13).
Using this functionality, users can directly edit their user profile. Users should keep the following points in mind about user profiles:
Users can specify who can view a specific profile property by specifying its visibility with the Show To column. Users can limit visibility to just themselves, their manager, their colleagues (more on that in a minute), or their workgroup, or they can leave it wide open for everyone to view. Recall that the SharePoint administrator can override these values, allowing a company to define a corporate-wide policy such as “every employee’s mobile phone number is stored in AD.” This prevents users from updating their mobile phone in SharePoint and thereby prevents any discrepancy between those two environments.
SharePoint doesn’t allow users to update mapped profile properties. Recall that a mapped profile property is assigned values from the official directory service (AD) via the profile import process. It doesn’t make sense to let users update mapped properties because any value they supply will simply be overwritten the next time SharePoint runs a full or incremental profile import.
These properties are visible in People Search. Employees should take a little care to make sure they maintain professional standards when updating their My Site properties.
Beyond user profiles and the now-familiar SharePoint bread-and-butter functions such as document libraries, sites, and Web Parts, My Sites offer a specialized collection of Web Parts that operate in the same way as any other Web Parts. Table 7.1 lists the most common and useful My Site Web Parts.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Colleagues | SharePoint attempts to leverage human relationships in a number of ways. The Colleague Tracker Web Part does this explicitly (see the next item). SharePoint’s People Search takes colleague relationships into account when assessing relevancy. All things being equal, if SharePoint finds two documents that match your search criteria, odds are that your colleague’s document is more relevant to you than someone else’s document. Learn more about search and relevancy in Chapter 8. |
SharePoint determines your colleagues with these simple rules:
| |
| Colleague Tracker | This Web Part leverages colleague relationships by showing a summary of colleague activity. This answers questions such as: When did he update a document? Did she write a new and interesting blog post? Is his birthday coming up? Did she get a promotion? |
| In Common Between Us | This Web Part helps users identify connections between themselves and others. It can show if two users have the same manager, shared colleagues, memberships, and other similar relationships. My Site owners add this site to their page, and it displays for visitors. |
| My Links | This Web Part works much like a Web browser’s favorites list. Add, change, and remove links, and share them with others. Like user profile properties, My Site owners can secure links so that only the My Site owner can view the link, remove security altogether, and let everyone see the link, or something in between. |
| In addition, My Links, like My Sites, are always available to you in the same consistent way throughout SharePoint. When you log into SharePoint and navigate to various sites within the environment over the course of your day, your My Links never change. This is a simple convenience on a day-to-day basis, but it’s especially nice when you get a new laptop or desktop computer. Because SharePoint manages your My Links, you don’t need to worry about moving them from the old computer to your new one. |
| Table 7.1 isn’t a comprehensive list of My Site–oriented Web Parts. However, they are the most common and useful. It’s debatable whether My Links belongs in a list of common and most useful Web Parts because many users end up saving links in their Web browser’s favorites or even using a social bookmarking tool such as delicious.com. |
Lastly, SharePoint allows users to control who can see what information on their public profile (keeping in mind that administrator settings override or limit the user’s options here). To do this, a user edits the profile and selects the appropriate audience as shown in Figure 7.14.
Figure 7.14. Specify As seen by.
This function allows users to present a different profile view to their manager, their workgroup, their colleagues, and the entire company.
My Sites Administration
SharePoint affords SharePoint administrators a great deal of control over My Sites above and beyond user profiles, as previously described. Two key features are Enable or Disable My Sites and Microsoft Office Integration.
Enable/Disable My Sites
SharePoint administrators can selectively enable or disable My Sites and My Links via the SSP.
| Many companies initially disable My Sites, viewing it as a “phase two” effort. This is often a smart way to proceed, but be aware that My Sites offers a great deal of useful functionality. Phase two may never happen or may take place much later than originally planned. Worse, a company may never use My Site functionality. Don’t fall into that trap. |
SharePoint uses the notion of personalization services permissions to support enabling and disabling these personalization features. Administrators assign access rights to specific users or, more likely, groups of users, to selectively enable or disable access to My Sites, My Links, and other personalization services.
By default, SharePoint enables My Sites and My Links for the AD group NT AuthorityAuthenticated Users. In plain English, this means that if you can log into SharePoint, you can use My Sites and My Links.
The quickest and easiest way to disable My Sites is to remove that group by following these steps:
1. | Log into SharePoint and access the SSP. |
2. | Click on the link Personalization services permissions. |
3. | Check the check box next to NT AuthorityAuthenticated Users. |
4. | Click on the link Remove Selected Users. Why? Because My Sites can be a lot to digest, particularly for companies just starting off with MOSS. MOSS already provides so many other features that it would be helpful to pare them back a bit so as to not overwhelm users, the MOSS implementation team, and IT support. If your organization hasn’t given much thought to My Sites, it probably makes sense to disable them until you do have a plan to roll them out to maximum effect. They can grow out of control, take up system resources, and negatively impact system performance if not planned properly. |
Lastly, personalization services permissions cover more than enabling or disabling My Sites and My Links. This chapter focuses on those features, but for more information go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263168.aspx.
Publish Links to Office Applications
Microsoft Office 2007 provides advanced integration with SharePoint and My Sites. To enable this integration, access your My Site and click on the link Set as default My Site. Accept the action; going forward, you can always save files directly to your My Site from Office applications.
Administrators can create additional integrated “save to” sites. Your company determines which document libraries should be available to Microsoft Office in this way and then configures them in SharePoint. This “publishes” the links to Microsoft Office applications. These Office applications then provide a simple shortcut to save those documents.
Final Thoughts on My Sites
So far, we’ve discussed these key My Site features:
My Sites are personal site collections for storing documents, pictures, blogging, and the like.
My Sites are very closely related to MOSS user profiles.
Employees use My Sites to manage their own user profiles and profile properties. These profile properties tie into People Search. System administrators constrain which profile properties can be modified in this way.
My Sites make specialized Web Parts available to employees to manage relationships between them and the rest of their organization.
Microsoft expects that users will change their Web browser’s home page to point to their My Site. If users learn how to use My Sites effectively, it could be a powerful tool. Imagine a day in the life of a SharePoint user. She sits down at her desk, fires up her desktop, and launches her browser. It opens up to her My Site, where she sees all of her colleagues’ latest activity, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds alerting her to recent company news, and top industry headlines from Google news. Because her profile is up to date, she is contacted by a team lead on a project and asked to provide her expertise and feedback for a new and exciting opportunity. The company wins because she’s the most appropriate fit for that project, and she wins because it’s a new opportunity for her to work on something interesting. This is a large part of the vision behind My Site functionality.
That said, My Sites aren’t without their warts:
Education. Companies need to make a strong investment in education for users to learn the best way to use a My Site.
Out-of-date AD. When users join a company, they are added to the company’s AD. Many times, this is the last time that user’s AD profile is changed until the day the user leaves. In the meantime, the user changes departments, is promoted, changes cell phone number, and so on. Because SharePoint pulls data from AD, old, stale data shows up in SharePoint. This negative can be turned into a positive, however, if you use this to motivate the organization to clean its AD environment.
Lastly, My Sites are more complex and nuanced than most IT professionals want to know. It’s useful to understand some of these complexities. Some of them are very complex (for example, geo-replication), whereas others are more niche-like:
Geo-replication. SharePoint does support widely dispersed organizations, and that support includes My Sites functionality. However, it’s nontrivial to set up and manage. This article provides a good starting point for research: http://blogs.technet.com/tothesharepoint/archive/2008/10/21/3139351.aspx.
Relinking AD. Sometimes, a user is deleted in AD by accident, or the user is separated from the company and then rejoins at a future date. It’s possible to relink AD profiles with existing My Sites using the stsadm utility function.
Backup and restore. My Sites are no different from backup and restore of any other site collection. However, they do need to be factored into the schedule and considered as part of any disaster recovery solution. Find out more information about this topic at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc713516.aspx.
Templates. Unlike most other SharePoint sites, it isn’t easy to create new My Site templates. However, it is fully supported by Microsoft. Start here to research this process: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/22/ customizing-moss-2007-my-sites-within-the-enterprise.aspx. This process is not for the faint of heart. It’s relatively difficult to create a template in the first place and even more difficult to change My Sites after they have been created using a customized template. Carefully consider these factors when thinking about custom My Site templates.
Additional administrative options. This chapter focused on the most important administrative aspects of My Sites, but there are several additional options. Administrators can specify whether users can pick a nondefault language for the My Site, trusted My Site host locations, and other settings.
Technical planning. If you plan to roll out My Sites to a few dozen users, you probably don’t need to pay a lot of attention to the impact on your SharePoint farm. However, if you plan to roll it out to 5,000, 20,000, or more(!) users, you do need to worry about the impact on the farm. The user count will affect how you plan for the number and configuration of your Web applications, content databases, Web front ends, and so on. The takeaway for information workers is that you need to be aware of this and work with the SharePoint administration team to properly size the environment.
Social planning. The very name, “My Site,” implies personal ownership, and personal ownership entails certain levels of privacy and personal use. Yet, SharePoint is a business application, not a pop culture phenomenon like Facebook or YouTube. My Sites blur that boundary, and it’s important to recognize that fact and plan for it. When rolling out My Sites, the same training program that describes the meaning and purpose of Web Parts from Table 7.1 must also describe proper use and privacy expectations. Failure to do so can lead to unpleasant scenarios in which a user has uploaded personal family photos or possibly pirated music. You name it, and there’s a chance it will get uploaded to SharePoint. Define information and proper user policies; communicate them and enforce them.
At this point, we’ve covered user profiles and My Sites. You can think of them as being brother and sister. Now it’s time to cover their first cousin, audience targeting.