My Site Configuration in SharePoint 2010

Now a days social networking has become part of our day to day life and it’s unavoidable specially with very popular sites like “Face Book”, “My Space” and “Linked In”. To increase social enterprise computing and collaboration between employees, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 provides a dedicated personal site as My Site.

In my view My Site is a “Facebook for the enterprise” because it gives users rich social networking and collaboration features, which enable users to explore and share interests, projects, business relationships, content, and other data with people in the organization. It provides you with a single location to manage all of the documents, content, and tasks that you have in any site in your organization. It serves as a point of contact for other users in your organization to find information about you and your skills and interests

My Sites in SharePoint 2010 takes social enterprise computing to the next. In this blog I will attempt to illustrate how to configure My Site in SharePoint.

Prerequisites:

For Configuring My Site, I need to pull users from Active Directory by using User Profile Service Application. If you do not have configured User Profile service yet, please configure it first. For configuring User Profile service, Please visit my last “Configure User Profile Service”, which store user details at central location that will later be imported from a content source such as Active Directory.

Create the My Site Web Application:

1) Log on to the Lync-SP2010 machine with Administrator credentials.

2) Open the “SharePoint 2010 Central Administration” site (Start->Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products-> SharePoint 2010 Central Administration

3) Go to On Quick Launch of Central Administration Site.

4) Click Application Management then click Manage web applications under Web Applications section.

5) On Web Application Management Page, click on New to create web Application and type necessary parameters and click on OK.

We have successfully created our My Site Web Application; now we can proceed to create our My Site Host Site Collection.

Create the My-Site Host Site Collection

1) On Application created window (See the above image) and click on Create Site Collection.

2) On Create Site collection Page enter following details:

· Title – My Site – Host

· Template – Select My Site Host under Enterprise tab

· Site Administrator – PROSEWARE\Administrator

3) Click OK. It will take few seconds to create your web application

4) You will see the newly created web application as SharePoint MySite – 10244

Create Managed Path for My Sites

Because we have specified “personal” as our Personal Site Location, we will need to define our managed path against our My Site Web Application.

1) On Quick Launch of Central Administration, click Application Management and then click Manage Web Applications.

2) Select SharePoint MySite – 10244 Web Application and then click on Managed Paths on ribbon.

3) On Define Managed Paths page add a new path as “personal”, click on Add Path.

4) Click OK.

Enable Self-Service Site Creation

Our last configuration step provides our users with the privilege to provision their own My Site’s by enabling the Self-Service Creation.

1) Enable self-service site creation for the SharePoint MySite – 10244 Web Application.

2) Select our SharePoint -112 Web Application and then click on Self-Service Site Creation on ribbon. See the below image.

3) On Self-Service Site Collection Management Page select “ON” and click on OK.

Configure My Sites

Now that we have successfully provisioned our My Site Web Application and Top Level Site Collection that will host our My Sites, we can continue to configure our My Site Settings.

1) Navigate to Central Administration->Application Management->Manage Service Applications.

2) Under Service Applications section, click on SP-User Profile Service

3) On SP-User Profile Service Page click on Setup My Sites under My Site Settings section.

4) On My Site Setting Page type
a) Preferred Search Center – http://lync-sp2010:111/Pages (Address of Enterprise Search Center)

To Setup Enterprise Search Center follow my previous post at Configure Enterprise People Search In SharePoint 2010.

b) My Site Host – http://lync-sp2010:10244 (Address of My Site Host Web Application)
c) Personal Site Location : personal (Managed Path)

5) Click on OK

Create My Site for user

Now let’s create My Site for individual user:

1) Login on client machine by any AD user (Renee) and open our My Site Host web Application in browser i.e. http://lync-sp2010:10244/

2) And click on My Profile, you will get user profile details available in AD.

3) And Now Click on My Content Link. It will create Personal Web Site for logged user. See the below image

NOTE: It will take up to 5 Minute to create web site.

4) Now choose My Profile and add you picture to your profile so other can easily identify you.

5) Click on Choose Picture.

6) Click on Browse, and select your image file and click OK.

7) Add additional details which can be help other users to search you and then click OK.

Hope this would be useful for readers..! Thanks and please let me know your comments or feedback.