SharePoint My Sites are commonly referred to as “Facebook for the enterprise” and are personal site collections providing each user with the ability to store private and public information such as documents, pictures, status updates, etc easily and efficiently. My Sites in SharePoint 2010 takes social enterprise computing to the next level and builds upon what we have come to love in previous versions. Microsoft saw the need to continue to invest and enhance SharePoint’s social networking capabilities, and as web 2.0 technologies continue to sprawl all over the world wide web, Microsoft have again successfully set the bench mark in the enterprise by introducing an array of social computing features to enhance end user collaboration in SharePoint 2010.
In my last article I introduced and configured our first service application for our SharePoint 2010 deployment, User Profiles, which provided us with a central location for storing user details that will later be imported from a content source such as Active Directory. Today we will continue our journey to plan and configure User’s My Sites in SharePoint 2010.
Prerequisites
This article is the 5th in my series on deploying SharePoint 2010 for the enterprise, so if you have missed the first 4, you can easily catch-up via the links below;
- Installing SharePoint 2010 using Least Privilege Service Accounts
- Configuring incoming email in SharePoint 2010 with Exchange 2010
- Configuring outgoing email in SharePoint 2010 with Exchange 2010
- Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010
Create the My Site Web Application
We begin by first creating a Web Application that will eventually house our My Site Host and subsequent site collections.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Web Applications
Click New
Authentication: Select either Claims or Classic depending on your requirements. I will select “Classic”
IIS Web Site: Create a new IIS web site (enter your details as per your requirements)
Authentication Provider: Select your preferred provider based on your requirements.
Public URL: Specify the URL that users will type to access their My Sites.
Application Pool: Create a new application pool and give it a descriptive name
As we have been utilizing the least privilege model whilst configuring our SharePoint farm in this series, we will click on Register a new managed account and enter the details for our My Site Application Pool Identity. Note: This account will be required to be provisioned in Active Directory before you can proceed. e.g. In my example I have created an account called DOMAIN\sp_mysite.
Click OK
Database Name and Authentication: Specify your Database server and Database name.
Failover Server: Specify your failover server if you are utilising SQL Server database mirroring.
Click OK
You should receive the below confirmation that the Web Application has been successfully created.
Click on our newly created “SharePoint – My Site” Web Application and click on General Settings. Proceed to fill out your Web Application specific settings such as the Default Time Zone etc.
Create the My Site Host Site Collection
Now that we have successfully created our My Site Web Application, we can now proceed to create our My Site Host Site Collection. This will be the top level site that will house our individual user’s site collections.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Create site collections.
Ensure that the recently created My Site Web Application is selected, enter in a Title and click select the My Site Host Template located under the Enterprise Tab. Lastly, specify your site collection administrators and click OK.
You should then receive confirmation that the top level My Site Host has been successfully created.
Setup 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.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage service applications.
Click on User Profiles.
Click on Setup My Sites located under My Site Settings.
Enter the details of your Preferred Search Center if you have one setup already.
Enter the URL of your My Site Host that we have just created in the previous step and the personal site location.
Finally, select your Site Naming format, configure your Language Options, Permissions and My Site Email Notifications.
Click OK.
Add our Managed Path
Because we have specified “personal” as our Personal Site Location, we will need to define our managed path against our My Site Web Application.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Web Applications.
Click on your My Site Web Application and click on Managed Paths from the Ribbon.
Add “personal” as a Wildcard inclusion, click Add Path and click OK
Enable Self-Service Creation
Our last configuration step provides our users with the privilege to provision their own My Site’s by enabling the Self-Service Creation.
Navigate back to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Web Applications.
Click on your My Site Web Application and click on Self-Service Site Creation.
Select On and click OK.
If I now browse to my My Site URL I will be presented with the following “What’s New” Page.
It is only until I click on “My Content”, that SharePoint will proceed to create my personal site as per SharePoint 2007.
My Content
As you can see, we have now successfully completed our setup of a My Site Host which will house our user’s My Sites.
There is a whole bunch of new exciting features within SharePoint 2010 and its latest iteration of My Site in which I will deep dive in future articles.
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If you require any assistance with your SharePoint or other IT needs, the team at GKM2 are happy to assist. You can contact us via info@gkm2.com.au or 1300 797 288 within Australia.
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Wow, you taugh me sharepoint, thanks a lot Gearge,just created a mysite
Hi George!
First of all, thak you for teaching me SharePoint! Yur article series have been most helpful.
I have followed your article series for Sharepoint and have successfully created a Sharepoint Site. However, I cannot seem to get the my site working. I get the “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”.
Do you have any clues to why this is happening?
I have done everything according to your guide.
Regards
Hans Marius
Hi again George.
I figured it out – stupid me forgot to add a dns entry on my DC. For all of you that gets “Internet Explorer cannot open the site” – add a DNS entry like mysite.domain.local -> 192.168.1.XXX.
Hi Hans,
You are exactly right 🙂 without an “A” record created in DNS, you won’t be able resolved the AAM address.
help? i have 2 sharepoint sites setup currently, 1 default port 80, second is on port 4000. i need to create mysites for the port 4000. followed your guide, called the site mysite.servername:4000 this doesn’t load anything. can i make the site servername:4000/my_sites?
Nice guide. Just want to comment – remember to disable loopback check or you’ll be stuck with a login prompt on the server. I forgot it on a server and just could figure it out.
Perfect! You saved my day.
Thanks George,
This is a really good tutorial, easy to follow and get you with a perfect results. Everythnig is working fine for me.
Thanks again,
Danilo
…
i click on my sites and get User Profile Could not be loaded.. any ideas
I have my sites configured except for one surprising behavior. The user is not given full control of the site. they have permissions to create new lists and libraries and populate them. But the top level SitePages/Home.aspx is not editable and when I look at the site permissions, the user is not listed.
Given I believe that I have set everything up as documented, what are somethings that I need to check so that the user is able to edit all of their my site?
Thank you!
Cool – Just tried this out in a Dev environment. Trying to see how this could help our company but it does seem like it could