Managing My Sites

When you enable My Sites, every user becomes a site collection administrator. Therefore, most My Site customization is performed by the users. The bulk of My Site personalization is done through user profiles and properties, which is a function of the associated Shared Services Provider. Please refer to Chapter 8, "Deploying SharePoint Server Shared Services," for detailed information on user profiles.

Personalizing the Top Link Bar from the Shared Services Provider

The default Top Link Bar links are to the user's My Site home page and user profile. You can add additional links to all or part of your user population. Using audiences in conjunction with personalized Top Link Bars gives you a powerful method to target such sites as Business Intelligence and such links as college alumni or news. For example, you might target a link for those who were members of an audience defined for senior management that displayed critical business metrics. Be judicious when creating Top Link Bar links; adding too many can crowd the top of the user's My Site. Add links to the Top Link Bar in My Sites by doing the following:

1. Browse to the Shared Services Provider for the My Sites.

2. Click on Personalization Site Links under User Profiles and My Sites.

3. Select New Item from the New drop-down menu.

4. Enter a URL for the site to link to.

5. Enter a description for the site. The description will be displayed in the Top Link Bar as the name of the link.

6. Specify an owner for the link.

7. Specify the audience that will see the link in their My Sites. The audience can be Global (this SSP) or Active Directory security or distribution lists.

8. Click OK.

Choosing a My Site Naming Format

By default, My Sites are simply created with the user ID of the user. For example, a user in the contoso Active Directory domain with a user ID of hanm would have a My Site named hanm. If you have multiple Active Directories using a My Site Web application, however, name collisions could occur. When this happens, the second user with the same user ID gets a site creation error. Although it is possible to change the behavior of My Site creation to prevent name collisions by appending the domain name before the username, like contoso_hanm, it is best to enable domain_username for all My Sites when using multiple domains.

To select a naming convention for My Sites do the following:

1. Browse to the Shared Services Provider for the My Sites.

2. Click on My Site Settings under User Profiles and My Sites.

3. Select either User Name (Do Not Resolve Conflicts), User Name (Resolve Conflicts By Using Domain_Username), or Domain And User Name (Will Not Have Conflicts) from the option buttons.

4. Click OK.