Sharepoint 2013 : My Sites (part 1) - Creating the My Site Host Site Collection

Creating the My Site Host Site Collection

Each My Site exists as a separate site collection. Site collections provide a level of independence in that each defines its own security model and each may reside in different databases from other site collections. Think of each site collection as its own contained ecosystem for data, which makes them ideal for hosting each My Site—an ecosystem for one particular user in the organization . Since each My Site is its own site collection, each My Site has at least one site collection administrator, who is typically the owner of the My Site and person with whom a user profile associates.

SharePoint maintains many site collections for My Sites in a single web application, called the My Site Host application. If you utilized the Farm Configuration Wizard to configure your SharePoint farm, then you likely have a My Site Host application instantiated. Since this is an administration book, I shall assume that you want to know how to create your own My Site infrastructure without the aid of the wizard. To start, I shall demonstrate the steps to create a new My Site Host application and root site collection using the My Site Host template. As you so often do, start by opening Central Administration.

1. Open Central Administration.
2. Click the Manage Web Applications link from the home page.
3. On the next page, if you see an application with a name that looks like it might be a My Site Host, then the My Site Host application may already exist.
4. Click the New icon from the ribbon.
5. Complete the form for the new web application .

    Note  Typically, I like to create a My Site Host on port 8080 and then create an alternate access mapping on port 80 with a fully qualified domain name, such as http://my.domain.com.

6. Return to the Central Administration home page.
7. Click the Application Management link.
8. Click the Create Site Collections link.
9. In the next page, select the correct web application in the drop-down box.
10. Give the site collection a name and description.
11. Choose the My Site Host template.
12. Provide a DOMAIN\name username for the primary and secondary site collection administrators.
13. Leave the quota option default.
14. Click the OK button to create the site collection.

Configuring Managed Paths

Before you are ready to create site collections for user My Sites, you must define a managed path. Managed paths tell SharePoint the location for hosting site collections within a host web application.

By default for each web application, SharePoint creates an explicit managed path for the root (“/”) and a wildcard managed path for offspring site collections (“/sites/”). I shall assume you created a My Site Host application and a My Site Host root site collection in the previous sections.

In my environment, I have a web application at http://myserver:8080/. When users provision their My Site collections, I would like these site collections to reside at http://myserver:8080/personal/name-of-person/. To accomplish my goal, I need to define a wildcard managed path for “/personal/” as follows:

1. Open Central Administration.
2. Click the Manage Web Applications link from the home page.
3. Click to the right of the name of the new My Sites Host application.
4. From the ribbon, click the Managed Paths icon.
5. Add a wildcard managed path for “personal.”

Great! Now you have a My Site Host, My Site administration root site collection, and a wildcard managed path to store all user My Site collections. However, you are not quite done with the configuration. You need to configure the User Profile Service, such that User Profile Service knows where to create new site collections for user My Sites. You will do this now.

At this stage, you should have a working My Site Host application and root site collection; you also have a managed path to host all user site collections (personal) and the host application path (my). The next set of steps assumes a working User Profile Service.

1. From the Central Admin home page, click the Application Management link.
2. Click the Manage Service Applications link.
3. Click to the right of the existing User Profile Service application name listed.
4. Click the Manage icon on the ribbon.
5. Scroll to the My Site Settings section.
6. Click the link to Setup My Sites.
7. You should see a page like that in Figure 1.

   

   Figure 1. My Site Setup page

8. Set the My Site Host location as the location of the root site collection in your My Site Host application (or site collection location if not at the root).
9. Set the personal site location as the managed path you created earlier for the location of user My Site collections.
10. Optionally, click the Configure Trusted Host Locations link to configure other trusted host locations. Trusted host locations are other My Site Host locations in which users of a specific audience host their My Site collection. For example, if you have an audience for all contractors in your organization and want their My Sites to host in a separate location from all other users, then Trusted My Site Locations are what you need.

The My Site Settings section in the User Profile Service application provides a few other options that administrators may deem useful in the organization—personalization site links and publish links to Office applications.

Personalization site links are additional links added to each user My Site, based on audience membership. For example, say your organization has a series of committees, and each user belongs to zero, one, or many committees, stipulated by a profile property. When users visit their My Site, they should see links to their committee sites in the organization. The following steps assume the existence of committee audiences and demonstrate configuration of personalization site links:

1. Navigate to the My Sites Settings section in the User Profile Service Application page.
2. Click the Configure Personalization Site link.
3. Click the New link.
4. Provide the URL to the landing page of the committee, the committee name in the description field, the owner, and the target audience.

Published links to Office applications are a feature that SharePoint provides to expose known locations in your portal that users may access in Microsoft Office applications. For example, if a user wishes to save his or her Microsoft Word document to a common location in SharePoint, and the location is available as a published link, the user may select Save to SharePoint from Microsoft Word and use this link location. Users may similarly save to SharePoint published links in other Office applications. The following steps demonstrate configuration of published links in SharePoint:

1. Navigate to the My Sites Settings section in the User Profile Service Application page.
2. Click the Publish Links to Office Client Applications link.
3. Click the New link.
4. Provide the URL for the published link and description.
5. Select the publication end-point type in the drop-down.