My User Profile Page
SharePoint 2013 continues to support user
profiles as it always has done since SharePoint 2007. The way in which
SharePoint manages profile organization under the hood has changed over
time, but users have always been able to see some demographic details about themselves and their peers, irrespective of My Sites. Even WSS 3.0 and Foundation
provided some rudimentary user profile management, albeit a series of
user properties and not a complete implementation of the user profile
infrastructure offered by the full SharePoint version of the time.
If you have not configured the User Profile
Service application and, by extension, not configured the My Site Host
application in your farm, you can still access user settings. These
settings are the very basic settings of a user and
do not constitute a full user profile, nor can you synchronize these
settings with any directory service, such as Active Directory. Figure 3 shows an example User Settings page in my team site when I do not have a User Profile Service application provisioned.
Contrast the basic User Settings page (Figure 3)
with that of the User Profile page from the User Profile Service
application. When clicking the name of the logged on user, instead of
seeing the “My Settings” link, you should see an “About Me” link,
which, when clicked, shows a page like that in Figure 4.
Also, notice the absence of the Newsfeed, SkyDrive, and Sites links,
which require User Profile Service and a working My Site. I do have to
admit that my User Profile page in my development farm is a little
bland, so I at least uploaded a picture to make it more appealing.
Even with the User Profile Service application provisioned and a My Site Host application
and root site collection, I want to make a clear distinction between
user profiles and user profiles with My Sites. Some organizations want
to take advantage of social networking in SharePoint but have concerns
about providing a space for users to upload documents and content. Up
to now, I have not actually provisioned a My Site. I am using features
of the My Site Host root site collection to
display profile information. By default, the User Profile Service will
provision user My Sites in the background. You can disable user access to My Sites, leaving the rest of the user profile and social networking pieces intact, with the following steps:
- Open Central Administration.
- Click the Manage Service Applications link.
- Click to the right of the existing User Profile Service application name listed.
- Click the Manage icon on the ribbon.
- Click the link to manage user permissions.
- Disable Create Personal Site option for authenticated users.
Note Disabling creation of personal sites will disable newsfeed and personal content storage, such as documents.
Looking at Figure 4,
you see that SharePoint is in the process of provisioning My Site and
that you should see content and your newsfeed shortly. A timer service
(User Profile Service Application—Activity Feed Job), which runs every
10 minutes, completes the provisioning process. I could switch over to
Central Administration and run the job now but will use this
opportunity to show you how to edit the user’s profile.
- From the About Me page, click the Edit link to edit the profile.
- SharePoint displays the Edit Profile page, like that in Figure 5.
The Edit User Profile page is much simpler than
in previous versions of SharePoint. For instance, you do not have to
scroll through lots of profile properties; all the common properties
reside on one page, under the Basic Information tab. Try clicking the
Contact Information tab, Details, and ellipses to see other profile
property values you can change. To demonstrate, I uploaded my profile
picture.
You might see that some of the profile
properties do not allow you to edit the value. Typically, these profile
properties link to Active Directory, or perhaps some other directory
service, with the synchronization direction set as import only. In
these cases, you cannot edit the profile property value because the
value comes from the imported profile of the directory service.
