Leveraging Social Networking Tools in SharePoint 2010 : Components of My Sites (part 1) - Creating and Exploring a My Site

That said, once the farm administrators are comfortable that the different moving parts are functioning properly and have customized the My Site to meet their needs, end users should be invited to start testing them and give feedback on what they like, what they don’t like or don’t understand, and what they can’t figure out.

Creating and Exploring a My Site

Once the environment is ready to support My Site, new users should be instructed to create their personal site and perform some basic configuration steps as follows:

1.	From the Portal home page, click the drop-down arrow next to the username in the upper-right corner and click My Site; the My Site home page will open, which is also the My Newsfeed page. The URL shows the location of this page, which is a default.aspx page. Note that the URL does not include the user’s name or any personal information, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. My Site My Newsfeed home page.
2.	From here, the user (TestUser1 in this example) can click My Colleagues, My Interests, or Newsfeed settings in the body of the page, and start configuring that information, or he can click one of the links along the top: My Content, My Profile, or any other links that the farm administrator has decided to add from Central Administration. Figure 23.10 shows an additional link CCO Site that was added by the farm administrator. Ideally, users will immediately configure their profile, so click My Profile.
3.	From the My Profile page (note that the URL is still generic, and the page is Person.aspx), click Edit My Profile under the placeholder for the picture.
4.	As shown in Figure 2, this page allows the user to enter information in the About Me field, choose a picture, and populate information in a number of other areas, which by default include Ask Me About, Phone Numbers, Office Location, Time Zone, Assistant, Past Projects, Skills, Schools, Birthday, Interests, choose which activities will generate email notifications, and which activities the user wants to see about their colleagues. For this example, upload a photo and enter some information into each of the fields. Figure 2. Updating profile information in a My Site.
5.	To upload the photo, just click Choose Picture, browse for a photo, and then click OK.
6.	Entering information into the other fields should be simple, and some provide the ability to determine which users will be able to see the information based on the options Everyone, Only Me, My Manager, My Team, and My Colleagues. Click Save and Close once the desired information is entered. The resulting view will look like Figure 3. Figure 3. My Profile page after updating.
7.	Click the Colleagues tab, and then click Add Colleagues.
8.	Enter in the names of users who can be considered colleagues (in this example, User1, User2, User3, User4), as shown in Figure 4. Click Yes under the Add to My Team option, use the General Existing Group, and leave Everyone selected under Show These Colleagues To. Click OK. Figure 4. Adding colleagues.
9.	The Suggested Colleagues window will then open, which will suggest other colleagues based on email and IM communications patterns. Check the box next to one or more of these suggestions, or click the X to remove the suggestion. Click Yes under Add to My Team, use the General Group, and click Add. Figure 5 shows the results on the Colleagues tab, where the new users are displayed as colleagues. Figure 5. Colleagues added.
10.	Next click My Content, and now the My Site site collection for the user will be created and a message to that extent will display while the site is created. A message will then display that states “Microsoft Office can remember your My Site to synchronize documents stored here in Outlook and to show it when opening and saving files. Do you want Office to remember this site...?” Click Yes for this sample user.
11.	Note that the URL, as shown in Figure 6, now contains the user’s name, based on how the settings are configured for the User Profile service application in the Setup My Sites tool, as covered previously in this chapter. The user also now has access to a site actions drop-down menu, making this a good training ground for tools the user wouldn’t normally have access to in a production site collection. Figure 6. My Content page for new My Site.
12.	Click Site Actions, and then Site Settings, and review the tools available.