Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

152 7.2 Personal Por tal—A User’s View

Now that we have discussed how to load up the profile and have it con-

tribute to relevant search results, we will move on and discuss what the peo-

ple features in SharePoint bring to the individual.

7.2 Personal Portal—A User’s View

If SharePoint is to be the “place where people go,” then it must offer support

that enables the individual to process his or her own information with as

much ease as they do other SharePoint information. From a personal portal

point of view, there are three main areas to consider: By Me, About Me, and

For Me. Users need their own personal place where they can work on private

things and have the freedom to shape their own view into various informa-

tion repositories, much like a My Yahoo or My MSN. This is the By Me area,

and it is implemented via something called a My Site.

Figure 7.6

Flat people

result set.

Figure 7.7

Social structure to

people result set.

7.2 Personal Por tal—A User’s View 153

Chapter 7

Next, users need to be able to make information about themselves avail-

able to others such that others can benefit. This is the About Me area, and it

is implemented via a public view known as My Profile.

Lastly, there needs to be a way in which other people can push relevant

information to the users. This is the For Me area, and it is mainly imple-

mented through Audiences. Let’s now take a closer look at these three areas

and some key features that go along with them.

7.2.1 By Me—My Site

A My Site is a SharePoint site that is instantiated using the SPSPERS tem-

plate. The site is created dynamically when suitably permissioned users click

the My Site link on the Welcome navigation bar at the top right corner of a

site. The site can also be pre-provisioned programmatically. When the site is

instantiated, the URL for it is placed into the Personal Site property within

the user profile.

My Site is a shared service, and therefore it is shared by all the Web

applications that use the same SSP. What’s more, a shared service provider is

in itself a Web application that has its own set of permissions associated with

it, and through these permissions you control who is and isn’t allowed to see

the My Site and My Links options. You can see this using the My Site Set-

tings link from SSP administration. From here, there are three main settings

pages that you can access from the left-hand quick launch bar. For control-

ling the visibility of My Site, you need to select the Personalization Services

Permissions option. There are two rights related to My Site—Create Personal

Site and Use Personal Features—and you will note that an out-of-the-box

deployment grants these rights to Authenticated Users.

Use Personal Features enables the My Links option, and Create Personal

Site enables the My Site option. Use Personal Features is a prerequisite for

being able to create a My Site. The subtle difference between the two is that

Use Personal Features lets you participate in all the personalization capabili-

ties that SharePoint has to offer (such as showing you your colleagues and

memberships), and Create My Site adds personal storage in terms of lists and

libraries on top.

By default, there are two parts to your My Site: My Home and My Pro-

file. The former is your actual personal site, and the latter is where you main-

tain your About Me details, which we discuss shortly. A default personal site

can be seen in Figure 7.8. It is a regular SharePoint site collection with the

owning user specified as having Full Control, but note that other permissions

can be added automatically when the site is created. This is under the control

of the SSP administrator (My Site Settings/My Site Reader Permissions). By

default, the Authenticated Users group has read access in order to allow peo-

ple to view the public profile. Note this does not give access to personal con-