Best Practices A round SharePoint 2010 User Profiles

1. SPC310 Best Practices AroundSharePoint 2010 User Profiles Scott Jamison Chief Architect Jornata LLC

2. Meet Scott Jamison • Chief Architect at Jornata (booth 650) • SharePoint partner with Gold Competency in Portals & Collab • Formerly a Director at Microsoft • SharePoint MVP • Microsoft Certified Master • Author: • Essential SharePoint 2007 • Essential SharePoint 2010 • Five whitepapers on SharePoint 2010 • Blog: www.scottjamison.com • Twitter:@sjam

3. What We Will Cover • User Profile Feature Overview [100 level] • Profiles & Properties • My Sites • Social Computing Features • Review Core Components [200 level] • Services • Service Applications • Databases • Timer Jobs • Planning & Provisioning [300 level] • Required set of pre-planning activities • GUI-based provisioning of UPA

4. What I Won’t Cover [400 level] • PowerShell provisioning • UPRE • Global my sites • High scale • Go to “Part II” – Spencer Harbar’ssession (tomorrow) • SPC407: Enterprise Deployment Considerations for the User Profile Applications

5. General information about SharePoint User Profiles About social computing & User profiles

6. User Profiles and Social Computing • Key Feature: Business collaboration and social computing • A “Social Identity” is the cornerstone of all user-centric and social capabilities

7. What a Social Identity Enables • Providing a social identity enables the users of your solution to: • Gather insight into other users based on their social network, such as informing them about what the people they know are doing • Provide social feedback in the form of ratings, comments, and tags • Find an ‘expert’ – a mechanism that provides a way for users to locate a person within the organization based on profile attributes • Provide an accurate organization chart so that users know the reporting structure • Display items such as human resources news, based on the user’s organization and business role within the company • Show a picture of your users in Outlook via the social connector

8. User Profiles Status About me Additional Profile Properties Personal Content “My site” Social Data Tags, Comments, & Ratings Activity Feed User Profile & Social Features

9. User Profiles & My Sites & Social Features • User profiles are rendered using single pages: • Public profile: • http://<mysiteurl>/<mysitehost>/person.aspx • Newsfeed • http://<mysiteurl>/<mysitehost>/default.aspx • Personal sites are individual site collections rendered at: • http://<mysiteurl>/<mysitehost>/<useraccount>/default.aspx • Personal Sites are optional • You can have profiles without my sites • You cannot have my sites without profiles • Social Features can be enabled/disabled • Rely on the user having a profile

10. Best Practice #1 You don’t have to enable personal sites if you just want people search and social computing.

11. Best Practice #2 Put your my site host on its own web application.

12. Best Practice #3 Do not pre-create a personal site for everyone. It’s a waste of resources. They’ll already have a profile.

13. My Sites demo Scott Jamison Chief Architect Jornata

14. Social Networking • Key Goal: Provide a means for social interaction • Why? Enables Users to: • Provide status updates • Interact with other users via noteboards (aka “the wall”) • View stories via Activity feeds • Discuss stuff via discussion boards • Discover people (“colleagues”)

15. Colleagues Track your colleagues Better, more readable “newsfeed” Add additional colleagues Notifications Email Note board Colleague addition Keywords suggestions Profile Updates Alerts to update profile Status message Social Networking

16. What is Feedback? Social Tags Notes and Ratings Applies to any URL, inside or outside of SharePoint How does it help? Categorize, annotate, promote Help retrieval of relevant links Primary mechanism for promoting documents and web pages to the newsfeed Social Feedback

17. Tagging • Tag anything • Documents • Items • Pages • Profiles • Things outside SharePoint • How to tag • I like it • Tags & Notes • Keyword column • Visibility • Tags & Notes • Tag Cloud • Tag Profiles

18. Best Practice #4 Encourage users to observe and use the existing tags. It maintains consistency.

19. Tag Profile • Tag Profile • Every tag has one • Subscribe • Follow tag in my newsfeed • Shows in My Interests • Add to “Ask me about” in My Profile • View people who are following this tag • People Search • FAST Search • Doesn’t Index Social Tags • “There are no available items tagged with”

20. Best Practice #5 Enable Metadata Keyword Social Promotion

21. Ratings • Rate your content • 0-5 Stars • Can enable/disable per list

22. Best Practice #6 Ratings are overrated. Use with caution.

23. Presentation My Site Feed Web part Atom 2.0 feed Types Consolidated Activities I consume Published My activities (that others consume) Activity Feeds

24. Best Practice #7 Enable the Activity Feed Timer Job. Change the schedule to suit your needs. RTM: disabled by default SP1: enabled by default Default schedule is Hourly.

25. Making Use of Social Features • Find an Expert • People Search • Ask me about • Tag Subscription • Get updates on tags of interest • ActivityFeeds • Follow • Be followed • SearchRelevance • Tags

26. User Profiles: under the covers

27. Core Components • User Profile Service Application • User Profile Services • Databases • Timer Jobs • Synchronization* • Forefront Identity Manager

28. Profile Services • User Profile Service Application • Container for configuration settings • Can be more than one (but only associated with a single synchronization service) • User Profile Service • SharePoint Service (service on server) • User Profile Synchronization Service • SharePoint Service (service on server) • Provisions Forefront Identity Manager • Associated with one User Profile Service Application

29. User Profile Service Application: Dependencies • Managed Metadata Service • Need this for certain user profile properties • Need this for Tags to work • Search Service • People Search • Tag Profile Page • Business Connectivity Services • Synchronizing profile properties from LOB systems • Read-only (no write-back)

30. User Profile Service Application: Databases • Social Database • Tags • Comments • Ratings • User Profile Database • Profile properties • Consolidated Activity Feed • Comments • Sync Database • Staging data (FIM) Social Data Profiles Sync Profile Synchronization Service Instance Profile Service Instance

31. User Profile Service Application: Timer Jobs • User Profile Service provisions 13 Timer Jobs • Consider the default schedule against your business needs

32. Activity timer job gathers data “Activity Feed Job” Hourly schedule Activity Feed Cleanup Job Cleans up activities older than 14 days Daily schedule Activity Feed API Consume user feeds Insert activities into newsfeeds How Activity Feeds Work

33. Activity feed architecture Activity Feed • User can define what they see in the activity feed (through user profile page) • Customer gathers can provide external data to the activity feed • Activity feed can be surfaced through search (people) Activity Feed - User profile DB Custom Timer Job Activity Timer Job Custom gatherer Profile and social gatherers Social database Change log - User profile DB

34. How Ratings Work • Stored in Social Database • Timer Jobs • “Social Data Maintenance” • “Activity Feed” • “Social Ratings Sync” • Proxy • Sync to content database • Average rating calculated

35. How Tagging Works • Tags stored in Social database • Requires Managed Metadata Service • Timer Jobs: • Social Data Maintenance • Hourly • “I Like it” – just another tag • Visible in tags and Notes dialog and also on My Site

36. How My Sites Work • Pages • Public profile (person.aspx) • Newsfeed (default.aspx) • My Site Content • site collection + Content DB • My Site Host • Site collection • Trusted My Site Locations • Distributed Hosting • Audience-driven • Timer Jobs • My Site Cleanup • Notifies manager when a user My Site is deleted

37. How Synchronization Works User Profile Service • Multiples Sources • AD • LDAP • BCS • Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) • Timer Jobs • User Profile Incremental Import Job Sync Profiles Profile Synchronization Service Instance Business Connectivity Service LDAP Active Directory

38. FIM • Forefront Identity Manager • ‘Light’ version bundled with MSS • Client great for troubleshooting Sync • Use for complex filters • Which cannot be expressed in CA The FIM Client is located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Synchronization Service\UIShell\miisclient.exe

39. PLANNING AND CONFIGURING USER PROFILES

40. Best Practice #8 Step away from the keyboard. Take time to plan.

41. Planning (Business Goals) • Clarify your business goals • Why are we doing this? • How does it align with our business goals? • Plan Capabilities - What features will be enabled? • User Profiles • Personal Sites • Social • Plan User Permissions • Who will be allowed to use this? • Plan Profile properties • This will take longer than you think.

42. Planning • You’ll Need To: • Work with HR • Work with ILM team • Work with AD team

43. Plan Profile Properties

44. Policies • Which properties should be mandatory? • Account name, department..etc. • Which properties should be visible to everyone? • Non-sensitive information • Which properties can be changed by users? • Phone number, preferred name..etc.

45. Social tagging Culturally disruptive? Policies Who can social tag/bookmark? What happens when the employee leaves? Activity feeds What’s visible? Person Pictures Federal requirements? Planning for Privacy

46. Plan For Governance • Governance is very important for user profiles • You need to train users and decide: • When are users supposed to put content into their personal site? • How are users supposed to use the tagging rating features? • How often should users update their profile • What should “About Me” say? • Can users put any picture they want into their profile?

47. Policies and Privacy Settings • Policies • Enabled, Required, Optional, Disabled • User Override • Replicable • Privacy and Visibility • Everyone • My Colleagues • My Team • My Manager • Only Me

48. Planning for Privacy • Social tagging will be culturally disruptive • Need to plan and decide • Who can social tag/bookmark? • Define an acceptable use policy • What happens when the employee leaves? • Security trimming of tags • Pluggable architecture allows definition of rules and back ends (new in June 2011 CU) • Define how to handle non-SharePoint and external sites • Only Indexed sites can be trimmed out-of-the-box • Activity feed repercussions

49. Planning for Privacy • You will need to proactively plan for privacy • Key stakeholders are HR, Legal, IT and Business Drivers • Top Issues for My Site deployment • Picture usage • Activity feed • Custom Fields

50. Further Planning (Technical) • What will your logical architecture design look like? • Plan Container Selection • Plan Sync Filters • Plan for Scale • Do you need global, distributed My Sites? • Do you need multi-lingual My Sites?