MySite
Plan Global My site & User Profile Replication In Geographically Distributed SharePoint Farms
Introduction:
This article will provide you the steps to achieve the following in the geographically distributed sharepoint farms,
- Preventing individual users from creating multiple My Sites – Part 1
- Provisioning Expertise Search – Part 2
How end user can create multiple My site?
Let me describe a sample scenario with geographically distributed farms. In this scenario, users work in different regions, each of which uses a different UPS Application. Some users have to collaborate across regions, and must have access to multiple UPS Application. This is particularly common if an employee in a global deployment moves between geographic locations.
Suppose that, as usually, users of each farm are configured in the same forest. If you want to give users the possibility to see other users’ profiles you have to configure in each farm the import of profiles from Active Directory and if you want that users in a region can see profile of users of other regions you have to import all users profiles in each farm.
This works well and in each farm you can see all users details but what happen if you want to give users the possibility to update their details (like skills, blog site and so on)? Let me show you an example: MyLinks. MyUser1 is browsing a site collection located in Farm 1 and adds a shortcut to a page with MyLinks OOB functionality. This link is recorded in a property of the user profile on UPS application 1. If the same user MyUser1 goes to a different site collection hosted on Farm 2 and looks at the list of his links he cannot find the previous added link on Farm 1. This happens because of Farm 2 is using a different UPS Application 2 and user profiles are not synchronized between UPS APPs.
We have a similar behavior with My sites. Each UPS Application hosts My Sites, so if a user click on MySite link from a site on Farm 1 he is redirected to the MySite hosted on UPS APP 1 but if the same user click on MySite link from a site on Farm 2 he is redirected to a different MySite hosted on UPS App 2.
When planning for My Sites, you must consider the location of the users in the organization and the number of farms or User Profile service applications that will host My Sites. If you have more than one farm or User Profile service application, you will likely have to configure trusted My Site host locations.
Trusted My Site host locations
The Trusted My Site Host Locations feature prevents a user from creating more than one My Site in an organization with multiple User Profile service applications.
To prevent individual users from creating multiple My Sites, configure trusted My Site host locations. When specified, users are redirected to the single My Site host location that is intended for their accounts regardless of where they are browsing when they attempt to create or access their My Sites. This feature ensures that each user can create only one My Site in an organization.
Geographically distributed farms
The following diagram illustrate the geographically distributed SharePoint farms
- The User profiles are imported from all the available domain in the root directory
- User Profile service applications are configured individually in all the regional farm
- My sites are provisioned individually in all the user profile server application
Configuration & Interface Behavior
Step 1: The following target audience should be created & compiled in all the user profile service application. For More information see Manage audience
- Americas Regional Users
- EMEA Regional Users
- AsiaPac Regional Users
Step 2: The following Trusted My Site Host Locations should be added in all the user profile service applications with target audience
| Trusted My Site host location | Target Audience |
| https://mysite.americas.contoso.com | Americas Regional Users |
| https://mysite.emea.contoso.com | EMEA Regional Users |
| https://mysite.asiapac.contoso.com | AsiaPac Regional Users |
This below picture illustrates my site behaviour for a user belonging to EMEA Region after implementing the above configurations.
- When EMEA Regional User accessing the My Profile page from Site or My site in EMEA farm, he is able to view is my site in https://mysite.emea.cotoso.com and he can view or edit his profile.
- When EMEA Regional User accessing the My Profile page from Site or My site in Americas farm, he is able to view/ redirected to his regional my site in https://mysite.emea.cotoso.com and he can view or edit his profile.
- When EMEA Regional User accessing the My Profile page from Site or My site in AsiaPac farm, he is able to view/ redirected to his regional my site in https://mysite.emea.cotoso.com and he can view or edit his profile.
- When EMEA Regional user trying to view other regional user profile in EMEA farm, the my profile page will be redirected to other regional farm where the user belongs to.
How it works:
When EMEA regional user access the my site in Americas domain the User profile service in Americas will look for current logged in users target audience and corresponding trusted host url and then it will redirect the user to appropriate Mysite.
I will cover the “Enabling Expertise Search & User Profile Replication” in my next post. Thanks.
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