My Site Recommendations
My Site Recommendations
The following My Site recommendations are a composite of best practices taken from experiences at Microsoft and other large customers.
Planning
My Sites (even if they are as small as possible and only really used to store a profile picture) complicate backup/recovery, and add complexity and risk to ensuring the availability of the rest of the SSP farm. Large organizations (100K+ employees) should consider putting My Sites into a separate farm.
Very large organizations might consider multiple My Site farms, perhaps regionally located. This minimizes the number of content databases per farm and places the My Sites geographically closer to the site owners. Having fewer content databases per farm eases administrative burdens. Having My Sites hosted closer to site owners reduces the affects of network latency, thereby enhancing their usage experience. Multiple My Site farms can also provide more flexibility in managing the effort and time required to deploy updates and service packs to any given farm.
Always create a dedicated Web Application to host My Sites. This allows leveraging web application policies to define security, facilitates content database management, and enables creation of zones for external access.
Do not customize the My Site site definition. Besides being unsupported, poorly designed customizations can severely impact server performance and unnecessarily consume valuable CPU and memory resources. Any customization should be done through feature stapling, see http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/22/customizing-moss-2007-my-sites-within-the-enterprise.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/cliffgreen/archive/2008/03/13/removing-web-parts-from-the-my-site-web-part-gallery.aspx
Indexing
Install the latest service pack (currently SP1). Be sure to get the latest post service pack hotfixes applied, in particular 21243 (Office QFE). There is an issue where incremental crawls will not pick up all changes on My Sites without the post SP1 hotfix.
Use a separate content source for People Profiles rather than allowing it to default to the Local Office SharePoint Server Sites content source. My Sites full crawls can be time consuming due to the large number of site collections. Creating a separate content source enables independent crawl configuration; such as, the type of crawl and crawl frequency for My Sites.
Provisioning
Remember, a user profile page will exist for all employees following a full Active Directory profile import, even if no My Sites have been created yet. Profile pages allow basic employee information to be exposed in search results.
Allow users to create their own My Site on demand. Do not pre-provision My Sites. Generally, pre-provisioning is a time consuming process potentially taking many days or weeks. It gains little, and costs storage and administrative headaches.
Rolling-out
Make My Sites available to everyone on day 1. This allows for "viral" adoption by early adopters. This will eventually encourage others to create My Sites, thereby getting the momentum rolling.
Send out invitations to a small group of "pilot" users who would be interested in trying out My Sites, based on their role in the organization. The pilot group might contain a few hundred users. This gets a critical mass of My Sites in place quickly.
Try regional roll-outs via "soft launches", which include poster campaigns or brown bag lunch training at selected campuses and offices.
About the 3rd or 4th month, promote the My Site feature in a story on the Intranet portal home page.
Around the 6th month, incorporate the concept of "filling out your profile" into new employee orientation as a specific training exercise. Now essentially all new hires will have a My Site (because they need one to store their profile picture).
Encouraging On-Going Adoption
Encourage high profile "executive blogging" to drive awareness and adoption of My Sites. Blogging topics might include annual business planning, corporate strategy, rumor control, etc. This can demystify blogging by encouraging many participants to make daily posts about what they were doing and what they are thinking about. Note: this implies more frequent incremental crawling to incorporate blog entries into the search index.
Also, consider setting up a "Blogs" scope on the search home page to facilitate blog discovery. This can be accomplished by setting up scope based on the Content Type of blog posts. An example follows:
Note that this scope will pick up Blog Posts no matter where the Blog resides, as long as those a SharePoint Blogs crawled by a SharePoint Content Source.
Consider adding a link on the profile page that allows others to send an email to ask the person to fill out their profile ("peer nagging").
Explore holding a contest or raffle – If you fill out (or update) your profile this month you are eligible to win a prize.
