Setting up My Sites in SharePoint 2013

One of the prerequisites to the setup of My Sites is that we should have the User profile service application up and running.

1. Verify that the user account that is doing this procedure has the following credentials:

• The user account that does this procedure is a Farm Administrator.
  
  
• The user account that does this procedure is a member of the Administrators group on the computer that is running a SharePoint Server.

2. Create an entirely new web application for hosting my sites. Go to the Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage web applications (in my case it is MySite-5000).



3. Create a site collection at the root level of the newly created web application. We can of course create it inside some other managed path other than root, but since we have a dedicated Web Application, root seems like an obvious choice. Site Collection must have “2013” experience and use “My Site Host” template.


4. Once the site collection has been created successfully, click on the “Managed Paths” to the web application that you created to host My Sites.


5. Add a new managed path with wildcard inclusion. I prefer to use “personal” as the My Site managed path, but you can choose anything else as well. (Write “personal” in the Add new path section and click on Add path.)

6. Click OK.



7. Check the service connections for the Web Application that will host my sites. Click on the “Service Connections” button to see if the correct service application is set up and working.



8. On Central Administration, at Application Management, choose the application that you created to host My Sites and click on the “Self Service Site Creation” button.



9. In the Self Service Site Creation management page the setup the values are as shown below.



10. On Central Administration, at Application Management, choose the application that you created to host My Sites and click on the “Permission Policy” button, where we need to grant permission to create new site collections (for my sites).


11. In the “Manage Permission Policy Levels “section, click on the “Add Permission Policy Level”.



12. In the “Add Permission Policy” page provide the required name and Description for permission level and provide the permission of Subsite Creation as shown in the following screenshot.







13. In Central Administration, at Application Management, choose the application that you created to host My Sites and click on the “Users Policy” button.



14. Click on the “Add Users” link and permission for everyone, in other words All Users and assign the MySites Subsite Creation permission for everyone as shown in the following screenshot.







15. In Central Administration, at Application Management, choose the “Manage Service Applications “button and then select “User Profile Service Application” as shown below.



16. In the Manage Profile Service Page under the My Site Setting section select the “Setup My Sites” button.



17. The My Sites Setting page is where we need to set up the search center (in my case, I haven't set up a Search Center), my host location (in my case, root site collection of the Web Application that serves as the host) and personal site location (managed path within the host web application, “personal” in my case). Have a look at the screenshot for all the other fields (that I have used in my case):







18. Now the only remaining thing to set up is the timer job for the activity feed. In Central Administration, at Monitoring, choose the “Review Job Definition“ button and under the Timer Jobs Section.

19. In the Job Definition Page, look for “User Profile Service Application – Activity Feed Job”, and set up the activity feed sync timer depending on your needs and Run the timer job and that's it!




20. Go to the site now (in my case - http://devsp2013:5000 ), and you will be notified of my site creation for yourself. Take care of your profile, follow people. Upload your private documents, share documents and follow documents. Enjoy being social!