Create And Configure My Site For SharePoint Server 2016

Priyaranjan K S
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The SharePoint Team at Microsoft defines My Site as a personal site that gives you a central location to manage and store your documents, content, links, and contacts. It serves as a point of contact for other users in your organization to find information about you and your skills and interests. By default, My Site is not configured in the SharePoint Farm. My Site ideally is a separate Site Collection that is created using the My Site Host template. In this article, we will see how to configure My Site for SharePoint Server 2016.

To test if My Site has been configured, we can go to ‘About Me’ option at the top right corner of the SharePoint Site.

If it has been configured, we will get the below personalized page.

If My Site is not yet configured, we will get the below exception.

Getting Started with My Site Configuration

As part of configuring My Site, we have to ensure that the below pieces are in place:

User Profile Service Application
My Site Host Site Collection
My Site Managed Path
Self Service Site Creation(optional)

User Profile Service Application

My Site is dependent on User Profile Service Application so before configuring My Site, we have to ensure that the User Profile Service Application has to be created. You can find the steps required to configure User Profile Service Application from here.

Create My Site Host

My Sites are personalized sites and they will reside ideally in a separate site collection which is created based on the My Site Host template. We can create it by going to Application Management -> Create Site Collections.

In the Site Collection creation page, specify the My Site Collection Name, URL; and the template used will be the My Site Host template under the Enterprise section.

Once created, we will have the My Site Collection. Copy the URL as we will be needing it going ahead.

Create My Site Managed Path

We will need to create a Managed Path for the My Site. Let’s use the path “/sites/MySite/Personal” for this purpose. If it is not created already, we can create it going to the Central Administration ->Manage Web Applications -> Managed Paths

In the new Managed Path creation page, add the intended Managed path(“/sites/MySite/Personal”). Specify the type as Wildcard Inclusion and click on OK.

Configure My Site

Once we have created the User Profile Service Application, My Site Host Site Collection, and the Managed Path, we can go ahead and configure My Site. In order to do that, go to User Profile Service Application from Application Management -> Manage Service Applications .

It will open up the User Profile Service Application page. From there, select ‘Setup My Sites’.

In the My Site Host section, specify the Site Collection URL for the My Site Host we had created earlier.

Under Personal Site Location, specify the Managed Path for the My Site that we had created earlier.

This completes the configuration of My Site for the SharePoint Farm.

Configure Self Service Site Creation

Once My Site has been configured, we can add Self Service Creation capability to My Sites. Ideally, there are two locations from which we can create site collections from UI.

Farm Administrators can create it from the Central Administration. This provides tight control as only Farm Administrator has the privilege to create site collections.
We can also enable Self Service Site Creation, which allows users with the necessary rights to create site collections under predefined paths from their My Sites.

So, one added benefit of My Site is that it enables users to create Site Collections from the My Site Page. We can enable it from Manage Web Applications -> Self Service Site Creation.