Simple Updates to Make Your MySite More Useful

chrishe — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:56:00 GMT

The SharePoint Server MySite page is intended to be the default landing place for a user to see information that is useful to them. Unfortunately, the unmodified, out-of-box MySite page leaves some room for improvement to make it a more useful experience and a site that a user would want to have as their default home page. While there are updates using customization that can increase the usefulness of the page, here are some simple changes that can also update the MySite but don't require any custom code or even SharePoint Designer.

Change the color theme for your MySite - under the Site Actions tab -> Site Settings -> Site Theme. (I like the Classic theme which has a nice yellow gradient and is a bit different from the default blue one but not too different).
Remove web parts you won't use - you can easily click on the right corner arrow drop down and select Close for any web parts you won't use (such as the Get Started with My Site info web part)
Edit Your Profile - adding profile information takes only a couple of minutes to complete but it will increase the useful of the site for you by making it more informative to others that view your profile
My Links and the My Links web part - the My Links feature is on the top navigation menu and is another way to bookmark URLs on the SharePoint Server farm and if you make use of this feature you should add the web part which is already on your My Site Public Profile page
Add Outlook Web Access web parts - My Calendar web part is added by default but I find it useful to have the My Contacts and My Inbox added as well
Add the Web Capture web part - using the web capture web part is a very easy way to synchronize data between the web part and some other content
Add RSS Viewer web part - one of the cooler web parts are the RSS Viewer web parts that allow you to pull in all sorts of data. Here are some examples of RSS feed URLs that I have:

Stock symbol RSS feed: http://tc.dk/stock.php?symbols=msft
MSNBC.com top headlines: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032091/device/rss/
Daily Dilbert: http://feeds.feedburner.com/tapestrydilbert

Increasing the frequency of the Profile and Membership Sync timer jobs

chrishe — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:05:00 GMT

One of the new features in MOSS 2007 is the ability to synchronize WSS user data to SharePoint Server. One of the areas where this is synchronization is displayed is within the MySite SharePoint Sites web part which will display all sites that the user is a member of.

The default frequency of the synchronization job is every 1 hour but you can increase the frequency by running this STSADM.exe command:

stsadm.exe -o sync -synctiming M:15

which will result in the sync jobs occurring every 15 minutes.

Chris Hernandez's Blog : MySite

Simple Updates to Make Your MySite More Useful

Increasing the frequency of the Profile and Membership Sync timer jobs