My Sites in SharePoint Server 2013
A My Site is a personal site for given users that allows them to display information such as their profile and relevant skillsets, as well as information regarding sites they are interested in and a newsfeed of recent activities. This also provides the users with access to their OneDrive, as well as their blog, aggregated list of tasks, and other personal information.
A user’s My Site consists of two site collections: the SharePoint 2013 farm’s My Site host site collection and the user’s individual site collection. When a My Site host site collection is created and users then create their individual site collections, this data is maintained in one or more content databases that are associated with the web application that you specify to host My Sites. It is possible to add content databases to this web application if multiple databases are required for storage due to size and other considerations are necessary. Also, the My Site host site collection and the related configuration that enables and creates individual My Sites site collections must be enabled before users can create My Sites.
Ensuring Best Practices My Site Architectural Configuration
SharePoint Server 2013’s My Sites, as shown in Figure 1, do have core architectural and configuration requirements or prerequisites that must be put in place to ensure that all My SharePoint Server 2013’s managed metadata service application enables web applications to store and access keywords from a managed metadata term database.
These features are required for My Sites users to specify keywords as their areas of expertise in the Ask Me About section, as well as to utilize the new hashtag feature in Posts and Newsfeeds, and for social tagging by using the “Tags and Notes” feature within My Site.
The managed metadata service application must be configured as the default keyword term store for the web application. I would also recommend for any SharePoint 2013 implementation that the SharePoint Server Search service application be enabled, but in terms of My Sites it is absolutely a requirement. This enables users to search from within their My Sites for people in the organization based on names or areas of expertise, which I believe is one of the most popular features of My Sites. This also enables users’ search results to access the hashtags in microblog posts.