I have 4 posts in draft and continue to run out of time to complete them, so to combat that situation I am going to do a very quick post today.
We have My Sites enabled in our SharePoint 2007 intranet. We also have a number of remote employees who rarely login to the network and have never gone to their My Site. Internally, the My Sites are often used to find reporting relationships, colleagues and contact information. In our environment “colleagues” are primarily co-workers in the same department…with exceptions for cross-department teams. Employees can easily add or remove colleagues in their My Site Profile page.
HR came to me today because one person changed roles and the profile page shows colleagues for this person that are no longer considered colleagues. The person is remote, has not gone to My Sites and will likely not do so, possibly ever. HR wants to know if I can update the colleagues displayed for this person.
As a SharePoint Administrator, I cannot manage a My Site that the user has not ‘created’ . That is, when anyone clicks on the name of a valid user they are taken to a My Site page…however if the user hasn’t created their My Site yet, this page is a profile page that SharePoint generates and it is NOT a site. So I can’t edit the site.
After some digging around I found the answer. There is no UI or SSP menu that will allow you to do this in 2007…it requires coding a tiny application that uses the UserProfileService web service. The forum article that really answered this question can be found on TechNet, and sample code doing this is available on MSDN. I hope this helps shorten someone’s research effort that may have a similar situation arise.
Tony Rockwell - Info 