After having provided these
instructions to a few clients as part of broader SharePoint projects/strategies
I thought I could share a short how to article that outlines everything you
should need to know for locking down or deactivating SharePoint’s social
features effectively. Hopefully after you lock them down you will roll them out
in time so that your organization can realize the business benefit they provide
in a more controlled/planned manner.
What follows are the tasks that
could be executed after a SharePoint environment has been provisioned and
validated. These tasks are specifically designed to remove, hide, or disable
many of the social features from SharePoint 2010. Effectively if you follow all
of these features you will have a ‘non socially enabled’ SharePoint 2010
implementation.
Adjust
User Profile Service Application Permissions
What follows are the steps that will
be executed in order to ensure that certain social features are not available
to users until the organization is ready to roll them out.
- Go to Central Administration > Application
Management > Manage service applications > User profile service
application
- From the ribbon, Click “Manage User Permissions” under
People
- In the “Permissions for User Profile Service
Application” pop up, select a user group, e.g. All authenticated Users.
- Uncheck the Create Personal Site and Use Social
Features checkboxes.
- Click OK.
De-activate
Farm Level Feature: Social Tags and Note Board Ribbon Controls
In order to ensure that Social Tags
and Note Board Ribbon Controls are not available to users we will disable this
farm level feature.
- Go to Central Administration > System Settings >
Manage farm features
- De-activate Social Tags and Note Board Ribbon Controls.
Update
MySite Host Navigation
Additional steps must be taken to
remove the default links to different sections of a person’s profile page. To
reset these settings it will be necessary to re-create these links.
- Navigate to the MySite Host root Site Settings page.
- Select Quick Launch
- Remove The Following Links:
- Description: “Content” & URL:
“/personcontent.aspx”
- Description: “Tags and Notes” & URL:
“/_layouts/thoughts.aspx”
- Description: “Colleagues” & URL:
“/_layouts/MyContactLinks.aspx”
- Description: “Memberships” & URL:
“/_layouts/MyMemberships.aspx”
- Optional: Any additional Libraries/Lists references.
Authors Note: Remember that by default the MySites have no way back to
your Intranet or Portal. Make sure you have updated the MasterPage or
navigation settings as needed to allow users to seamlessly move from the
MySites/Profile pages to other key SharePoint systems.
Modify
User Profile Properties
There are specific user profile
properties that will be adjusted from SharePoint’s default settings.
- Go to Central Administration > Application
Management > Manage service applications > User profile service
application
- Select Manage User Properties
- Update Properties According To Excel Sheet
- The Excel Sheet will highlight ‘changes’ in red. So
when planning profile properties identify the changes you want/need and
then keep a record of the changes in the Excel sheet itself in case you
ever need to re-provision or re-create the environment.
- This is also extremely helpful when planning new
property additions, or when working with external parties that need this
data.
Change
Default Page of MySite
Since your organization may not be
using the Feeds or Activity features of SharePoint 2010 in phase 1 it makes
sense to change the default page for MySite/Profiles to reference the profile
page instead.
To change the default home page of
the MySite Host Site Collection open the site collection in SharePoint Designer
(you need to be a site collection owner of the my site host). After the site
collection has been opened click on all files on the left hand side.
In the right main area you should
see a bunch of items. One of these items will be default.aspx which is the
current default page. There is also a person.aspx which is our desired default
page. Select person.aspx and then in the ribbon click “set as home page”.
Modify
Display of Status Message
Since the status message will give
an error (due to it being disabled in the user properties) we need to load
SharePoint Designer and edit the person.aspx page that we set as the default
page.
To do this go back to SharePoint
Designer and click the hyperlink for person.aspx this time and it will open in
edit mode. Since we want to change settings set in the site definition we need
to edit in Advanced Mode. To do this select Advanced Mode from the ribbon so
that the page loads in advanced editing mode.
Once that is done the page will
refresh and all of the code is now editable. Find the following div tag
(surrounding StatusNotesControl) and hide it (using style=”display:none”) or
comment it out.
Save your changes.
Close SharePoint Designer and go to
your user profile. The Status Message control is not displayed.
To
Remove Add As Colleague Button
The following can be added to the
MySite Masterpage or appropriate CSS file to hide the ‘Add As Colleague’
button.
To
Hide Social Webparts
There are a 3 social webparts that
should be hidden by editing the person.aspx page in SharePoint.
- Navigate to a user profile.
- Click Site Actions > Edit Page.
- Click on the Ask Me About Webpart Header
- In The Ribbon Select Web Part Properties
- Expand Layout Section
- Check Hidden
- Click OK
- Click on the Recent Activities Webpart Header
- In The Ribbon Select Web Part Properties
- Expand Layout Section
- Check Hidden
- Click OK
- Click on the Note Board Webpart Header
- In The Ribbon Select Web Part Properties
- Expand Layout Section
- Check Hidden
- Click OK