Updated: 2009-11-12
[This article is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases.]
The User Profile service stores information about users in a central location. Social computing features use this information to facilitate productive interactions which enable users to collaborate efficiently. In order to provision My Site Web sites, enable social computing features such as social tagging and newsfeeds, and create and distribute profiles across multiple sites and farms, you must enable the User Profile service.
In this article:
Uses and benefits of the User Profile service
The User Profile service is a shared service in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that provides a central location where service administrators configure and manage the following features:
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User profiles – contain detailed information about individuals in an organization. A user profile organizes and displays all of the properties related to each user together with social tags, documents and other items related to that user.
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Organization profiles – contain detailed information about an organization such as teams, divisions, and so on.
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Profile synchronization – provides a reliable way to synchronize user, group, and organization profile information that is stored in the SharePoint Server 2010 profile store with profile information that is stored in directory services across the enterprise.
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Audiences – enables organizations to target content to users based on their job or task, as defined by their membership in a SharePoint Server group or distribution list, by the organizational reporting structure, or by the public properties in their user profiles.
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My Site Host – a dedicated site for hosting My Site Web sites. A My Site Host is needed in order to deploy the social features of SharePoint Server.
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My Site Web site – a personal site that gives users in your organization a central location to manage and store documents, links, and colleagues.
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Social tags and notes – enables users to add social tags to documents, to other SharePoint Server items, and to other items, such as external Web pages and blog posts. Users can also leave impromptu notes on profile pages of a My Site Web site or any SharePoint Server page. Administrators can delete all tags for employees when they leave the company or remove a tag they do not want.
These features make it possible for users in an organization to share information and to stay informed about what is happening within the organization. Social tags, for example, enable users to tag and track the information they are most interested in. Users can be alerted when people they work with author new blog posts or when there is a change in organizational metadata. They can also see how people relate to organizations and how organizations relate to sites.
Like other shared services in SharePoint Server 2010, the User Profile service is easy to deploy and set up. Farm administrators can delegate the management of all or part of the features of the User Profile service to one or more service application administrators. For more information, see Assign or remove administrators to a service application (SharePoint Server 2010).
Architecture
When you create an instance of the User Profile service, SharePoint Server creates three databases for storing user profile information and associated data:
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a profile database - used to store user profile information.
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a synchronization database - used to store configuration and staging information for synchronizing profile data from external sources such as the Active Directory Directory Service (AD DS).
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a social tagging database - used to store social tags and notes created by users. Each social tag and note is associated with a profile ID.
Each of these databases can be accessed by SharePoint sites, My Site Web sites, and Team Sites by using the User Profile service. This provides a dynamic, personalized experience for the users in an organization.
The User Profile service can be managed by the appropriate business group and advertised in the corporate resource center. One administrator can manage all areas of the User Profile service. As an alternative, areas can be isolated and managed by different administrators who need not know about the existence of other areas of the service. For example, one administrator can manage My Site Web sites while a different administrator manages social tags and notes. The User Profile service can be restricted and available only to certain departments or sets of sites based on business need, security restrictions, and budgets.
Related services
The User Profile service relies on other shared services to implement the full range of social computing features in SharePoint Server. These related shared services include the following:
See Also