in

SharePoint Blogs

The Best Place for SharePoint-related Blogs

Dave Wollerman's SharePoint Blog

I use this blog to share information with the community plus also as a repository for reference material on unique situations that I have come across.

View Dave Wollerman's profile on LinkedIn      Sogeti Logo

My Sites and Memberships

Memberships located in a users personal site are managed for the user automatically by 2 timer jobs that run.

Profile Synchronization (default interval is every 1 hour)
Quick Profile Synchronization (default interval is every 5 minutes)

These schedules can be changed by running the following stsadm command with the "-SyncTiming" (profile sync) and the "-SweepTiming" (quick profile sync) parameters.

stsadm -o sync
           {-ExcludeWebApps <web applications> |
            -SyncTiming <schedule(M/H/D:value)> |
            -SweepTiming <schedule(M/H/D:value)> |
            -ListOldDatabases <days> |
            -DeleteOldDatabases <days>}

These timer jobs synchronize user information tables in every site collections with any updated profile information in the user profile database. They also identify whats sites the user is a member of and store that information for the user in the memberships list on the users personal site.

Being a member of the site was a little vague as to how does sharepoint know. Do I just need to be assigned permissions to the site, be in a special group? The answer is that by default when a site collection is created there is a members sharepoint group created too. This group is assigned as the "members of this site" group. You can create a custom sharepoint group and assign the custom sharepoint group to be the "members of this site" group. This can be done from the people and groups settings, viewing the members of any sharepoint group and selecting "Settings -> Set Up Groups" option in the toolbar.

Also, even though sharepoint groups are managed at the site collection level, each site in the site collection can identify the group that will be considered "members of this site" group. So when the timer job checks out the groups for memberships it will look at each site in the farm to determine the sharepoint group to use and then update each users membership with that information.

Keep in mind that if the user is also using Office 2007 their memberships show up as "My SharePoint Sites" in the open and save dialogs. From what I am lead to understand is the information that renders under this section of your office client application is updated upon the first time an office application is started for the day.

This information also shows up in the users "My Links - My SharePoint Sites" dropdown in the top right of a sharepoint site.

This is a MOSS only feature and is available with MOSS Standard and Enterprise editions.

Published Feb 29 2008, 08:30 AM by dwollerman
Filed under: , , ,

Comments

 

Tom C said:

What do I do if I want more than one group to be listed in a user's "My SharePoint Groups" under the "My Links" menu?

I have several sites where different SharePoint groups have different access rights depending on their association.  All memebers of all groups are "members" of the site but the permissions delineate what areas they have access to?

There's got to be a way to force multiple sites to have whatever flag "Member of this Site" sets.

Thanks for the blog post.  This is the most information I've been able to find out about how the membership lists are created to date.

March 13, 2008 11:24 AM
 

dwollerman said:

Yes, I completely understand your concern. I agree to a point it would be nice if it just showed which sites you have general access to.

There can only be one sharepoint group assigned to be the "members of this site" designator. From what I am aware of there is no other way to allow multiple sharepoint groups to have this designation.

The meaning of this setting though is to promote your working areas, not your general viewing access. The "Member of this site" setting is there to specifiy which sharepoint group contains the users who will be contributing to this site.

It is designed like this because the list of sites in your my links gives you direct acces to these editable areas through office 2007 applications. Plus they give you a starting point from your my site. They are meant to be an point to easily access these areas for the member to save or edit content quickly without having to know the url, or have to navigate through the farm to find the content first.

March 13, 2008 12:22 PM
 

Tom C said:

Thank you for the information.  A great feature would be to put a checkbox to say "Crawl this group for My SharePoint Sites".

Additionally, this would be less of an issue if groups could be part of other groups (but I can see where this would cause things to blowup).

Finally, I see that this is more of an edge issue since I'm administering my MOSS implemenation at a college where a lot of the access controls come from within a site's own groups verus active directory security groups in tightly controlled enterprise.

Is there any kind of web part that would show simply all sites that someone has general access to?

March 13, 2008 1:27 PM
 

dwollerman said:

If you are using MOSS, then the easiest out of the box way to do this is Search. You can use the search core results web part with a fixed query looking at the following....

contentclass:sts_site contentclass:sts_web

this will pull back all site collections and sub webs the user has access to. Since it is search, the results are security trimmed. You can add in the search paging web part also.

March 13, 2008 1:36 PM
 

Matthew said:

Dave, thanks for the post. Can you:

1. Elaborate on how you would change the group used for the sync.

2. Clarify if this can be done for Webs (or is it just site collections)

3. Expand on what would cause it to break? (So often this feature just does not work.)

Thanks

June 7, 2008 7:53 AM
 

dwollerman said:

Matthew,

Sorry for the delay, I have been real busy as of late... :)

1. How to change the group...

I explain it in the post, but I will give step by step here...

- Goto the "People and Groups" area

- Click on the "Groups" heading in the quick launch

- Click on the "Settings -> Set Up Groups" in the list toolbar

- Change the "Members of this Site" group

- Click "Ok"

2.Can this be done for webs....

Yes, you can specify a custom "Members of this site" group for webs, no matter if they are using unique or inherited permisisons

3. What would cause breaks...

The process runs once every 24 hours and works with the updates from the user profile sync. You can change the schedule to run in a smaller interval by using the STSADM -o sync command.

I am not sure of all the exact scenarios that would cause it to break, alot of times it is working fine, but you can't see it because of the timing of the updates. Also have to make sure that there are no errors in the user profile import or with the WSS timer service. There is a timer job that runs the sync and if the timer service is causing errors (which sometimes it does) it can cause issues with the timer jobs.

June 19, 2008 7:26 AM

Leave a Comment

(required )  
(optional )
(required )  
Add
Need SharePoint Training? Attend a SharePoint Bootcamp!
Posts (c) their respective authors. Everything else (c) 2007 SharePoint Experts