Forum Discussion

CarstenB's avatar
CarstenB
Iron Contributor
Nov 29, 2017
Solved

Autofollow people policy in UPS 2016 not available anymore?

Hi all,

 

when setting up the MySites in a SharePoint 2016 on-prem environment, I am missing the user policy settings of the whole Privacy section in the User Profile Service Application. Due to company restrictions this server should not automatically create follows to team members when a MySite is provisioned (policy Auto-follow people from team, see here). Obviously it is possible in 2013 to set this here, so maybe I am missing some feature dependencies. Some other explanation could be that everything regarding this was moved to PowerShell, but I am not able to find this nor any 2016-specific hint in the net.

 

Anyone of you also stumbled upon this and can give me some advice?

 

Thanks,

Carsten

sharepoint server
  • CarstenB's avatar
    CarstenB
    Dec 13, 2017

    Just wanted to share the solution here. It seems that the behaviour of SharePoint to suddenly auto-follow was just caused by a fix in the July CU. Until then, the AD sync did not fill the Reports To field in the profile correctly, thus leaving any organizational structure blank with no team whatsoever. When we updated with the latest feature pack, the fields have seem to be updated then, allowing auto-follow to kick in for newly created MySites.

     

    The policy to steer this behaviour is still there, for some reason it just vanished from the policy UI in the UPS. When I looked at the PowerShell objects, I had it right before my nose..

     

    $site = Get-SPSite "CentralAdminURL"   
$serviceContext = Get-SPServiceContext $site
$profileManager = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($serviceContext)
$policy =  $profileManager.GetPrivacyPolicy().GetAllItems() | ? {$_.DisplayName -like "*auto-follow*"}
$policy.PrivacyPolicy = [Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.PrivacyPolicy]::Disabled
$policy.Commit()

    I wrote a bit more in German on this topic over there: http://spmoshpit.de/2017/12/auto-follow-von-teammitgliedern-in-sharepoint-2016-verhindern/

     

  • CarstenB's avatar
    CarstenB
    Iron Contributor
    Dec 13, 2017

    Just wanted to share the solution here. It seems that the behaviour of SharePoint to suddenly auto-follow was just caused by a fix in the July CU. Until then, the AD sync did not fill the Reports To field in the profile correctly, thus leaving any organizational structure blank with no team whatsoever. When we updated with the latest feature pack, the fields have seem to be updated then, allowing auto-follow to kick in for newly created MySites.

     

    The policy to steer this behaviour is still there, for some reason it just vanished from the policy UI in the UPS. When I looked at the PowerShell objects, I had it right before my nose..

     

    $site = Get-SPSite "CentralAdminURL"   
$serviceContext = Get-SPServiceContext $site
$profileManager = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($serviceContext)
$policy =  $profileManager.GetPrivacyPolicy().GetAllItems() | ? {$_.DisplayName -like "*auto-follow*"}
$policy.PrivacyPolicy = [Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.PrivacyPolicy]::Disabled
$policy.Commit()

    I wrote a bit more in German on this topic over there: http://spmoshpit.de/2017/12/auto-follow-von-teammitgliedern-in-sharepoint-2016-verhindern/

     

Resources