My Site’s personal sites allow users to store mysite data on the dedicated site collection, but what if you don’t want users to be able to store their personal data on there? There might be several reasons: you haven’t come up with governance around what content is to be placed there, how long is it kept and how much content are users allowed to store on each of their sites. Whatever the reason, you can disable the creation of user personal sites without impacting the rest of the SharePoint 2010 social functionality.
SharePoint My Sites are managed by User Profile Service Application (Central Admin -> Manage service applications -> [User Profile Service Application])
From there you have an option to Manage User Permissions. Once you open the management dialog, you can choose All Authenticated Users or specify explicit groups and chose whether those users can:
- Use Personal Features
- Create Personal Sites
- Use Social Features
Whichever you choose, keep in mind it may take a minute or so for those settings to propagate.
After the settings have propagated, users will not be able to see applicable user interface, in our case it’s a link to create their personal site (even if you’re farm admin etc).
Even if you manage to navigate to my site provisioning link directly (http://server/_layouts/MySite.aspx), you will get an error reporting that you have no permissions to create pages on this site.
This article was originally posted here, on the ShareMuch blog.