Using a taxonomy for User Profile options

Having been involved in a project that was all about leveraging User Profiles for employee’s to discover each others skills and strengths I needed to look into User Profile Properties pretty deeply.

Even though this implementation was all out of the box with no real custom coding effort there is a lot that you can do with user profiles. One common request is the ability to define a taxonomy for user profile options.

By default all the user profile options are taken from the entire terms store – both from Term Sets and from Keywords.

This can make things really confusing for end users and it also doesn’t allow the enterprise to control content. However we can assign a term set to a user profile so that users can only choose from a specified term set. This is great because now the organization can define a taxonomy, for say ask me about or skills, and have users choose from this list. Makes things a lot easier and much more powerful for users.

To do this first you need a Term Set defined, so I have a created a Term Set called Ask Me About with some options:

Now go into the User Profile Application Service administration page, click on Manager User Properties and then click on the property you wish to edit. In out case we will use the ‘Ask Me About’ property.

Now if you look at the Property Settings there is a list box to Pick a Term Set for this Property. We will choose our Ask Me About Term Set for this:

Now after doing this you might have to perform an IIS Reset (horrible I know) but I think that if you run the Taxonomy Scheduler job that should push the changes through. However most of the time this seems to work straight away (good old SharePoint!)

Now if we look at the Ask Me About section we can see that we can only choose items from our Term Set. This visual indicator to users is the taxonomy tag next to the actual profile:

I highly recommend that as part of a My Site implementation that you take some time in determining exactly what the taxonomy should be. It will help finability, discovery and the information architecture of your implementation immensely!

Tags: managed metadata, MySite, terms

Category: How To