Magically Appearing Colleagues in SharePoint 2010

I had a client asking me why there have been colleagues been added to some user profiles when the users swear that they did not add these colleagues.

Turns out that this is a pretty common problem and it took a while to figure out however this thread on the MSDN forum seems to have answered the question so I quote:

SharePoint by default adds a users manager, reports and peers as colleagues for the user. Every time an incremental AD sync runs, SharePoint checks if there is any new person in this set, and adds those as colleagues.

This behavior is consistent with SharePoint 2007, even then this set of people were automatically added as colleagues and thereby their events would show up on colleague tracker web part in 2007.

This is essentially to bootstrap social networks/newsfeeds. Unless a user sees active newsfeeds, they won’t add more people and this provides a way to get over that issue.

If you want to turn off this behavior, you can go to Policy Settings in User Profile Application Management and turn off “Automatic colleague addition”.

So basically if you change manager, reports or peers SharePoint will then add these in automatically for you. In order to turn this off as stated go to your User Profile Application, click on ‘Manage Policies’:

Select the ‘Auto Population of Colleagues from organizations’ and select ‘Edit Policy’

Choose the Policy Setting to Disabled and this will solve the issue:

Cheers!

Tags: colleagues, social, user profiles

Category: General