Create User Profile Service application in SharePoint 2010

The User Profile service application stores information about users in a central location. It maintains User Profiles for each User with detailed information maintained as User Properties. These User Profiles will be and synchronized with the Active Directory or with your Custom DB based on the configuration.  These Information will be useful for provisioning My Sites, enable social computing features such as social tagging and newsfeeds, and create and distribute profiles across multiple sites and farms, you must enable the User Profile service application.

Follow below steps to Create User Profile Service application.

1.       Navigate to Central Administration à Application Management à Manage Service Applications.

2.       Select New from the Ribbon and click on User Profile Service Application from the dropdown.

Note: Make Sure that “SharePoint Web Services root” application pool is running in IIS.

Fill-in the required information like Service application Name, application pool details and the Application pool account details.

(Note: It’s better to have separate account for this configuration, to track down the issues).

The Application Pool account which configure here must have the following privileges.

·         Farm Administrator

·         Local Administrator in the server where SharePoint is running as application server.

·         Log on locally policy in the server where SharePoint is running as application server.

Choose domain and username in site naming format if your application have more than one domain to avoid the Naming conflicts.

3.       SharePoint creates 3 different databases for storing the User Profile Information.

·         Profile database – Stores all the User Profile Properties.

·         Synchronization database – Stores all the configuration information for synchronizing profile data from external sources such as the Active Directory or BDC.

·         Social tagging database - Stores social tags and notes created by users. Each social tag and note is mapped with a tag owner.

4.       Once the User Profile Service application is created. We need to make sure the below Services are running in the server.

·         User Profile Service

·         User Profile Synchronization service 

5.       To check the above, again Navigate to Central Administration à Application Management à Manage Services on Server.

6.       Once the Services are the started in the Server, now we need to Create the Service Connections for Synchronizing the User Profiles from our Source like Active Directory.

7.       To Create a new Connection. Navigate to  Central Administration à Application Management à Manage Service applications and click on the newly created the Service application.

8.       Click on Configure Synchronization Connections link under Synchronization section. 

9.       Now Click on the Create New Connection link to create the connections.

 Fill-in all the required details

·         Connection Name: ADConnection

·         Forest Name: ad.local

·         Account Name: domainname\accname 

Specify the Provider name if you want to synchronize from any other source.

10.   Once done with creating the Synchronize Connections, now we are good to go to Start Full Synchronization. Select Start Full Synchronization link under Synchronization Section.

 

You can check the Profile Synchronization status in the Right section, where you get the more details about the User Profiles.

11.   Now configure the Incremental Synchronization which will make sure your User Profiles are up-to-date with Active Directory. Click on Configure Synchronization timer job link under Synchronization Section to change the occurrence of the Timer Job.