I don’t normally do much with My Sites to be honest – usually I’m building applications, and they’re not usually in My Sites. One of our customers asked me ‘How do users navigate back to the Intranet?’ and I’ve got to admit, I was baffled.

Well, SharePoint’s My Sites have a site-collection setting for ‘Portal Site Collection’. This setting modifies the Global Breadcrumb, and inserts another link there – so you can have a link back to your site-collection.

There a number of issues with that, though…

• Each user’s My Site is an individual site collection, so this value has to be set for each site, rather than just once. That’s not a problem, though – this can be done…
• …by feature stapling, which will allow you to set the ‘Portal Site Collection for any new sites. If you have My Sites in existance, that’s not going to work.
• And anyway, what if you’ve got more than one site-collection to link a user back to?

Thus, I found myself asking my colleagues, and they’d an interesting suggestion – adding new tabs to the My Site as if for a Personalization site. Thus, I went to my Shared Service Provider:

And I configured Personalization Site Links:

I set up the link:

And to my surprise, although it wasn’t a link to Personalization site, it still gave me a tab – which worked!

This is particularly useful as I could have tabs to serveral different Site collections.