I came across an interesting problem today. I’m building a demo, and I wanted to use personalization site to ‘push’ a dashboard page to a certain set of users. I created a Personalization site (using the Personalization Site tempate), and then went to my SSP to set up a Personalization Link to it:

I then logged in as a user who belongs to the audience it was configured to show for:

Everything looked good – I had my ICT link that I’d just set up, so the audience was working correctly. However, when I clicked on it, things didn’t work so well…

Yup, two tabs were being shown. One was my Personalization Site link that I’d configured in the SSP, and the other was the navigation tab for the site itself. I only noticed ‘cos the name on the tab I’d added in the SSP (ICT) and the name of the site (ICT Dashboard) were different. Also, the Site’s own tab gave me the ‘Pin/Unpin Site’ option.

It’s a bit of a digression, but what’s the pin/unpin site stuff about then? Well, you don’t have to push personalization site links out to users (via the SSP). Instead, users can go to a personalization site and choose to add it to their My Site tabs; this is ‘pinning’ the site. After they’ve done this, they can remove the link (‘unpinning’).

However, that’s not what I wanted – I want the ICT audience to always have that link, and I don’t want another tab, or any pin/unpin options. So how do I get rid of that? There must be a way; it’s obvious that if I’m pushing a personalization site to a bunch of users that they shouldn’t get those options.

After much head scratching, I figured it out. My personalization site link in the SSP only pointed to the site, not to the actual page. I changed it to point to the page (default.aspx).

When I then navigated via that tab, I was shown only one tab – with no pin/unpin options:

Hurrah! What I think happens, then, is that the top navigation compares the URL of the current page in the personalization site with the URLs for the tabs in the user’s My Site. If none of them exactly match, then it adds a tab for the site itself, including the pin/unpin menu. Although my personalization site’s url did resolve to the same page (default.aspx) the URLs were not the same – and hence I was getting two tabs!