When your MySite doesn't recognize you

So consider the following scenario:

Users log in to their MySites and are able to see their Profile and Newsfeed.  However, whenever they click on their Tasks link, they get redirected back to their Newsfeed.  It's almost as though SharePoint is treating them as a stranger to their own MySite.

We spun several hours on this problem, and I'm not sure our scenario fits for everyone.

The cause of our problem was we had migrated many thousands of MySites from one farm to a new farm.  We did this as part of a large scale farm upgrade.  When we did that, we did not backup and restore the User Profile databases.

Both farms were in the same domain, same usernames in Active Directory.  However, the rub came in the mismatch between the User Profile databases and the MySite content databases.

When a User Profile is imported from Active Directory, SharePoint assigns a GUID to that Profile and stores it in the User Profile database.  It then assigns that GUID to the MySite (in the MySites Property Bag) when the user first creates their MySite.

In our case, since the MySites were attached already, the creation action never fired.  And since the Profile GUID in the MySite Property Bag was different than the GUID in the Profile Database, when the user tried to click on their Tasks list, SharePoint didn't recognize them.

But there's a fix.  You can do this on a multiple site basis, or on an individual MySite basis.  The Powershell is:



$Web = Get-SPWeb http://[MySiteURL]/personal/[UserID]
$Web.SetProperty("urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:userprofile_guid", "[NewGUID]")
$Web.Update()
 
You can get the NewGUID by querying UserProfileManager in PowerShell or by going to User Profile Service Application -> Manage User Profiles -> Find the user profile that is having issues -> Edit User Profile  

Then get the GUID out of the URL ProfAdminEdit.aspx?guid=[NewGUID] 

The credit for this one goes to Matt Coleman and Matt Royer - two of the guys on our team that dug pretty deep on this problem.  Hopefully it helps someone else out there.