Linking from My Sites in Office 365

One of the greatest features of SharePoint 2010, especially on Office 365, is ‘My Sites’ (sorry, those on Office 365 P plans don’t get these, another reason not to have a P plan in my books). What ‘My Sites’ basically provides is a ‘home’ area in SharePoint for users that they can store information about themselves, their job experience and files in their own SharePoint site. Imagine it a bit like a combination of Linkedin and SkyDrive but a whole lot better.

You get to your ‘My Site’ by generally going to the top left of your SharePoint site and selecting My Site from the pull down menu like so:

That’ll take you to a screen that looks like this:

From here you can get to your own SharePoint site via ‘My Content’ and to your Linkedin style information via ‘My Profile’. But hang on, how do I get back to my original SharePoint site without having to the back button in the browser? Bottom line is that there is no default link to take you back, which is frustrating once you have gone a few screen into your ‘My Site’.

The reason there is no default link is you can have access to many different SharePoint sites but you only have one ‘My Site’ per user. But your are in luck! There is a way to add a link at the top of the screen back to any URL you want. To do this you’ll need to login to your Office 365 portal as an administrator and then select Manage from under the SharePoint Heading.

Then select Manage Site collections from the next menu.

Then select User Profiles from the menu on the left.

Now on the right, under the My Site Settings section select Configure Personalization Site.

Now select the New Link option and enter in address of the SharePoint site you want to return to as well as an owner.

Now when you go to ‘My Site’ you’ll see the link you just created and you use that to navigate back to your SharePoint site. In this case I created a link called Intranet to the right of ‘My Profile’.