The idea of memberships is something new that was added to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
("MOSS"). In MOSS, when a new site is created, by default three (3) groups are added: Visitors, Members, and Owners. To start seeing the benefits of the membership functionality a few things need
to happen: a) a user needs to be part of the Members group, b) the user needs to have their My Site
created and defined as their default My Site, and c) you need to have a search crawl scheduled defined.
What does membership do?
One shortcoming of the previous version of SharePoint was the ability to easily navigate to the many
sites you may be participating in. When it came to your browser experience, you either had to rely on
your memory to type in the full URL of the site, or use browser bookmarking. When it came to the
Office experience, it was easier to initiate the documents from SharePoint and store them back.
However, it was difficult to get to a site if you were already in Office (You basically had to know the
URL).
For the average non-technical user, this was a challenge and made it difficult and frustrating to work in
SharePoint.
With the introduction of memberships with MOSS and the membership awareness of Office 2007, it
makes it extremely easy for end-users to get to the SharePoint sites they are members of. On a daily
basis, the new sites are propagated to their desktops the first time they run an Office application.
A new quick link appears in the Office 2007 file dialog box called My SharePoint Sites that will
display all the sites that user is a member of and allow them to quickly access that information.
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Not only do they get easy access from Office, the same membership information is displayed in the top
navigation bar from the My Links menu that is displayed across the top of all SharePoint sites in the
farm.
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Profile Synchronization
The two SharePoint Timer Jobs that update membership information are:
Profile Synchronization
Quick Profile Synchronization
By default the Profile Synchronization runs once ever hour and the Quick Profile Synchronization runs
every minute.
The stsadm operation called sync can be used to adjust these intervals. The synctiming argument
controls the Profile Synchronization timer job and the sweepingsync argument controls the Quick
Profile Synchronization timer job.
How do I see user memberships?
Ocassionally you may need to get a list of site a particular user is a member of. There is no way out of
the box to do this, however, running the following SQL you can query in the Shared Services Provider
("SSP") database you can get a users My Links and Membership information.
declare @RecordId int
select @RecordId = RecordId
from dbo.UserProfile_Full
where PreferredName = 'Doe, John'
exec dbo.QuickLinksRetrieveAllItems @RecordId,@ViewerItemSecurity=31,@RequestedItemSecurity=16
