My Site Introduction My Site is a component of the portal that is available to all NB educators. It is a personalized site that provides all users with the following features: A place to save and share work A way to find and connect with users A way to customize and collaborate with others Setting-Up Your Own Personal My Site Space When you first click My Site on the upper right-hand corner of the horizontal navigation bar in the portal site, the SharePoint Portal Server will create your personal site for you. Navigating in My Site Once your personal site is created, you can view it anytime by clicking My Site on the navigation bar of the portal site. You can also choose to login directly to your personal My Site by entering the URL https://portal.nbed.nb.ca/mysite/default.aspx and you will be prompted for the same your login information (user name and password) but instead of entering the portal homepage you will enter your personal My Site space. If at anytime you wish to leave My Site and return to the portal, click on Up To Portal on the Horizontal Navigation Bar in the top right hand corner. If you are not on your personal My Site, log in to the portal and click on My Site in the upper right hand side of the horizontal navigation bar. Keep this window open so that you can follow along with the activities in this unit. Private and Public Views When you first enter your My Site, you will be in the Private View. This area of My Site is your private view and contains personal information that only you can see. Your private view also contains content targeted to you based upon your membership in a particular audience: Educators, Department, or Government of New Brunswick. As a teacher, your Private View will include the following components (webparts): My Calendar, News for You, Links for You, My Links Summary, and My Alerts Summary. You can also organize and access your documents, view and manage your alerts and alert results, and link to other educators and information.
There is also a Public View of your My Site, which is the view all other NB educators will see when they visit your site. Your public view includes the following components (webparts): Personal Profile, Shared Links, Recent Documents, Shared Lists, Shared Pages and Shared Workspace Sites. The private view is shown by default when you first enter your personal site. To switch to the public view, click Public in the Select View section of the action pane in left hand side of the Quick Launch Navigator Bar. Editing Your Profile You will probably want to modify your personal profile to make it more useful to other users. To change your profile, click on Edit Profile which is located on the left side Quick Launch Navigation Bar under Actions. Add some information about yourself that will appear in the Public View of your site, which all portal users can access by searching your name. For this activity, add a school Fax number and a few sentences about yourself. When you are finished editing your profile, click on Save and Close. This will return you to the Private View of your personal My Site. The Public View Next, let see how the changes you made to your My Site will appear to others. Click on Public located under Select View on the left side Quick Launch Navigation Bar. The information on this page shown in the upper red rectangle is generated from the information your school district has on file in the active directory. To make changes to
this information, teachers must contact the help desk at 1-888-636-3131 and request a change in information since changes are made at the School District level by IS Managers. The areas of the personal profile marked by the red arrows represent information you can change when you select Edit Profile. This additional information is optional and you can determine what to include. The information on this page is from your personal site, search results and the directory service. As the owner of the site, you have the ability to see this information, as well as your private documents and lists. Other than your personal profile, another teacher CAN ONLY view the information and documents on your public site if you have granted them permission to do so. NOTE: It is important to remember that while you, the site owner, can see all the files displayed under Recent Documents, other teachers will not unless you have given them access or placed the documents in a shared folder. Finding Other Educators' Public View Sites Just as you can share information with other people in your school, district or the Department of Education through the public view of your personal site, you can also find and connect with other people through the public views of their personal sites. The best way to find other users is to use the search function at the portal level. Simply type the person's name into the field in the top-right corner of the page, select People from the pull-down menu and click on the green arrow. When a user name appears in Search Results, you can click on the name which is hyperlinked to the public view of their My Site. Everything that that person chooses to share is available for you to see. You can see a person's shared links to sites, people,
and documents that might help you get your work done. You can also see what information you have in common. This will help for collaboration purposes. If the teacher you are searching for actively uses the portal, there may be a lot of search results to pick from. You can narrow these search results by choosing from the selection located under Select View in the left side Quick Launch Navigator Bar. Take a few minutes and search for three New Brunswick educators using the search box. When you locate their name, click on the hyperlink to visit their Public Profile. Adding URL Links to My Site You may wish to save web links that you frequently use on your My Site. These links can even be sections of the portal you frequently access, like the subjects you teach or your email. The top link library entitled Links for You is managed by the portal administrator and will be used to share important and pertinent education links. You will use the second link library entitled My Links Summary. To add a URL, simply click on Add new link. The Add Link dialogue box will open. Fill in the text fields with the appropriate link information. Note that Title and Address are required fields. In the example shown, the box Share on public view of My Site is checked off. This means that the URL will be available to anyone who visits the user s site. When finished, click on OK.
Back on the My Site page, there is now a group called General and a link to Environment Canada Weather Office. Follow these steps and add a link to a web site you access frequently to your My Site. Managing and Organizing Your Links If you have a lot of links in your My Links Summary, then you will probably want to organize your links in groups. To do this, you will need to create the groups. When you click on Add Link in the dialogue box, you will see the option of creating a new group. When you click on this button, you will be prompted to name the group. In this case, we are creating a group called Search Engines. You will see now that there are separate groups in the links summary. By clicking on the Manage Links button, you can edit or delete the links you have added.
To select Edit or Delete, hold your mouse over the link name and a box will appear around the title. Now right click and drag down to Edit. This will reopen the original dialogue box. You can now change the grouping, the title and whether or not the link is shared. Add two links to your My Links Summary. Put each link in a new group. When you are finished, edit one of the links by changing the title and group. Storage Spaces in My Site In your personal My Site, you have and can create a variety of collaborative and private storage spaces, including document libraries, picture libraries, lists, discussion boards, surveys, sites, document workspaces, and meeting workspaces. When you first access My Site, you will already have a Private Documents library, a Shared Documents library and a My Picture library that you can access from the left side Quick Launch Navigation Bar under the Shared Lists heading. The Private Documents library is for documents that you want to keep private; they are only visible to you. The Shared Documents library is used to share documents with others; documents stored here are shared on your public home page. You may store pictures in the My Pictures library but keep in mind that pictures stored here are available for everyone to see. Uploading Documents To upload documents or images from your desktop to a folder, first select the library from Shared Lists by clicking on the hyperlinked name. Then select Upload Document. You can organize your folder by choosing New Folder.
This will open a dialogue box where you will be prompted to browse your computer for the file you want to upload. Once selected, you will need to click on Save and Close. If you are running Office 2003, you will notice that you have the option of selecting to upload multiple files at the same time. You can also quickly move complete folders from your desktop. To do this you will need to change to Explorer View. This view allows easily accessing all of your folders and dragging them to your portal space. This feature will only function inside the firewall or if running VPN (Virtual Private Network). Upload a document to both your private and shared documents. Once completed, return to the library where you should see an icon with a title for each document you uploaded. You can re-open the document by clicking on the icon. Creating Additional Document Libraries or Lists You can create new document library or lists. To do so, click on Documents and Lists in the top horizontal navigation bar.
Clicking on Create opens a list of template documents and list libraries you can create and make part of your My Site. Your personal site is like a large filing cabinet - you can create many different folders and determine which are private and which are available for public viewing. Choosing any sort of page will always open a dialogue box. You will need to give your page, library, list or group a name and you will have the option of including a description. You will need to decide whether it will appear on the Quick Launch Bar and whether you want a new version of the document created each time you save to the space. The library is set up to receive MS Office by default but it can store other types of files. Click Create when you are finished. The new document library will now appear and be accessible from the Quick Launch Navigation Bar.
Personalizing My Site After you create your personal profile, post documents, search for co-workers and save a link on your personal page, you may decide to adjust your page to establish a more unique look. When you first created your My Site, you used the portal's default view. This standard view is made up of pieces of information, called Web Parts, that include: News for You - collects and directs news items from sites and groups a user is a member of, My Links Summary - collects URLs that the user has requested be added to My Links, Links for You - collects links targeted to the user based on groups they belong to, and My Alerts Summary - collects alerts that have been sent from other sub sites to the user based on membership or request. All portal users have the ability to configure or modify the appearance of their My Site. This can be done in different ways. To add or delete web parts or design the My Site Home Page, begin by clicking on the Modify My Page link located under the search box in the horizontal navigation bar. Using the tools provided in the Actions pane on the left side of the screen, you can edit your profile, choosing what information is available to other users of the site. Lists can be created (including document libraries, contact lists, events, tasks, custom lists, surveys and discussion boards). You can create additional web pages to share information with others by clicking on Create Page. You can manage alerts so that you can view alerts from selected sites in one location. Selecting Site Settings in the top horizontal navigational bar gives you access to many settings for your site, including who has access and how your site appears to others.
Use each of the modify features covered in this section to make changes and personalize your My Site. Downloading a Document from a Shared Space If you want to download a resource or document that a teacher has placed in their Shared Documents library, click on the resource title. Depending upon your version of Microsoft Office, you may be prompted to accept opening the document (if so, click OK) or you may be asked if you wish to Open or Save. You may select either. Deleting a Document from your Shared Space You may change your mind about which documents you wish to share. If so, you can easily delete the documents you uploaded to your site. Other people are not able to delete from your Shared Folder. To delete a document from your shared or private space, right click on the end of the title and drag down to Delete. You will be asked if you are sure you want to delete. Click OK.
Download and Delete for Apple Computer Users Apple Computer users begin with clicking on the hyperlinked document name to download or delete a document from a shared or private space. A new window will open giving you several options, including Check Out or Delete Item. Search for the My Site of another teacher and download a document from their Shared Document library. Upload the document to your Private Documents library. Delete the document you just uploaded.