SharePoint 2010 Newsfeed Security Trimming

When Service Pack 1 was released for SharePoint 2010, a new set of features was introduced in the User Profile Service Application, however over the past few weeks I have encountered an unexpected result as part of the new security trimming option. New after SP is a set of options to specify if you want links in the activity feeds, ratings and social tags and notes to be trimmed based on who has security to those items. You can find a ton of detail on setting up My Sites here.

The default setting for the security trimming is to check all links for permissions, which one would think should be the way most server admins would want, however there is a small caveat. If people use the favorites / bookmark tool which links to content outside the SharePoint environment as seen here, those tags and notes will not be shown:

Personally I use this feature all of the time to organize external links to TechNet, blogs and other outside sites that gives me the reference material I need for things that I don’t do very often like: "What is the T-SQL command to run on a SQL server to determine the edition and patch level” (BTW, you can find that out from here). When I recently asked a colleague if they had seen my note board comment on a new externally tagged page, they said, “What Note?”, hence this post.

What we needed to do was adjust the security trimming options to only check links under specific URL’s (our internal web application URL’s) and all of a sudden my external notes showed up immediately. The image below now shows what we needed to change the settings to from the “Setup My Sites” link in the User Profile Service Application:

Have you run into this issue, or know if this has been fixed in a recent Cumulative Update? Let us know.