We recently came across an issue with one of our clients who was having troubles with showing colleagues’ blog post updates in newsfeed part of the profile page in SharePoint (2010) MySite. In our client’s case the problem was that no activities were being displayed let alone the blog updates which is something that proved to require some additional steps to resolve. The aim of this post is to show what steps we took to resolve the issue and hopefully help you plan if you are introducing or extending the SharePoint social features.

Firstly, you will need to make some checks by visiting the SharePoint Central Administration site (or ask your SharePoint Administrator).

1. Ensure that newsfeed is enabled.
Navigate to SharePoint Service Applications > User Profile Service Application > Setup My Sites

In My Site settings page, scroll down and check “Enable newsfeed on My Sites” and click OK.

2. Ensure that the “User Profile Service Application – Activity Feed” timer job is scheduled to run (say every 5 mins).
Navigate back to SharePoint Central Administration > Monitoring > Review Time Job Definitions.

3. Creating Blog Post
Since each My Site is a site collection and before you create a blog post, a new sub site based on a blog template is required. Once this is created then go ahead and create your blog post!

4. Check “New Blog Post” checkbox in the  ‘Activities I am following’ section of your my site profile settings
Navigate to your my site profile page and edit your profile to select any other active you would like to follow.

5. Perform a full search crawl
Navigate to your Search service application within central administration and start the full search crawl. This may be unnecessary but at the least try the incremental crawl depending upon your crawl schedules and time it takes to complete. The main difference of including the search crawl as a step in the process is because the blog post and comments are part of the SharePoint site which does require for search service application to crawl, in order for newsfeed to display the blog updates.

Note: Please check the crawl rules as well to confirm that my sites are not excluded from search crawling.

6. Wait for the “User Profile Service Application – Activity Feed” timer job to run, or run it manually.

The blog post should now show up.

Subsequent posts will show when:

• An incremental (or full) crawl is performed.
• The “User Profile Service Application – Activity Feed” timer job runs.

So I hope this post helps you solve the problem of displaying blog updates in your my sites newsfeed.

Happy blogging in your SharePoint environment and make your newsfeed interesting!

Chirag Patel @techChirag

This post first appeared here: http://blog.pointbeyond.com/2013/02/13/enabling-colleagues-blog-posts-in-newsfeed-of-your-sharepoint-my-site/

Published by Chirag Patel @techChirag

Chirag is an independent Microsoft 365 consultant at Patel Consulting, and Microsoft MVP (Office & Apps Services), based in UK with more than 20 years of industry experience. He is also a BCS (British Computer Society) Member & Chartered IT Professional, Microsoft 365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert, MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) and TOGAF9 Certified Architect. He works with a wide variety of clients in many sectors, designing and implementing business collaboration, data and information management solutions and services based on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 technologies, Power Platform to create business value for both themselves and their customers, including UK Microsoft Gold Partners with deployment, upgrade and migration services delivery. Chirag is an active Microsoft 365 community participant, frequent speaker at local and international events including Microsoft 365 Saturdays, Power Saturdays, SharePoint Saturdays, Collab365, TeamsFest, Modern Workplace Summit and Scottish Summit. You can follow Chirag on twitter at @techChirag. View all posts by Chirag Patel @techChirag