MySite Title always changes to Site Collection admin display name

Question

I have been struggling with an issue for a while now. Our customer had the requirements to have a central account to be set as site collection administrator for each mysite. This means that, upon creation, we are adding this account as site collection admin and removing the original account.

Security wise, this is working perfectly. But sadly sharepoint always changes the MySite title to the display name of the NEW sitecollection admin.

eq: I create my mysite (for user Frederik Prijck). Our feature stapler picks this up and switches the sitecollection admin to: "domain\mysiteadminaccount". We also programmaticly set the title to the correct value (SPWeb.Title = "Frederik Prijck"). After a while (depends, can be 5 minutes or can be longer) sharepoint changes the title to "domain\mysiteadminaccount", which is the display name of the current site collection admin account.

It feels like SharePoint has a timerjob (or something) that is constantly updating the users profile properties and making sure that the site title is up to date. (this is my guess)

In one way I think this is a good thing. If my display name is changed in AD, my MySite will be updated. But on the otherhand, in this case, it is going wrong.

We do not want the site name to be related to the mysite admin. These mysites are still for a specific user, we just don't want to give them all the rights that a sitecollection admin has.

Does anyone know how to work around this issue?

A dirty solution: A timerjob which constantly sets the title to the correct value. But I don't like that...

PS: I've read Mark Arend's blog article and tried it out but it still fails (its 2007 anyway, and I am facing this problem in 2010): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/markarend/archive/2008/04/10/modifying-mysite-owner-security.aspx

Answer 1

We have found out that the title does not get changed every day. It is more like only in the first 30 minutes when a mysite is created.

So, we have created a timerjob which will run daily to change the title back to the userprofile of the mysite's user, if it is not in sync.

This way, users will not be able to change their site titles, but we do have control over this title. And most importantly, sharepoint stopped changing the title automaticly aswell.

We have chosen to not allow users to change their own title as a part of our project governance. This is not neccesary to fix the issue mentioned in the question.

Answer 2

Most things I've read and done suggest not removing the user from site collection admin as there are several dependencies...

However, if your client insists, I've found that inserting a bit of code to change the site title every time the user opens the site to be the most effective way of handling this requirement.