Yesterdays Vancouver SharePoint Usergroup meeting brought up some interesting points about how SharePoint 2010 my sites can be customized.
I’d like to share some of my findings when working with mysites, many more details you can find in my book in chapter dedicated to branding SP2010 specialized sites .
As you know, if you have SharePoint 2010 MySites enabled, when users click on other users name – they will be taken to that user’s personal profile page.
The main part of the page, personal profile details and a photo are displayed. The the bottom part of the page is a tabular menu with options to access Overview, Organization etc.
If you’re signed in as administrator and viewing someone’s profile, like we do here, you can access Site Action -> Edit Page and manage which web parts are going to be displayed for users on this page, just like any other web part page:
When you save the page, those changes are going to be propagated to all the users and everyone’s profile page will change depending on your customizations here.
Some part of the page you can’t customize in edit mode, for example the menu:
Well, you can customize the menu by going to Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Quick Launch.
Here, you just edit the titles and URLs as you see fit. You can even remove menu items or add new ones. All of the changes here will be propagated to all of the other user’s profile pages.
So if you have a custom page you’d like to add to the menu with a custom link – this is the place to add it.
Next, you will notice that when you click on various menu items – they point to different pages. Some of them live in _layouts, such as:
Colleagues: _layouts/MyContactLinks.aspx
Memberships: _layouts/MyMemberships.aspx
Well, if you want to adjust the look of those, all you need to do is create a new instance of those pages (do not modify existing pages, they may break with a next SP2010 update) and point your Quick Launch to new pages.
Some other pages, such as :
Organization: my/OrganizationView.aspx
Content: my/personcontent.aspx
are just pages inside a MySite, shared across all users. The difference between and Overview page and Organization, for example, is that Organization page doesn’t have any web part zones defined on it, so if you want to change it – you must either edit it in SharePoint Designer, or provision a new page using Visual Studio. If you provision a new page using a Visual Studio, you will need to link it in the Quick Launch menu, just as in all other cases.
If you’re using SP Designer, then assuming you’re logged in as administrator, get to the page you’d like to edit, click Site Actions -> Edit in SharePoint Designer.
When a design surface loads the site, click Site Objects -> All Files ; find a file you’d like to edit organizationview.aspx (in our case) and make a copy of it.
Then edit the copied file in SPD, where you can make any changes you like, as you can see below you can pull additional profile properties or anything else displayed on the page.
You can add web part zones there as well, and as always, changes made here will be displayed on all personal profiles for other users.
Save the page when ready and as always link it in the Quick Launch menu.
See, things are actually quite easy 
Enjoy!
