My Site Default Quota Template
We recently encountered a subtle issue setting the quota used when creating My Sites; that is, My Content personal sites. The default quota template MUST be named “personal site” or sites are created without a quota. Here is the whole story.
When you first open General Settings dialog for a new web application, it shows the selected quota template as “No Quota”. As we will see below, this is misleading.
We created the My Site hosting web application using a PowerShell script. That script also created a default quota template per the customer maximum and warning size requirements, and then updated the web application’s default template to that value. We named this quota template “MySite Quota”.
The problem is SharePoint doesn’t use the web application default template when creating personal sites. A little digging shows that SharePoint creates its own default personal site quota template using the hard coded name “personal site” (or the equivalent installed language translation). When creating a personal site, this template is applied, not the web application default template.
I suspect SharePoint creates the default template for these reasons:
- To make sure the template is available; that is, to avoid configuration errors if the customer forgets to create a quota template.
- To specify resource usage limits for Sandbox solutions. (I bet many customers don’t realize Sandbox solutions can be deployed to personal sites.)
If you later need to override the default quota for certain users, you can go to Central Administration > Site Collection Quotas and Locks (or use PowerShell). You can change the template to another template you have created (like “gold personal site” in the following picture), or change the template to “individual quota” and manually enter values in the following fields.
More information regarding the personal site quote template can be found at Plan for My Sites.