SharePoint 2013 Preview Newsfeeds showing nothing

So you've build your farm, configured Manage Metadata, Search, User Profile Service and Mysites. The first thing you obviously want to check out are the cool new social features.
You login and fire off your first post, in anticipation of the reactions of your fellow social pioneers in your company.

A day goes by but, nothing happens… What is going on here?
You check your feed but it keeps saying "We're still collection the latest news. You may see more if you try again a little later."
There must be something wrong here. When you crank up the ULS logs to verbose on the Microfeeds and User Profiles categories in the ULS logs:

"Microfeeds", "User Profiles" | Set-SPLogLevel -TraceSeverity Verbose

you will find a strange message stating the User Profile Service Application Proxy is not available:

nasq Medium Entering monitored scope (SPMicrofeedFeedCacheService.GetPublishedFeed). Parent FeedCacheService.GetPublishedFeed e554c59b-9365-2015-6119-380e065adfbb

d22b High Failure retrieving application ID for User Profile Application Proxy 'User Profile Service Application 2': Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException: UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException_Logging :: UserProfileApplicationProxy.ApplicationProperties ProfilePropertyCache does not have 5c3e254a-4ab9-4736-a5f1-58d582d1d6d0 at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_ApplicationProperties() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_AppID() e554c59b-9365-2015-6119-380e065adfbb

ahv64 High SPMicrofeedFeedCacheService.GetUserProfile() - UserProfileApplicationProxy not available e554c59b-9365-2015-6119-380e065adfbb

b4ly Medium Leaving Monitored Scope (SPMicrofeedFeedCacheService.GetPublishedFeed). Execution Time=2.064 e554c59b-9365-2015-6119-380e065adfbb

 

At first it did not hit home for me, but then I remembered similar issues when using powershell to manage the UPA back in SharePoint 2010. This was basically solved by granted (sharing) permissions to the UPA proxy.

The problem in this case is that my MySites are hosted in a different application pool from my UPA service application. Although the MySites application pool account is added, the service app application pool account is not.

Either grant the application pool account hosting the UPA Sharing Permissions through Central Admin:

 

 

 

Or use the following powershell script:

 

$account = New-SPClaimsPrincipal <domain\user> -IdentityType WindowsSamAccountName

$UPA = Get-SPServiceApplication <ID>

$sec = Get-SPServiceApplicationSecurity $UPA

Grant-SPObjectSecurity $sec2 -Principal $account -Rights "Full Control"

Set-SPServiceApplicationSecurity -Identity $UPA -ObjectSecurity $sec

 

The magic happens, and voila; the feeds start showing!

 

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2012
    Hello Mark, Nice post I am facing same issue in my SP2013 project, I have applied your steps in CA (added my app pool account user and given full permission). Still problem exists. Then i have tried with your PS commands that are giving error. Can you please give more options with PS or something else ?

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2013
    Hi! I'm also having the same issues as Anoop over here. Did what you suggested, but still no newsfeed.. Any ideas?

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2014
    Thanks Mark. Your post just fixed my problem.

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2014
    Thank you! This saved us today!

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2014
    I am getting error at the time of migrating mysite from 2010 to 2013.

    error1.
    We're still collecting the latest news. You may see more if you try again a little later.

    Error2.

    We are about to ready!!

    Awaiting your reply!!

    Tanks Ali

  • Anonymous
    March 06, 2015
    if you are doing upgrade it looking for your old mysite application. Please check it may cause this issue

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2015
    We have this issue "We're still collection the latest news. You may see more if you try again a little later." but it only happens maybe 2 out of 10 times, the rest of the time it works. Our rights are correct but it still shows up every once in a while, could it be a timer job is set wrong, or SQL slowness issue?

  • Anonymous
    May 04, 2015
    There is a small error in the script. It should be:

    $account = New-SPClaimsPrincipal -IdentityType WindowsSamAccountName

    $UPA = Get-SPServiceApplication

    $sec = Get-SPServiceApplicationSecurity $UPA

    Grant-SPObjectSecurity $sec -Principal $account -Rights "Full Control"

    Set-SPServiceApplicationSecurity -Identity $UPA -ObjectSecurity $sec

  • Anonymous
    June 11, 2015
    I like this article but found two possible problems. First, in Central Admin, I can highlight my UPA Proxy fine but the Permissions option remains grayed out. Not sure why. Same for all my proxies. So i considered the powershell script as a workaround but noticed that it uses Get-SPServiceApplication rather than Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy. I thought the idea was to set permissions on the proxy of UPA rather than on the UPA itself. Thoughts? Thanks!