Disabling Delve/MySite redirection from SharePoint Site Collections

In this post, I outline a simple way to stop SharePoint (either on-premises installation or SharePoint Online) from redirecting to Delve or MySites (respectively). The normal behavior is, that this happens when users click any name of a user anywhere in SharePoint. This is often not desired, and sometimes just confusing or impractical.

Problem

If your customers are like mine, a lot of them hate Delve or MySite, or both. Or maybe they just aren't willing to yet adopt Delve. Or perhaps you've heard of Delve blogs retirement, and are wondering is there any future for Delve either?

Or maybe they just want to simplify the team site experience for their users and get rid of extra redirects away from the actual team site. In any case, there's a valid case to stop the redirection from SharePoint's (very sparse) user information page completely.

Luckily, that's possible, if a bit impractical. Quite a few sources claim, that it's unsupported or hacky, but it's actually pretty easy, and there's no need to make changes to control templates or anything. Check this out.

Solution

Clicking a user's name in SharePoint takes you to a URL a bit like this:

https://{weburl}/_layouts/15/userdisp.aspx

A typical example would be something like this:

https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/marketing/_layouts/15/userdisp.aspx?ID=86

Now, normally that URL is going to just redirect you to Delve or MySite (depending on which you're using). Luckily you can stop the redirection by appending Force=True to the URL.

https://{weburl}/_layouts/15/userdisp.aspx?ID=86&Force=True

This, in turn, can probably easiest be done by using jQuery, a script-editor webpart, an SPFx extension (or some other client-side tech), so that you won't have to actually edit any templates or anything.

Simple as that!

Now, I recently uncovered this blog post by Hugo Bernier, detailing how to, instead, form links that take to a user's Delve profile - so if you wanted to do that instead, here's how to do that:

Time needed: 2 minutes.

To create a link to someone's Delve profile:

1. Take your tenant name, and add -my.sharepoint.com/PersonImmersive.aspx?accountname=i%3A0%23%2Ef%7Cmembership%7C to the end of it.

2. Append the person's email address at the end of what you got in step 1!

3. You're done.

   You should have something like this at the end:

   <code>https://contoso-my.sharepoint.com/PersonImmersive.aspx?accountname=i%3A0%23%2Ef%7Cmembership%[email protected]</code>

If you don't want to figure out the URL yourself, you can just use a tool Hugo released - check out his article for that.