One of the best improvements I have noticed while configuring the SharePoint 2013 preview is the User Profile Import.  It is very stable as compared to SharePoint 2010.  It might be the case that I am following the best practices but still it took me about 10 minutes to setup the service application, user profile services and my site setup.  Here are the steps that I had performed.

1. Create User Profile Service Application
2. Start User Profile Service
3. Start User Profile Synch Service and provide Farm Admin Password
4. Went to active Directory and enabled Advanced View from View Menu
5. Took properties of contoso.com domain and in Security tab I added SP_Profile Account and gave him Replicating directory changes permission.

6. Looked at Monitoring –> Running Job and found "ProfileSyncSetup" job running and in less than 5 minutes I went out and I found User Profile Synchronization Service Running.
7. Did an IIS Reset just LIKE 2010.  🙂

Here is the home page of User Profile Service Application

Then I added a new DNS AAA Host my.contoso.com and created a new web application

Next step was to create a new My Site Host Site collection inside my.contoso.com

Then I enabled Self Service Site Creation

Then I went to create personal wildcard inclusion.

Then I went to my Intranet Portal and created a Search Center Site Collection that will be used for profile search.

Do the below steps only If you have your portal as Publishing Portal or you can enable the SharePoint Publishing Infrastructure feature on your site collection to create Search Center.

To do that I opened the site and click on Site Contents

Then scroll down and click on New SubSite.

Next is to visit the “Setup Mysite” and fill in the information.

add secondary owner for every my site and choose privacy settings if you want.

Now Start Full Import

I did all these steps before synchronization because I don’t wanted to wait for it to complete.

Here is the update

Now click on User Name in the document Library

This showed the profile of the user and now let’s setup mysite.

Now I logged into my Windows 7 Client Machine and logged in as Adam Barr.

Now Click the Drop Down next to Adam Barr and choose About Me.

The Edit Profile improved a lot.

Now Mysite is setup.   Tasks section Showed up on the left navigation.

Clicked on Newsfeed to find this nice dialog.

Now see the a way to mention someone from mysite.

Now I logged in a Steve Masters check the message that Adam Barr Sent him.

Now he has to wait for his mysite setup to complete.  I clicked on check to see the updated status

Now I tried to put a tag and saw that there was no mention for him from Adam Barr as his mysite was setup later so mention never showed up at this point.

means I have to setup Managed Metadata Service Application which is off in my case.

Now I went on to mention Adam Barr from Steve Masters Profile and logged back to Adam Barr.

First thing I noticed as 1 Mention which is pretty cool.

I clicked on Mentions and saw the mention then clicked on Show Details and then clicked on Follow Steve Masters.

Now I am going to reply him.  and I have liked it as well.

Now look at Steve Masters Profile

Enterprise Social Networking at its best.

The next thing I am about to explore is SharePoint 2013 Workflow.  By the way take a look at my SharePoint 2013 Farm.

I am running it on Windows 8 RTM on HyperV.

Having Lenove W30 I7 CQE Processor with 32 GB RAM & 512 GB SSD makes the difference