We upgraded from 2007 to 2010 last year. In 2010 we did not set up a MySite web app or top level site collection. We did set up the User Profile Service and the profiles are syncing data from AD correctly. I have two issues that I would like help resolving. First, I would like to set up a search where we can search for people and get their profile information. I want to use this like a company directory. I don't want to use the site collection user list, I want the profile information instead because the site collection user list does not contain all of our users. If I don't have MySite, what do I set the crawl to?  Where are the profiles stored?

Second, in a site collection, when we click on the name of the user under "created by" or "modified by", we get a page not found.  I'm not sure if that is supposed to link to the profile (which I think is person.aspx) or the site collection user (userdisp.aspx). 

Are both of these issues caused by not having a MySite application set up?  Is there anyway to have and use profiles without having them in the MySite app and site collection?  I would like users to be able to modify their profile and we'd like to search them.  I'd also like those links under created/modified by to link to something.  I've read about 50 articles and books and can't find a definitive answer on needing/not needing MySite. Any help is much apprec

- The user profiles are stored within the UPS... you'd need to access the data using the UPS API's

- the user links should go to the site collection page (userdisp), which should (correctly) detect when mysites are available, and in that case redirect to the mysite page (person.aspx or whatever)

I appreciate your response but I'm not sure it answers my questions.  Are you saying that I have to set up the MySites web app and allow users to create MySites in order for me to view their Profile pages?  I've found some blogs that contradict that but still didn't give enough information for me to figure out what is needed.

Do you have any idea why the user link is not going to userdisp.aspx? 

I was able to resolve my crawl issue. I set up a separate content type (not sure if a separate one was needed, but that's how I did it). The crawl was set for sps3://[myservername].  Once the crawl was complete, I was able to search for people in my search center.

My userdisp and person.aspx are still not coming up.  When I click on a user in the site collection, I'm expecting to see their info in the userdisp.aspx page but I still get a page not found.  And after I search for people, if I hover over their name, the URL shows http://[myserver]/my/person.aspx?accountname=[accountname] but I also get a page not found.

Does anyone know how to get userdisp and/or person.aspx to render?  I looked in my 14 hive on the server and the userdisp.aspx page does exist so I'm not sure why it won't come up at least.

Also still wondering if users need a mySite to edit their Profile.

SEARCH RESULTS will always link to MySites (webapp, not the same as allowing users to create their own MySite site collections).

within CONTENT (such as looking at the [Created By] field for a task), it links to the UserDisp page, which MAY OR MAY NOT redirect to MySites, depending on whether it thinks the MySites' profile page (again, webapp, not the same as allowing users to create their own site collections) are available.

correction: based on the URL you mentioned (http://[server]/my), it's just using the My explicit managed path... just create the MySites site collection... no separate webapp is necessary.

I just noticed that when I hover over a user's name (created by, modified by), that it points to http://[myserver]/_Layouts/listform.aspx instead of /_Layouts/userdisp.aspx.  If I modify the URL and append &force=1 the page loads.  How can this be pointing to listform.aspx and how do I change it?