SharePoint 2010 - User Profile Service Application

The User Profile Service Application is a powerful SharePoint 2010 feature.

It's objective is to gather and centralize information about individuals.It also enables the social features of SharePoint 2010.

User Profile Service Application features:

• User Profiles: Provides set of properties of individuals in an organization, along with their respectively social tags and other items.

• Social Tags and Notes: with this feature, users can now tag SharePoint items (documents, blogs posts...).

• My Sites Host: provisioning of the site for My Site feature, as for the rest of the social "tools";
  
  
  
• My Site: provisioning of personal sites for the users (with some nice "Facebookish" features);
  
  
  
• Organization Profiles: gathering of information about a given organization (departments,..);
  
  
  
• Audiences: enable target content to users based, for example, on their hierarchy within the organization;
  
  
  
• Profile Synchronization: Mechanism for synchronize the profile's information with the master information repositories (e.g. AD's);

For more information, click here.

Implementing User Profile Service Application

Installing and activating the User Profile Service Application, may not be an easy or very straightforward task (e.g. given the correct permissions for application users).

I strongly recommend following this guide:

http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010ups.aspx

(credits to Spencer Harbar for helping so much people with the above article).

Cheers.