Adding Portal Site Navigation to MySite

Although the MySites are really a separate site collection (or web application), from a user experience perspective, many clients want a seemless experience between a portal and the My Site. We need to be able to provide the same navigation (i.e top flydown menu navigation) for My Sites as we have in a portal in another site collection (or web application). I have seen a few posts on this, referencing using the PortalSiteMapDataSource, however, the one post that seemed to spell out how to do this did not work as shown. Also, from other posts, it appears that the PSMD only operates in the context it is within. In other words, I cannot point it to another site.

Basically, we want a seemless user experience between a portal site and my Site. Now, somone may say "What if you have more than one Portal... which navigation would you use on My Site ". For most companies a single portal is all they have.... at least that is our experience... Any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

I'm also interested in a solution to this problem (or imho a design flaw). Why was the product designed this way 99% of clients want 'mysite' functionality inside of the main portal site navigation. I understand the benefit from db seperation for BU/restore but the loss of global navigaiton most of the time outweighs this benefit.

I created a new site under the main site collection of template type mysite and that works, but there is no way to inherit the parent navigation.

Is there a recommend approach to deliver a global navigation considering the volume of people wanting this functionality

Thanks

Just to let you know, we never were able to get this to work.

If Microsoft is reading this thread, here are some thoughts:

1. Many companies do not want to use the concepts of My Site.. rather they just want to give people a "My Profile" (i.e. name, dept.. the info coming from AD).

2. I'm sure the idea behind a seperate My Site is that if you have several portals in use, this is a common site that people can always come to if they click on "My Site".. a centralized point of information. But the webparts that come with it are difficult to use.. for instance, requiring an end user to type in a url to set up the inbox and calendar.. maybe we missed something, but it appears that it requires an end user to edit the webpart and type in the URL.. that's way to much to expect from your average user and a support nightmare... Please provide some easy to deploy webparts to show inbox, calendar, aggregartion of information from another site collection (like the CQWP but allow it to transverse site collections and web applications).

3. Simple webparts that aggregate information are difficult to use or just missing. For instance, the My Documents webpart requires the end user to enter the url of every site they wish to view. Also, there is not a webpart that does a simple operation like showing all alerts that a user has within a site collection (we had to write one for a customer that we had).

Don't get me wrong.. MOSS is an incredible tool, but just need some more work around the My Site concept.

I thinik suppose to be manually we can add links in the my site by using the personalization site links in the central admin.

But I also do prefer this will be done automatically

Thanks for everyone's responses. At least I know I'm not alone. Its just frustrating because I want to leverage all the goodies surrounding mysites, but the navigation might be the stop me from doing that.

Does anyone know how to point the menu provider to the main site collection I wonder if that's possible. Thanks.