Problem

Now what this is really about and the reason why you stopped at this post. SharePoint 2013 gives an error when you hit the ‘Follow‘ button with the next message: Something went wrong.

Sorry we could’t follow the document or site sharepoint 2013

In this example I tried to follow a document in a library.

Cause

This pop-up doesn’t provide a lot of information. except that it’s not working. The next step is to check the good old SharePoint logs at the ‘15 Hive‘ location: C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions15LOGS

Analyzing the log file shows that there is a problem opening the content database hosting the users
My Sites. Now it starts to get interesting. reading further down the logs shows the name of the user account that has failed to login. (search the term ‘for Cannot open database’)

Sorry we could’t follow the document or site sharepoint 2013

The cause of this problem is that the Application Pool Account has no access to the database. This is most probably caused by the service accounts that are used for the SharePoint default web application and the My Sites web application.

This can easily be checked with a PowerShell script :

Add-WindowsFeature Web-WMI | Format-List
Get-CimInstance -Namespace root/MicrosoftIISv2 -ClassName IIsApplicationPoolSetting -Property Name, WAMUserName, WAMUserPass | select Name, WAMUserName, WAMUserPass


powershell app pool account

Solution:

This is what you’ve all been waiting for! How do I solve this annoying issue.
Well the resolution is pretty easy. You have to go to the database server and give the Application Pool Account access to the needed database.

Open your SQL server and correct instance and select the user that you’ve found in the SharePoint log. In my case this was the user: ‘TESTSP_WebApps‘

Go to the Security – Logins node and right-click on the user that you found earlier in the SP Logs and select properties.

Sorry we could’t follow the document or site sharepoint 2013

Now select the ‘User Mapping‘ node and select the My Sites content database.
Also select the ‘SPDataAccess‘ and hit the OK button.

SQL login properties user maping settings

Close the SQL Server and go back to your SharePoint site.

Your set to go and ready to follow documents, Libraries, Sites, etc.