Speaking at the Australian and New Zealand SharePoint Conference 2013

As you are probably already aware the Australian SharePoint and New Zealand SharePoint Conferences are rolling around for 2013 and have a fantastic line up of local and international speakers that you absolutely must see if you have the chance.

I will be presenting a session entitled “Beyond FBA: No-code Authentication with SharePoint and Azure”.  If you are running a SharePoint based extranet, or if you are facing authentication challenges on your SharePoint environment, this is a session I highly encourage you to check out.

Why? What if your users could log-in to SharePoint like this.

1.  Visit site and click “Sign In”

1

2.  Click on the appropriate provider

2

3.  Enter credentials on provider site

3

4.  Done – you are signed in.

4

 

No code.  No hacks.  No need to create accounts.  No messy codeplex solutions.  No need to mess around in AD.  Highly supportable and easily repeatable.

Come see my session at the conference to find out how to do this yourself with zero code and in use in under an hour!

SharePoint 2013 – Follow not working across Web Applications

When attempting to follow documents in SharePoint 2013 Release Preview, I noticed the following issue.  The new funcion of SharePoint 2013 “Follow” which will keep track of documents, sites, etc in a handy location in your MySite did not appear to be working.  This was quite odd as it was working for documents in my MySite, but not when trying to follow documents outside of the MySite Web Application.

The above screenshot shows the error that occurs when I clicked Follow, unfortunately these “Technical Details” are not as helpful as you would hope, so a quite trek into the ULS logs was in order.

Cranking up ULSViewer, which works just fine with SharePoint 2013, I noticed the below error almost immediately.

The way the follow function appears to work in SharePoint 2013 is a direct write back to your MySite Content Database.  If you have your primary SharePoint 2013 site and your MySite on seperate Web Applications there is a fairly reasonable chance you have split them out so that they use seperate Application Pool Accounts, and in this situation obviously there is going to be a permission issue.

All it takes to get this working is to make sure that the Web Application account has access to the MySite Content Database by giving it membership to the “SPDataAccess” role.

And just like that, Follow is now working!

SharePoint 2013 Configuration – Cannot start service AppFabricCachingService on computer

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been spending time with SharePoint 2013 and once again have come across another little error regarding Farm Configuration.

Cannot start service AppFabricCachingService on Computer “.”.

As mentioned in my last post, there are some posts out there that suggest that you can circumvent Distributed Cache problems by Creating or Connecting to your configuration database with the -SkipRegisterAsDistributedCacheHost parameter, however this will result in the Distributed Cache Service Instance being absent from your farm, and I have at this stage been able to get it to reappear.  As it is pretty early in the game for SharePoint 2013 I am not yet sure the impact that not having a Distributed Cache Service will have on your farm, however it will likely be negative.

This particular problem seems to be permissions related as the Windows Service “AppFabric Caching Service” is unable to start when it is using the SharePoint 2013 Farm Account, and while I have not YET spent much time trying to figure out why this occurs, I was able to avoid the problem by adding my Farm account to the Local Administrators group.

Hopefully this post will help a few folks avoid a rather frustrating problem.

Note : Yes I am aware this is not best practice, however it may help a few folks get around the problem in what is likely to be a non-production test machine anyway as the software is still in Beta (Release Preview).  I’ll be looking into this further to try and find out exactly what permissions are required so that we do not need to add to the local admin group.

SharePoint 2013 Configuration – Failed to connect to host in the cluster

I’ve been spending a little bit of time around SharePoint 2013 and have been probing the various installation methods and came across this problem twice sp far while trying to configure SharePoint 2013 Farms.

Connect-SPConfigurationDatabase : ErrorCode<ERRCAdmin040>:SubStatus<ES0001>:Failed to connect to hosts in the cluster

There are some posts out there that suggest that you can circumvent this problem by Creating or Connecting to your configuration database with the -SkipRegisterAsDistributedCacheHost parameter, however this will result in the Distributed Cache Service Instance being absent from your farm, and I have at this stage been able to get it to reappear.  As it is pretty early in the game for SharePoint 2013 I am not yet sure the impact that not having a Distributed Cache Service will have on your farm, however it will likely be negative.

What seems to be causing this particular problem is an alias being used for the SQL Server, when your SQL Server is on another server.  Re-running the command or trying to establish your farm with the server name instead of the alias seems to avoid the problem.

Hopefully this post will help a few folks avoid a frustrating problem.

Note : This is not a solution, it is just a work around that might avoid frustrating and let you test out SharePoint 2013.

Early Bird Tickets available for NZ and AUS SharePoint Conferences

I’m already looking forward to these events, so I’m happy to mention that there are now early bird passes available for both events, at the early bird prices (NZ – 650.00 and AUS -725.00) for the two day event. These will go fast and are limited to the first 250 people registering. You can also get a great discount if you have 5 or more people register.

See
http://www.sharepointconference.com.au
for the 2012 Australian SharePoint Conference, which is in Melbourne March 20/21

See
http://www.sharepointconference.co.nz
for the 2012 New Zealand SharePoint Conference, which is in Auckland 28/29 March.

After an AWESOME planning weekend, with the organiser team on the Gold Coast earlier in December, we have an agenda up on the sites. This will be improved in the next few weeks, but gives you a taste of what is to come! FIVE tracks this year, as we introduce a new track – “Office, Productivity and BI” – lots of great sessions in there.

The Voice of a Customer track has changed names to “Case Studies” – and as it aptly describes, will be a collection of Customer stories – these are shorter 25 min sessions, which means we will have 20 Stories to share!

We have more great technical content for both Developers and IT Pros…and speakers from the USA, UK, Canada, India, New Zealand and Australia. More details will come throughout January…

IN addition to the two days packed with informative sessions, and lots of learning, you can also register for one (or many) of the GTTP (Get to the Point!) half day workshops. There is a selection of around 12 different topics, for all levels – and two full day workshops also. Check out the site for more details.

Hong Kong SharePoint Conference 2011

I am pretty excited that I will be presenting this year at the upcoming Hong Kong SharePoint Conference 2011.

The session I am presenting is :

SharePoint 2010 Performance and Health Monitoring

An amazing amount of new and exciting features were added to SharePoint 2010 for IT Professionals, a major investment being Server Health and Monitoring Infrastructure. In this session we will look into these features in-depth, focusing on guidance for keeping SharePoint installations healthy and running at peak performance. We will go into detail on supporting features such as Diagnostic Logging, the Developer Dashboard and the SharePoint 2010 Logging Database; illustrating how to successfully use these features and more, to troubleshoot issues quickly and accurately. If you have a production environment running SharePoint 2010, then this is a session not to miss!  

If you have the opportunity to make it to this conference, I would highly recommend it and tickets are still available!

 

Have You Registered? Under 2 weeks to go!

Be part of the very first Hong Kong SharePoint Conference…join us at the SharePoint event of the year!

Great sessions and speakers from Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, USA, and New Zealand

Introductory sessions
Come along to the introductory sessions to hear real life stories about the University of Nottingham, working with Office 365, governance, social computing and how to create massive user adoption!

Extending sessions
Visualising business data, best practice document management, Project Crescent, and text analytics for search.

Technical sessions
Learn great tips and tricks from the experts on PowerShell, web parts, development, infrastructure monitoring, migration and more!

Check out the agenda now

Dux Raymond Sy
Keynote:

Dux Raymond Sy
Empowering Your Organisation with SharePoint 2010

Experience the power of one of the most sought after SharePoint speakers and learn how you can empower your organisation using SharePoint 2010.

Thinking of implementing SharePoint or do you already have it? Either way, don’t make the same mistakes as everyone else around the world! Invest some time to get things done right!

Come along to the 2 day Master ClassSharePoint Governance and Information Architecture with Paul Culmsee.

www.sharepointconference.asia

Microsoft, Platinum Sponsor

Register Now!

Early Bird Price EXTENDED

Conference Day:
Friday 11 Nov 2011

Conference Price:
Early Bird Price: $HKD250.00
(Extended!)
Group Discount: for 5+ people
Regular Price: $HKD300.00

Conference Location:
Harbour Grand Hotel

Thank you to our gold sponsors!
AvePoint, K2, OpenText, Pingar

Event managed by SPevents, a division of envisionIT (NZ) Ltd in association with the Hong Kong User Group and is run BY the Community FOR the Community.
Phone: +852  2121 2688

Hong Kong SharePoint Conference, 11 November 2011

Adding 285 Contoso Users with Pictures to your Development Environment Active Directory

While I love the Information Worker Demo VMs that Microsoft make available, I really wish they would hang around more than the really short expiry they are currently set to, and besides while I like the stuff they have in their VMs I do not need all of it for my work.

What I really like is the pre-populated Contoso Active Directory, with all of the users, properties and profile pictures pre-populated.   I like it so much I took the time to export all of the values and code up a script that will add them into just about any Active Directory environment.

###################################################################################
# Title : Create Contoso Users in Active Directory
# Author : Mark Rhodes - markrhodes@gmail.com - @mrhodes
#
# Purpose : Creates 270+ users in Active Directory copied from the Contoso Information Worker Environment
#
# To Use : Extract all files and run "CreateUserAccounts.ps1 from an Administrative PowerShell prompt.
#
# Requirements :
# Active Directory RSAT tools installed.
# User Account with sufficient privilegse to create accounts in "USERS" Container.
#
# Files :
# CreateUserAccounts.ps1 - PowerShell Script
# ADUsers.csv - CSV file with all Active Directory properties
# Folder UserImages - 270 Images of users to be populated into the thumbnailPhoto property
#
# Warning! - Do not use this on a production directory.
###################################################################################
#Import Active Directory Module
Import-module activedirectory

#Autopopulate Domain
$dnsDomain =gc env:USERDNSDOMAIN
$split = $dnsDomain.split(".")
if ($split[2] -ne $null) {
 $domain = "DC=$($split[0]),DC=$($split[1]),DC=$($split[2])"
} else {
 $domain = "DC=$($split[0]),DC=$($split[1])"
}

#Declare any Variables
$dirpath = $pwd.path
$orgUnit = "CN=Users"
$dummyPassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText "P@ss1W0Rd!" -Force
$counter = 0

#import CSV File
$ImportFile = Import-csv "$dirpath\ADUsers.csv"
$TotalImports = $importFile.Count

#Create Users
$ImportFile | foreach {
$counter++
$progress = [int]($counter / $totalImports * 100)
Write-Progress -Activity "Provisioning User Accounts" -status "Provisioning account $counter of $TotalImports" -perc $progress
if ($_.Manager -eq "") {
New-ADUser -SamAccountName $_.SamAccountName -Name $_.Name -Surname $_.Sn -GivenName $_.GivenName -Path "$orgUnit,$domain" -AccountPassword $dummyPassword -Enabled $true -title $_.title -officePhone $_.officePhone -department $_.department -emailaddress $_.mail
} else {
New-ADUser -SamAccountName $_.SamAccountName -Name $_.Name -Surname $_.Sn -GivenName $_.GivenName -Path "$orgUnit,$domain" -AccountPassword $dummyPassword -Enabled $true -title $_.title -officePhone $_.officePhone -department $_.department -manager "$($_.Manager),$orgUnit,$domain" -emailaddress $_.mail
}
If (gci "$dirpath\userimages\$($_.name).jpg") {
$photo = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("$dirpath\userImages\$($_.name).jpg")
Set-ADUSER $_.samAccountName -Replace @{thumbnailPhoto=$photo}
}
}

I’ve made a zip file available that contains :

1 CSV file populated with all the values required.
1 PS1 file with the full script to create these users
1 Folder with 285 user images

All you need to do is unzip these, and run the PS1 file with PowerShell.  By default my script puts each user into the USERS container, however if you wish to change this, just modify the $orgUnit variable.

The script can be downloaded from my public dropbox here. It is approximately 14 MB due to the large amount of photos contained within.

Update – 26/10/2011 – Fixed a couple of minor bugs, including one that stopped this working on any domains with three parts in the domain name.

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