User Profile Synch SA – Bringing it back to life

I’ve probably blogged about this ten times, but I keep running into more and more interesting scenarios with this “admittedly” very complex service, the infamous User Profile Synchronisation.

In this scenario there was a mix-up with passwords and the accounts that were running the various services and management agents had changed / were locked or a combination of  both.

The symptom for the users were simple; Changes made in Active Directory were not being populated through to SharePoint.  This was causing havoc with the K2 business processes (dependant on reporting lines and departments) to name one element.

Upon initial investigation the user profile synchronisation service application seemed to have “stopped”.  Weird I know, but there is more.  When going into the “Manage” link within the service applications management page, the user profile synchronisation status read – “User Profile Synchronisation is being provisioned”.  This message never changed.  Under services on server, the user profile synchronisation service was also stuck on “Starting”.  Note:  Don’t confuse this starting with the ones documented in other deployment scenarios.

In order to resolve this mess, I completed the following steps:

- Manually re-enabled two services via the services console, namely “Forefront Identity Manager Service” and “Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service”

- This was done, by also updated the “Log-On” element with the correct user credentials.  The services started.

- I then navigated to the Manage User Profile Service Application page and clicked on “Configure Synchronization Connections”.

- In this page, I updated the credentials of the user that is used to synchronise.  Failing to do this step will cause your event log to blow up like a Christmas tree as the synch service will execute but the actual agent traversing Active Directory will not be correct.  For more information on the actual agent running behind the show, have a look at the application ("miisclient”) in this directory:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Synchronization Service\UIShell”

- I then executed a incremental update and all was well again.

I’ve read up quite a bit on this service and when it works I am super amazed at the technicality of it all.  On a side note, I really wish that Microsoft at some point bring out a simple way to store pictures in once place and synchronise them across Exchange, Lynch and SharePoint.

SharePoint adoption quick facts

According to Microsoft market research:

• In 2009, SharePoint was a $1.3 billion business with more than 100 million users
• Every day for the past five years, 20,000 workers have joined the ranks of SharePoint users
• 78 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are SharePoint users
• One in every five knowledge workers now has access to SharePoint.

Source

Where’s the value in your SharePoint implementation?

SharePoint developers and consultants are under constant pressure to deliver projects quickly and cheaply. More often than not this leads to quality taking a back seat while the rush to deliver projects on time and on budget becomes the main objective.

It’s upsetting to witness projects that were initially sold with a passionate sales speech and much enthusiasm, delivered in the end as sub-standard implementations that don’t deliver on their promises. Yes you’ve delivered an intranet, but will it really be used and will it really help your customer?

To deliver more meaningful SharePoint implementations, try taking a proactive approach to quality standards by injecting quality right from the beginning of your projects, all the way through to the end. Don’t wait until your project is nearly finished before considering quality aspects such as performance, design, maintainability and all those other quality factors that seem to somehow creep into SharePoint projects when they’re ‘almost done’.

I know you hear this all the time, but test your functionality as if you were your own end user. Why not deploy some of the functionality you’re building for your customer onto your own company intranet to see where the values lies and what can be improved?

List of SharePoint App Stores

Here’s a list of the SharePoint ‘app stores’ I’ve come across in my travels (in no particular order).

www.sharepointreviews.com
www.sharepointappmarket.com
www.sharepointvillage.com
www.sharevolutionhq.com
www.componentsource.com/features/sharepoint/index.html
www.thesharepointmarket.com

If you know of any I’ve left out, please let me know in the comments and I’ll update the list.

How I solved the problem of DLL’s being removed during WSP uninstallation

I ran into a problem a few weeks ago that took quite a bit of work to sort out, so I thought I’d share my findings with you guys.

WARNING: This post contains the words ‘WSP’ and ‘assembly’ many, many times.

I had a few different web parts that each had their own WSP as they are sold/deployed separately and are not related. I also had a ‘common’ assembly that was referenced by each of these web parts.

My first task was to package this common assembly so that it could be deployed with each web part, so I simply told (demanded?) Visual Studio to include the common assembly in each WSP. So now I had a bunch of WSP’s each containing a copy of the same common DLL. Would I be able to install these WSP’s without conflicts?

Yes. Lo and behold SharePoint installed my WSP’s and common assembly to the GAC just fine. I’m not sure if it overwrote or simply ignored the existing common assembly but it worked nonetheless – one common assembly referenced by multiple web part assemblies.

But I now had another challenge: if someone uninstalls one of the web parts, it would remove the common assembly from the GAC, breaking the remaining web parts that reference it. I tested this theory and indeed that is what happens.

Now I missioned trying to come up with a solution to this, and my searches all came up with the same suggestion: you need to create a separate WSP for your common assembly so that it doesn’t get removed when you uninstall your web part. I considered a couple of other ideas:

- Loading the assembly into the GAC programmatically (i.e. not via a WSP). I decided against this when I realised that I would have problems deploying to multiple servers in the farm, permissions etc. Best to leave that to SharePoint.

- Creating multiple versions of my common DLL so that each WSP would reference its own separate common assembly. I decided against this due to the nightmare involved with maintaining multiple versions of the same DLL. Deploying updates would be a major headache, and it’s just a messy solution.

- Moving the common code to each web part and scrapping the idea of a common assembly. Problem is, it was a very complex assembly with thousands of lines of code. Not having this as a common assembly would be maintenance hell and would make versioning really difficult.

I eventually settled on the idea of deploying the common assembly via a separate WSP just like the wonderful internet people suggested, which unfortunately presented yet another challenge…

I was using the popular SharePoint Solution Installer from CodePlex to deploy my WSP’s, but it only accommodated a single WSP as part of its standard functionality, and I had two of them to install: my web part’s WSP, and my common assembly’s WSP. I didn’t want people to have to go through two full installations (i.e. run two EXE’s) just to install a web part, so I decided to modify the SharePoint Solution Installer to install both WSP’s as part of a single installation (one EXE).

Some hacking was necessary, so I got to work modifying the Installer to first install my common assembly’s WSP, and then continue with its standard installation procedure of deploying my web part.

A couple days later and the end solution works like a bomb, so now my common assembly is deployed independently of the web parts that reference it.

The details of how I modified the Installer to do this are too complex to post here, but I just wanted to pass this general info on to anyone out there who is stuck with this same problem and pondering possible solutions.

Happy SharePointing!

About _layouts and referencing application pages

If you need to reference SharePoint’s _layouts path to point to an application page that you’ve built, it’s tempting to simply go <a href=”/_layouts/…”> as this works in most cases. It works fine when referencing images for example, which just need to be loaded from the filesystem, and /_layouts will get you there.

A problem creeps in though when using this method to point to pages (e.g. aspx/ashx) that reference SharePoint entities such as lists or list items.

You see, if your custom code is executed within a site collection with a different URL to the root, like say http://myserver/sites/MySiteCollection, and you’re using SPContext.Current.Site to reference the current site collection, your code could break when trying to load a list or another entity via its ID, because that list may not exist in the site collection that is referenced.

I ran into this problem recently when passing an SPWeb ID to my custom application page via the querystring. I wanted to instantiate the web, so I got a reference to SPContext.Current.Site and attempted to load the web, but the code threw an exception and complained (much to my disgust) that the web could not be found. It turns out that this was because it was physically located in a site collection at a different URL from the one I used to reference my page. My bad.

Because the _layouts folder is a virtual path, it can generally be accessed from any URL, even from a location that doesn’t actually exist (e.g. http://myserver/ThisIsNotARealSite/_layouts/images/ANNOUNCE.GIF). This makes it easy to reference stuff in the _layouts folder from anywhere, but it can give the false impression that you can reference your aspx pages using any URL and everything will be hunky dory. As I learned, it does matter what URL you use to reference your application pages.

So if you’re using SPContext.Current in your custom application pages be aware that your context is derived from that URL location, and when constructing URLs, always make sure that you reference the page at the correct site collection location. For example, http://myserver/sites/MySiteCollection/_layouts/MyCustomPage.aspx.

One way to point to your _layouts folder correctly is to use the same simple method that SharePoint uses internally, which I’ve delivered to you courtesy of .NET Reflector.

string layoutsPath = web.ServerRelativeUrl + (web.ServerRelativeUrl.EndsWith("/") ? string.Empty : "/") + "_layouts";

Yes, it’s a bit crappy to have to construct URLs in this way (instead of simply hard-coding /layouts in your hrefs), but it ensures that your custom code will always be executed under the correct site collection.

SharePoint Nuggets – June 2011 Part 2

So the Nuggets I managed to gather in May was so much that my June issue wasn’t big enough.  Herewith the second instalment of my June 2011 SharePoint Nuggets.

Hope they spark some thought, discussion and potentially safe you some time.

Enjoy.

SharePoint 2010 Administration

• I ran into an issue about not being able to create a secure store key: "An error occurred during the "Generate Key" process" I read the following articles (http://www.heyweb.net/2010/09/sharepoint-2010-secure-store-service-error/, http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010general/thread/559f72a4-d9ca-4004-b5ca-a0fa6dbad51f, http://www.spjeff.com/?p=480 and http://sharepoint.nauplius.net/2010/09/secure-store-service-error.html. After reading them I realised that something with AppPool wasn’t right. I reviewed this via the service application properties option and updated it to use the SecurityTokenService application pool. I then logged in with the correct account and it worked.
• How to generate GUID when configuring Secure Store? SELECT NEWID()
• When updating service accounts via the _admin/FarmCredentialManagement.aspx page beware that SharePoint does a couple of things in the background. For the user profile sa for example, all custom mappings and sync connections are wiped clean. Note: After restarting the services, all settings are returned to normal.
• In MOSS 2007 a user with Farm Administrator rights will not have the "Create Web Application" link unless he / she is in the local administrators group of the SharePoint server hosting Central Administration. (I know this is related to older version, just FYI)

SharePoint 2010 Licensing

• Cannot edit SPD Workflows in Visio without premium edition – https://msmvps.com/blogs/sundar_narasiman/archive/2010/10/29/visio-2010-does-not-show-option-to-create-sharepoint-2010-workflows.aspx

SharePoint 2010 for ITTPro’s

• Cool SQL queries to READ info from SPS – http://vspug.com/ethan/2007/09/16/inspecting-the-sharepoint-content-database/
• Removing the "Recently modified" sidebar from the wiki library sections: http://johndandison.com/blog/post/2010/01/25/Removing-the-e28098Recently-Modifiede28099-from-the-Quick-Launch-e28093-SharePoint-2010.aspx
• PUBLISHING ISSUES: If you run into monster publishing page issues, then ensure that you enable "Publishing" and "PublishingSite" features. ( Guids in here – http://www.sharepointfix.com/2010/11/sharepoint-2010-publishing-feature-guid.html)

SharePoint 2010 and InfoPath 2010

• InfoPath string functions (toUpper etc) via translate() http://arichterwork.blogspot.com/2008/04/comparing-infopath-fields-case.html
• Did you know: To preview a complex form in InfoPath without publishing it to SharePoint, simply update the trust settings to enable "FULL TRUST" verses "DOMAIN TRUST"

TechNet Awesomeness

• Managing Digital Assets (TechNet article): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee414276.aspx
• Calculated Columns references – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb862071.aspx

SharePoint Nuggets – June 2011

You guessed it, it’s that time of the month again.  The topics covered in this months Nuggets ranges includes, Federated Search, Fixing Troubled Farms, Fun with InfoPath, Testing SQL Connectivity, Publishing Feature Mayhem and more.

Have fun reading through the bits and pieces I’ve collected over the past 4 weeks:

SharePoint and Mobility

• Cool blog post on Mobility feature in SharePoint (http://www.shareesblog.com/?p=280)

SharePoint Farm, SQL Connectivity

• If you are trying to disconnect from a troubled SharePoint Farm, simply stop SQL which will force SharePoint to give you the option to disconnect from the farm.
• To test SQL connectivity you can use sqlcmd -S <servername> -E
• Read this blog entry to find out how to see what port SQL Server is listening on (http://www.smallcitydesign.com/problems/cannot-connect-to-database/)

Configuring SSL for SharePoint 2010

• Export from IIS 7
• Import from website
• Edit bindings to web application
• Select certificate
• Add alternate access mapping to SharePoint

SharePoint Administration

• When creating a new web application, remember to set the “Browser File Handling” to “Permissive” to enable the loading of PDFs.
• Cool PDF icons for SharePoint – http://www.iconarchive.com/show/i-icons-by-treetog/PDF-icon.html
• Configuring 64bit Adobe iFilter for SharePoint 2010 – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2293357
• STSADM vs POWERSHELL commands re: solutions in SharePoint 2010 – http://www.sharepointanalysthq.com/2010/08/sharepoint-powershell-for-solution-deployment-wsp/

SharePoint Search

• If search crawler complains about crawling account cannot connect to sps3://[servername] repository, ensure to complete the following steps:
  • Open Manage Service Applications
  • Select User Profile Service Application
  • Click on “Administrators”
  • Add the default content access account and select “Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers” as per the following screenshot:

• If you’re having trouble searching the user profile store in a SSL environment remember to update the URL for search to sps3s:// vs sps3:// (Thanks to a client for pointing this out)
• Adding federated search to SharePoint, quick and easy: http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/12/federated-search-in-sharepoint-2010.html
• Federated search connectors – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/enterprisesearch/ff727944.aspx

SharePoint Migration Challenges

• Dealing with orphaned users in SharePoint vs AD – http://nikspatel.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/delete-orphaned-ad-users-from-the-site-collection/
• After migration, Excel Web Access is not functioning. This article describes the issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jjameson/archive/2010/05/04/the-workbook-cannot-be-opened-error-with-sharepoint-server-2010-and-tfs-2010.aspx. To resolve it, ensure that the service account has access to the _Content db.
• Taming calculated columns – https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/taming-the-elusive-calculated-column.aspx

I’ve just realised that my Nuggets for June are too many to fit into one blog post.  I’ll either start doing this bi-weekly, or post it whenever I have 10 or so items to share.

Hope this sparks some thought and potentially saves a bit of time searching the net for answers.