Tristan Watkins, Author at Tristan Watkins on IT Infrastructure

User Profile Picture Export Permissions

Most IT Professionals with SharePoint 2010 experience will be familiar with the initial configuration complexities of the User Profile Service Application but it’s probably less well-known that there are additional requirements to set up profile property export, and that some properties have further requirements still. SharePoint 2010 allows properties to either be imported or exported (but not both, out of the box). The most basic of these requirements for Active Directory export are the Write All Properties and Create Child Objects permissions on the OUs where data will be written by SharePoint.

We initially followed Matthew McDermott’s Profile Image Export suggestions but in our case these steps were insufficient, as detailed below. That article was written while SharePoint 2010 was a beta product. The User Profile Service Application changed since that release and is now configured differently, so it doesn’t surprise me that our experience differs.

You might wonder why we spent this much effort just to get a picture in Active Directory (of all places). While we think it’s important to have this knowledge for our clients and delegating photo selection to end users can drive SharePoint adoption, it is also used by the Outlook 2010 Social Connector. When you start using this great new social computing front-end, it just feels incomplete without a photo.
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Product Version Job: DCOM 10016 strikes again

For some time now, IT professionals have been modifying DCOM activation rights in order to keep their System event logs clean. In SharePoint 2010, that fix became slightly trickier, as permissions to modify the DCOM permissions had to be granted through the registry for the IIS WAM REG admin service and oSearch14 DCOM applications. Having made these fixes, I’ve noticed a new breed of DCOM 10016 error.

The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
and APPID
{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
to the user <FARM ACCOUNT> SID (S-1-5-21-xxxxxxx….) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

The CLSID for this COM Server Application is MSIServer, used to activate the Windows Installer Service. You can find this by navigating to HKCRAppId and examining the details there:

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Hyper-V video issues fixed by Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta?

Recently we’ve been considering a hardware refresh for our developer/consultant/architect laptop build (on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with Hyper-V). After a fair amount of deliberation we decided to pilot a new model but stumbled massively at the first hurdle: when we enabled the Hyper-V role on a new Dell Latitude E6410 we got a blue screen. Further testing revealed that the graphics driver was at fault and the SVGA driver worked fine. However, the SVGA driver only has single monitor support. Back to the drawing board.

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Optimising the SharePoint 2010 IW Demo VM Part 2

Continuing on from Part 1, in this post I’ll discuss the Microsoft 2010 Information Worker Demo Exchange VM, the SahrePoint VM’s event logs and potential future improvements to the environment.

Exchange Server Reconfiguration

Tidying up the Exchange server is a much more straight-forward process. In fact, all of the changes that I made are network orientated per the network changes from the first post, so if you are not adding a second NIC or a second fixed IP address on the original internal NIC, these steps aren’t necessary.
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Optimising the SharePoint 2010 IW Demo VM Part 1

Around the time that Microsoft released the public beta of SharePoint 2010 they also released a demonstration virtual machine, known as the 2010 Information Worker Virtual Machine, which was updated to RTM in mid-June. This is a fantastic resource for demonstrating SharePoint 2010. The content and demonstration scenarios (including walk-throughs) represent a huge investment from Microsoft and it would be foolish not to at least evaluate these assets. Personally, I think it’s silly to reinvent this wheel.

Now the public beta trial is expiring and people are moving to the RTM build. It appears to be much improved, in that more of the product works in this version and a few niggles have been fixed now. However, it’s widely acknowledged that the resource requirements for this virtual machine are gargantuan due to the breadth of what it offers.
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Scheduled Sitemap Generation for SharePoint 2010 Websites

As promised in my SharePoint 2010 SEO Analysis with the IIS SEO Toolkit post, while the IIS.NET SEO Toolkit does an excellent job of generating an initial sitemap and providing a nice GUI for ad hoc updates, it does not offer any obvious scheduling mechanism to ensure that your sitemap stays current with the changing content in your CMS. Thankfully, my colleague Glyn Clough whipped up some PowerShell to produce a full sitemap for your web application based on Jie Li’s initial script, which was scoped at the root web. Running this as a Windows scheduled task will get you a very up-to-date sitemap for all sites in your web application with very little on-going maintenance. Nice one Glyn!

Fixing the Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application Proxy

You may notice that the Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy is Stopped after deploying it in your environment. This is not just a matter of starting the service like it is with some Service Applications. In this case the SA proxy itself appears to be stopped.

Unfortunately I’ve found a problem with our development build, or rather, with SharePoint 2010. You may notice that the Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy is Stopped after deploying it in your environment. This is not just a matter of starting the service like it is with some Service Applications. In this case the SA proxy itself appears to be stopped. It appears that this is a known problem when provisioning this Service Application via the GUI. In fact, ours was created automatically as part of the Search Service Application creation process. At any rate, it doesn’t work in its current state in our environments, so it won’t actually collect any data.

To fix this just requires a couple of lines of PowerShell, courtesy of this article (to which I’ve added some clarification here).

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SharePoint 2010 SEO Analysis with the IIS SEO Toolkit

The IIS.NET Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit provides a powerful analysis tool that can generate reports for web editors and can automatically generate sitemaps and robots.txt files as well. These reports not only provide insight in to page rank improvements but also help content editors identify missing/duplicate content and find broken links. This post provides an overview of how the tools can be used by content editors or web managers who do not have access to the server infrastructure and what you can expect to see when running an SEO Analysis against an out of the box SharePoint 2010 Publishing site. I will also review the server tools that generate sitemaps and robots.txt files.

Installing the SEO Toolkit

Although Remote Server Administration Tools can be installed on Windows Vista and Windows 7, I have produced the directions below on my Windows Server 2008 R2 desktop. The instructions should be fundamentally the same for any OS once IIS Manager is available locally, however it is installed. To be crystal clear, the SEO Toolkit can be used by anyone with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. It is not a requirement to have access to the web server and it is not necessary to install IIS locally.

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Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

I’ve just finished watching Virtual PC Guy’s TechEd video on the forthcoming Dynamic Memory update for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. The beta release of the service pack is due in July. The video is fairly lengthy, at around 80 minutes, but is well worth a watch if you’re interested and find the time. If not, here’s a round-up: Continue reading “Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1”

SharePoint Redirections

In the lead-up to our SharePoint 2010 website launch I’ve been doing a fair amount of research in to the SEO Tools that work with SharePoint. We’ve been looking at automatic/scheduled generation of sitemaps, robots.txt management and conversion of 302 (temporary) to 301 (permanent) redirects. There are a couple of approaches to tackling the first two issues, which I’ll discuss in my next post, but this last issue is more peculiar to SharePoint, as you will have noticed if you’ve ever looked at Fiddler when you browse to the root of a path. For instance, if I browse to the root of my http://publishing/ publishing site I will be automatically redirected to http://publishing/Pages/default.aspx. On a blank site template I would be redirected from http://blank/ to http://blank/default.aspx. In each case SharePoint issues a 302 temporary redirect from the root of the path to the default page. This is not optimal for search on the internet, so many people have tried to rewrite the URL using the IIS URL Rewrite module. Unfortunately, “rewrites” are not supported with SharePoint but I have never seen this explained clearly. To clarify, this is what we’re talking about:

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