Product reuse at Microsoft as seen through a FIM lens

Microsoft and other large software vendors often fall foul of criticisms that products overlap significantly, or that discreet functionality in one product has been written afresh when the facility is already mature in another technology. As I’ve grown to know it better, I think Microsoft’s Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) provides some interesting examples of the benefits and drawbacks of product re-use. I put these thoughts out as a set of considerations to counter the view that reuse is always a positive thing.

Note: I wrote this article a long time ago, and have always been on the fence about posting it because it’s an editorial rather than purely technical content. I’m not 100% certain this is the right place for this content, but I am publishing it here now rather than letting it rot. Because this was written a long time ago, some references are dated. Like this doesn’t speak of MIM, AADSync or AAD Connect in any detail, so put that knowledge to one side for now.

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Active Directory Account Creation Mode in SharePoint 2010

Earlier this week, I had the misfortune of generating an error I’d never seen before when building a new SharePoint Server 2010 farm. The error first emerged when the SharePoint installation process landed me at the Farm Configuration Wizard page. I wouldn’t have been running it (not advisable ever, really), but it’s the first page that loads after the Product Configuration Wizard completes, so my first Central Administration page was this error:

The page cannot be displayed because your server’s current configuration does not support it. To perform this task, use the command line operations in Stsadm.exe.

How odd, given the emphasis on PowerShell in SharePoint 2010! After a bit of head scratching and examining application and ULS logs, I navigated to the Central Admin home page and everything appeared to be fine, but then when I got around to creating a new Site Collection a bit later, I got the same error, even though I was able to create web/service applications. I had the same error when logged on as farm admin, farm admin + local admin rights, farm admin + SQL SysAdmin and farm admin + domain admin rights, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t a permission issue (and I should note my temporary fiddlery here is only really suitable for non-production environments). This error also occurred on some other Site Collection-specific pages.

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