Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010 - Part 4

We will finish off by initiating a full synchronization via Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications / User Profiles / Start Profile Synchronization.

In order to confirm that the import was a success, the Number of User Profiles should now be set to the number of users in your organization, in my case I have 269 dummy users in my Active Directory domain.  Word of note; this will take some time and is considerably slower than an Active Directory User Profile import in SharePoint 2007.

You can also venture into Manage User Profiles and search for users (please take note that SharePoint 2010 does not display any users by default and that you will have to search for them).

Edit a User Profile to ensure that all the necessary Active Directory attributes were successfully imported.

We have now successfully completed a User Profile Synchronization which will form as a basis for User’s My Sites in my next article.  Until then, happy SharePointing!!

Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010 - Part 3

We will now venture back into Central Administration / System Settings / Manage services on server.

Scroll down to the User Profile Service and User Profile Synchronisation Service and start both.  The User Profile Service should start without any further user interaction, however the User Profile Synchronization Service will ask for your SharePoint Farm credentials.

Click Ok.

Both services should now be listed as started.

This in turn, will correctly configure and start our ForeFront Identity Manager Windows Services (FIM).

At this point, it is imperative you run an IIS reset.  Even better, just reboot the machine 

We will now configure our User Profile Connection to our Active Directory Domain.

Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.

Click on User Profiles / Manage.

Click on Configure Synchronizations connections / Create New Connection.

Enter the follow details;

Connection Name:

Type: Active Directory

Auto discover domain controller or specify a domain controller

Authentication Provider Type: Windows Authentication

Account Name / Password:

Port: 389

Click on Populate Containers

Click OK.

Your connection should now be listed as follows upon successful creation.

We can now easily setup connection filters against our Active Directory User Profile connection by clicking on the connection that was just created and selecting “Edit Connection Filters”.

Specify and Add any User or Group exclusions and then click OK.

Next we will Configure a Synchronization Timer Job via Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications / User Profiles.

Click Enable

Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010 - Part 2

User Profile Service

Now that we have successfully configured our Managed Metadata service we can now focus our attention on the User Profile Service.  The User Profile Service provides our SharePoint farm with all the social networking features that we have come to love in SharePoint 2007, plus more.  It forms the basis of My Site support, User profile pages, Audiences and some of the newer features in SharePoint 2010 social computing such as social tagging.

Before we begin, we need to ensure that our Farm account (DOMAIN\sp_farm) is listed as a member of the Local Administrator’s group where the User Profile Synchronization (UPS) service will be deployed.  Please make a note to remove the DOMAIN\sp_farm account from the Local Administrator’s group after provisioning the User Profile Synchronization service.  Please also note, that if you ever have to re-provision the UPS service at a later date, that you will need to ensure the DOMAIN\sp_farm account is added back to the Local Administrator’s group.

Let’s now navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.

Click New and select “User Profile Service Application”

The “Create New User Profile Service Application” window pops up in which you will enter the following details; (you will obviously enter in the details based on your environment setup)

Name: User Profiles

Create new application pool: SharePoint – User Profiles

Register a new managed account: e.g. DOMAIN\sp_userprofiles (nb: this account will need to be provisioned in Active Directory first)

Enter your Profile Database server details and database authentication.  You will notice that SharePoint 2010 introduces the ability to configure Failover Server which allows you to associate your SharePoint databases with another SQL server for failover purposes utilising SQL Server database mirroring.   We will not specify a Failover Database server for any of our databases at this present time.

Specify your Synchronization Database which is used to store configuration and staging data for synchronization of profile data such as that from Active Directory.

Next, specify your Social Tagging Database which is used to store tags and notes that are created by users.  Social Tagging is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 which is not only displayed against the items that user’s are tagging, but are also displayed in the user’s activity feed.

Next, select your Profile Synchronization Instance Server.

In the proceeding section, we will not create a My Site Host URL and will leave this for part two of this series.

Click Create.

You should now have the User Profiles service application listed and  started.

Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010 - Part 1

I first introduced Service Applications and User Profile Service Synchronization back when SharePoint 2010 was in beta, and as many of you who would have attempted this feat, would have come to realize that there were a couple of known issues, in particular those around utilizing a least privilege model with service accounts.  I’m confident in stating that these issues have now been resolved with RTM and in today’s article I will share with you my step by step guide in setting up the User Profile Service application, focusing on its configuration and administration and how we can enable the creation of user profiles via an Active Directory import .

SharePoint 2010 introduces the notion of “Service Applications” which build’s upon the “Shared Services Provider (SSP)” which was introduced in SharePoint 2007.  Service Applications are individual services that can be configured independently and can be shared across other sites within your farm with some service applications that can also be configured across farms.

The individual service applications provided with SharePoint 2010 are listed as follows;

• Access Services
• Business Data Connectivity
• Document Conversion
• Excel Services
• Managed Metadata Service
• PerformancePoint
• Search Service
• Secure Store
• State Service
• Visio Graphics Service
• User Profile Service

This article will build upon our initial SharePoint 2010 install utilizing the least privilege model which I have documented here, so check it out if you haven’t already done so.

Managed Metadata Service

The User Profile service requires that the Managed Metadata Service is setup and configured first before attempting setting up our first User Profile Service.  The Managed Metadata service allows you to utilize managed metadata and provides you with the ability to share content types across sites.  You can read more about Managed Metadata here.

To setup our Managed Metadata Service, navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.

Click New and select “Managed Metadata Service”

Enter the follow details;

Name: Managed Metadata Service

Database Server: <server_name>

Database Name: Managed Metadata DB

I will utilize the sp_farm account for the Application Pool Identity.

Click Create.

Lastly, navigate to Central Administration / System Settings / Manage services on server and start theManaged Metadata Web Service.

Farm Topology

Link

My Site

My site

Claim Based Authentication with SP 2010

Details

Useful info blog as Architect

Click

Sandbox Architecture

Details

Claim Based Authentication Process

  Details

Server Architecture




    Site Architecture

   




         Details

Project Server Architecture

     Details

SharePoint 2010 Architecture Drawing

SharePoint 2010 Architecture Drawing

I've recently been working on an architecture drawing for our SharePoint 2010 environment and I thought I'd post it here. The drawing covers all aspects of our environment from development to our internal environment (intranet) to our external facing public website. Take a look and feel free to post your comments.

Business Intelligence Indexing Connector architecture

Details

Performance Point

Details

This article provides a detailed look at how users and security are managed and configured within SharePoint


Click

SharePoint 2007 vs SharePoint 2010

http://www.rharbridge.com/?page_id=103

SharePoint 2010 Architectures Overview

              Details
       

How To Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 using Database Attach method: - Part 2

Step 2: Backup the content database of the Web Application from SQL Server. Copy it to the machine where SharePoint 2010 is installed and restore the backup of database in SQL Server using SQL Server Management Studio. To restore the backup you will first have to create an empty database in SQL Server and the restore your database one top of this new Database. While restoring make sure that the Overwrite the Existing Database option is checked (In the Options section....See image below)

 

At this point your database is checked for upgradation and transfered to the SharePoint 2010 farm. Now in the next steps we will start the Upgrade process on the SharePoint 2010 farm.

How To Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 using Database Attach method: Part 2

This is a Continuation of my previous post How To Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 using Database Attach method: Part 1 of my 2 Post series on How to Upgrade MOSS 2007 farm to SharePoint 2010 farm using Database attach method

In my previous post we covered all the steps which were to be performed on MOSS 2007 server. In this post we will cover the steps which are to be performed on SharePoint 2010 site.

The two steps which we covered in my previous post were
Step 1: Running Pre-Upgrade check command on the MOSS 2007 server, reviewing the report generated by it and fixing any issues which might be there in the farm
Step 2: Copying the Content database from MOSS 2007 server to SharePoint 2010 server.

Now we move to the 3rd Step..

Step 3: Create a new Web Application in SharePoint 2010. Once you will create a web application a content database will be attached to it, remove the database attached to the web application via Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Content Databases.
Make sure that no database is attached to the Web Application which you have just created.

Step 4: Run the Test-SPContentDatabase cmdlet (PowerShell). 
Running this command will check if the database is ready for upgrade or not. This will tell you about the things which are missing in this farm (E.g. Any setup files, web parts etc.). You can either attend to these missing features pre or post-upgrade but this depends on whether there are any items that will block the upgrade from proceeding.

Syntax: Test-SPContentDatabase -Name -WebApplication 

Step 5: Run the stsadm addcontentdb command to add the content Database to the web application which you created. This will initiate the upgrade process as shown in the screen below
Syntax: stsadm -o addcontentdb -url -databasename 

Step 6: Review the Upgrade Log file and fix the errors.
The upgrade process generates two log files. (Under 14/LOGS)
The upgrade log file which contains all the information about the upgrade
The error log file which gives you the error which occurred during the upgrade
You can review the log files and fix the errors by manually upgrading the Customizations which were there in your site

 

Step 7: Upgrade Customizations
You have to manually upgrade the customizations. I decided to copy the customization after doing the upgrade as none of it was blocking the upgrade. If any of your customization is blocking the upgrade you will have to upgrade the customization first and then do the upgrade.
 The customizations in this upgrade included the following things 
–A custom Solution (wsp)
–2 custom Web Parts
–Custom Images (/_layouts/Images)
I added the solution to the farm solution store by using stsadm and then deployed it to my web application then I copied the Web Part assemblies to the GAC and added the Safe Control entries in the web.config file of my Web Application then I copied all the images used in my Web Application to appropriate places (like /14/TEMPLATE/IMAGES)

Once you have upgraded all the customizations your upgrade is complete.

There is one more Feature about which i would like to tell you is the Visual Upgradefeature. This feature gives you an option to switch between  MOSS 2007 view of your Site and SharePoint 2010 view of your site after it has been upgraded.
Since your custom themes will not be upgraded Visual upgrade gives you an option to keep the MOSS 2007 view after you have upgraded the site to buy you some time to create new themes for your SharePoint 2010 site and once you are done creating the new theme you can switch to the new SharePoint 2010 view.
Following images show how the site looked after upgrade in MOSs 2007 view and SharePoint 2010 view.

How To Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 using Database Attach method: - Part 1

Part 1

Hi.. Once SharePoint 2010 is launched one of the first things that people would want to know is how to upgrade their existing sites (on MOSS 2007) to SharePoint 2010. In my previous blog post i had shown the various methods which one can use to upgrade a MOSS 2007 farm to SharePoint 2010 farm. In this Blog post i am going to show you a step by step guide to upgrade your MOSS 2007 Web Application to SharePoint 2010 using the Database Attach approach.
I will explain this method in 2 Blog posts.
In Part 1 I am going to show you the steps which you need to perform before you start the upgrade like the pre upgrade check and reviwing the pre upgrade check report to make sure that your content database is ready for upgrade. In Part 2 i am going to show you the actual upgrade process.
Ok..so without any further delay....lets start!!

I upgraded a sample Web Application which i had created on MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. So i will explain the steps using that Scenario.
But First let us take a look at the Pre-Requisites for Upgradation
Pre-Requisites

·                     MOSS 2007 should have SP2 Installed. You should have SP2 installed on your MOSS 2007 machine. The preupgrade check command was added only in SP2. So if you do not have SP2 installed you will not have the preupgrade check command in stsadm.

·                     SharePoint 2010 should be set up on a different Server machine. This blog post will not show you how to set up SharePoint 2010 so you should have it installed and configured on a Machine. However if you want a guide on how to install SharePoint 2010 then you can refer to the following Blog PostSharePoint 2010 Installation Whole 9 yards!!! 

So let us now take a look at the Farm Structure which i am going to Upgrade
The Farm had One Web Application. A root Level Site Collection with around 10 sub sites and one of those subsites had 15 more subsites. Folloing diagram shows the structure of the Web Application.

Following were the customizations in the Portal
34 Custom Site Columns 27 Custom Content Types
2 Custom Web Parts
1 Custom 3rd Party Rating Solution

·                     1 Custom Field Type (Rating Field Type)

·                     6 Custom Content Types

·                     1 Custom Web Part

Custom Master page and Page Layout.

The following image shows how the Site looked before the Upgrade. As you can see there were a lot of customizations on to the site master page.

So let us now start with the upgrade process

Step 1: We have to run the Pre-Upgrade check command on the MOSS 2007 server to find out if there are any issues in the SharePoint 2007 farm (like missing site definitions, features etc.). Running the command will generate an html report for you. This report will not only notify you of any issues regarding your SharePoint farm such as missing Site Definition Information or missing Feature Information, but it also provides you with a blueprint of your SharePoint Farm setup
Some of the details that are provided by this report are
–Search content sources and start addresses
–Office Server Search topology
–Servers in the current farm
–SharePoint version and list of components
running in the farm
–Supported upgrade types
(Inplace Upgrade and Content Database Attach)
–Site Definition and Feature Information
–Language pack information
–Alternate Access Mappings (AAM)
that will need to be recreated
–Customized List views (these will not be upgraded)
–Customized field types (these will not be upgraded)
–WSS Search topology
-List of Content Databases and SQL server location

Syntax: stsadm –o preupgradecheck

 

After you have reviewed the report and fixed any issues which might be there in your farm you can move to the next step.