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”

2.  Click on the appropriate provider

3.  Enter credentials on provider site

4.  Done – you are signed in.

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!

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!

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.

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.

See http://www.sharepointconference.com.aufor 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.

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!

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 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 Class – SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture with Paul Culmsee. www.sharepointconference.asia   Forward to a Friend 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! 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

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.

Well it turns out I had, however it had not come across from the migration from the old blogging platform I had previously used to WordPress when I came over here about 18 months ago.  A quick republish and http://mrhodes.net/2008/08/08/anonymous-access-to-lists-in-moss/ was online.

Fortunately the bulk of this article is still valid, however as it is SharePoint 2010 it makes more sense to do this operation in PowerShell :

In case the text isn’t clear :

Get-SPFeature -Site http://www.sitename.com | ?{$_.DisplayName -like “*lock*”}
Disable-SPFeature -id <<Insert ID from Previous Command>> -Url http://www.sitename.com

The only “Gotcha” with this is that much like in MOSS 2007 you must toggle your Anonymous access settings before this will take effect.  To do this, I quickly set the anonymous access on the site collection to “Nothing” then immediately set it to “Entire Web Site”

Some of the highlights for me were the Keynote.  Purely as an attendee in the IT Pro plenary keynote, I felt somewhat special as we were shown information on the next version of Windows which had not yet been released to the public.  There are some videos with more information on some of this that can be found here courtesy of Alan Burchill’s SmarterGeek site.

I was also lucky enough to get the opportunity to present on Private Clouds and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 in my session “From Bare Metal to Silver Lining with SCVMM 2012… Today!“.

Have you wondered what it would take to build your own private cloud? Going from bare metal to Hyper-V to a Cloud used to take a significant amount of time and expertise, but with the soon-to-be-released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, building a private cloud is easy and inexpensive, and with the beta of SCVMM 2012 you can do it right now!

 Join Mark Rhodes as he demonstrates provisioning of a Private Cloud, taking a blank server from Bare Metal to Silver Lining. This session will explain the core technologies of Data Center Fabric and Private Clouds with Hyper-V R2 and SCVMM 2012, and include comprehensive demonstrations of all of the steps necessary for you to go home and build your organization a Private Cloud, today!

If you are interested in catching this session, I will be presenting at the Brisbane Infrastructure Group on Monday evening.  More information and a link to RSVP can be found here.  Hope to see you there.

If you are interested in seeing the session, you can view a recording, however I strongly recommend coming along as its not really the same thing!

I love working with everyone in the community, so a huge thank you to everyone out there for making SharePoint such a cool community to work within