Also available for laser printers – refill toner kits to easily refill your laser toner cartridge.

Select the User Profile Service and click the Manage button on the ribbon. You should see the screen just like the one below.

Default User
Profile Service configuration window after being created

Select Configure
Synchronization Connections in the Synchronization section. Now
click the Create new Connection option, if you see the
pop-up window In that case go back to Manage Services on Server and wait until the service starts.

Pop-Up window when
attempting to create the UPS synchronization connection

In the Add New
Synchronization connection window, we will need to fill-in several fields.

In the Connection Name
field enter a descriptive name of your connection, such as AD Synchronization.

In the Forest name field
enter the FQDN name of your domain (in my example: ad.local). Leave
the Auto discover domain controller option selected.

In the Account name, Password,
Confirm Password,enter credentials for the synchronization account
(sps_ups_sync).

User Profile
Synchronization Connection configuration

Now click the Populate
Containers button and select your AD organizational units you would like to
import. I’ve selected NetPro and Users OU’s where I usually store
all my users.

User Profile
Synchronization Connection – AD Container selection

Click OK and after a
while you should see your newly created connection listed. We can add
additional properties now, to tell the UPS Service that we do not want to import
AD accounts that are disabled. In my experience this is often requested by clients, so I propose
to make it a default for your setups.

Scroll over your connection name
and expand the menu using the black arrow on the right, then select Edit
Connection Filters option.

Edit Connection
Filters option under Synchronization connection name

Right now we need to add
exclusion filter for users that are disabled. You need to choose userAccountControl
attribute with Bit on equals operator with filter value 2.
See the screenshot below for the exact config you should perform.

Exclusion
configuration that would prevent importing disabled user accounts

Click the Add button – you
should see your newly created filter listed now. Click the OK button and
go back to the User Profile Service settings window.

What is SharePoint User Profile Service?

You may be wondering – why do I need SharePoint UPS. Just to make it simple and short – all social features from
SharePoint 2007, including My Site support, User Profile pages, audiences and social tagging is now bundled in the User Profile Service.

Preparing your SharePoint farm for the User Profile Service

If you never updated your SharePoint 2010 farm with cumulative updates (and no, I am not talking about Windows Update) – you will need to do it to enable UPS. SharePoint 2010 RTM version has many issues related to User Profile Service – you will need to update to the newest cumulative update available. Just to keep you informed – if you have December Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2010 then User Profile Service won’t work at all! I will be focusing this guide on the latest February 2011 Cumulative Update.

The best resource to find the latest SharePoint updates is TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff800847.

For this walkthrough I will be using the SharePoint Foundation 2010 (KB 2475880) and SharePoint Server 2010 (KB
2475878) updates for the SharePoint farm. These updates are downloadable on-demand. It best practise to make a full server backup before you try any Cumulative Updates to SharePoint (including database-backup), because there is no option to roll-back the update.

After you install both SharePoint Foundation 2010 update and SharePoint Server 2010 update, you should run the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard to complete the upgrade. After a successful upgrade you should verify if your SharePoint server is indeed updated. To do this, go to the Central Administration – System
Settings – Manage servers in this farm section. There you can see all your servers that are connected with the SharePoint farm (including smtp servers and SQL Servers).

Manage Servers in the Farm Window

Unfortunately, there is no clear information about the update – just  build number in the Configuration database version variable. In my case it is 14.0.5136.5002 which means I have the February 2011 Cumulative Update installed.
To verify this I usually Google the exact build number to determine the Update details. If you are following my links and you see 14.0.5136.5002 build – you have February 2011 Cumulative Update and you can continue.

One important note: if your build is 14.0.5136.5001 – you also have February 2011 Cumulative Update, but this build contains an error and you should download and reinstall the 5002 build of the February 2011 Cumulative Update to prevent farm issues.

Most of this article is applicable to the original RTM version of SharePoint 2010, but some solutions may not work exactly as described. I know that the UPS Service caused many issues before February 2011 Cumulative Update (and to give you more – the Feb 2001 CU is actually dedicated for UPS Service hotfixes) so I strongly suggest to upgrade – unless you have a strong reason not to.

Verify Managed Metadata Service installation

User Profile Services requires Managed Metadata Service to interact with. The SharePoint Managed Metadata Service (MMS) is a service that publishes a term store and normally some content types that the managed metadata will consume in its services. MMS is the key to the social tags and notes – since it is where where all tags are to be stored. You can create multiple MMS, but for the User Profile Service you will need at least one MMS.

First we will check if there is at least one MMS installed and configured.

Go to Central Administration – Application Management – Manage Service Applications and look for the Managed Metadata Service. If you used Configuration Wizard on your farm (which is what I would personally would recommend), you will probably have one MSS.

Managed Metadata Service in the Service Applications window

If you don’t have one, from the ribbon select the icon New and choose Managed Metadata Service. Then you will have to setup some MMS properties – which you also need to verify when you actually had one MMS before (then you have to mark the Managed Metadata Service and click on the properties icon in the ribbon).

Managed Metadata Service properties window – top
Continues…

Leave Default Master Pages In Peace

SharePoint 2010 comes with three out-of-box Master Pages  – v4.master (the default SP2010 design), default.master (the old MOSS2007 look) and minimal.master (used in SP2010 Search Center). In this tutorial we will create a new masterpage using the v4.master as a template and then connect the newly created custom Master Page to our site. It is a good idea to leave the default Master Pages untouched (at least for the examples in this post).

First we need to clone the v4.master file. Open SharePoint Designer 2010, and from the Sites tab select the Open Site icon and enter your site URL.

SharePoint Designer 2010 – Open Site window

The site root will be opened in SharePoint Designer 2010. Now select Master Pages from the left menu, click on the v4.master file and press CTRL+C and CTRL+V to create a
copy of the .master file.

SharePoint Designer 2010 with copy of the v4.master file

Now name your master page – click on the Rename icon in the ribbon and enter your custom name (for example myCustom.master).

Now using the newly created master page we are now ready to make the modifications. Users of your SharePoint site will not notice that we are changing anything, and if you will break something – you will break custom master page, not the one users are seeing.

Create a Custom CSS to Add Branding

Next we need a CSS file which overrides the default core4.css style definitions. To see some changes to our
customizations, we will include the fixed width style for our new master page.

Open SharePoint Designer 2010, select All files from the left menu and then enter the Style library.

To create a new css file, right click on the Style Library and select New > CSS from menu.

New CSS file menu in Style Library

Name this file myCustom.css, just to keep the naming schema consistent with our custom Master Page.

Right click the newly created .css file and select the Edit file in Advanced Mode option.

SharePoint Designer menu available on the CSS file

Continues…

Error occured in deployment step: “Recycle IIS application pool”: The local sharepoint server is not available. Check that the server is running and connected to the sharepoint farm

There are several possible remedies for this:

• Ensure that  SharePoint is installed on the same machine as Visual Studio
• Ensure SQL Server is started are running properly
• Set the current user to db_owner

In General Settings for the SharePoint site set the Browser File Handling to Permissive. You then need to restart IIS for the changes to have effect.

Note that the Browser File Handling setting is specific to each site and so this procedure must be repeated for all sub-sites which need to display PDFs.

PowerShell can be very useful for automating tasks such as backing up SharePoint sites.

The below example demostrates a simple backup scenario where PowerShell is used to backup and entire SharePoint site:

1. Open a new text file and enter Backup-SPFarm -Directory D:Backup -BackupMethod full
2. Save the file as D:ScriptsSharePoint_Backup.ps1.  Note, that you may need to use “set-executionpolicy RemoteSigned” to allow for running of a local unsigned ps1 file.
3. Enter powershell -command E:ScriptsSharePoint_Backup.ps1 in the command line (or alternatively in a batch file).
4. In the Task Scheduler, make sure that the account has admin permissions. For details on how to use the Task Scheduler see here.

When doing SharePoint farm backups, SharePoint instructs SQL Server to perform database dump to your chosen location so there are some issues to note to avoid complications with the backup task :

• The Central Admin app pool account will require both  read and write access to the backups’ location.
• The SQL Server Service account will require both  read and write access to the backups’ location.
• When performing a farm backup using  STSADM or  PowerShell, the account running it will require both  read and write access to the backups’ location
• The location will need to be accessible from the SharePoint system the running the backup.
• The location will need to be accessible from  the SQL Server instance that SharePoint is attempting to back up.

Got to Central Admin > Web Application Management > Select your web app > Select General Settings on the ribbon > set the Browser File Handling to Permissive

Note that this is only necessary in SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2007 can display swf files by default