SharePoint User Profile Services and Different Domain Names

If your environment has User Profile Service, have you noticed that whether all users are under the same domain? In our case, we were not and it created other issues when we want to use profile data. For example, when we want to query a user profile data, we don't know which domain this user was mapping to and it is hard to predict. In order to fix this problem, we have to fix this problem and have all users under the same Net BIOS domain name.

There are articles to show you how to do it. For example, you can find steps from this blog: http://tremblayse.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/ups-and-netbios-domain-name-different-then-fqdn-domain-name/. Since there are enough information on-line already, I would like to just mention our experience when we perform this change.

1. Make sure you have tested it in a non-production environment and document all your steps. This is very important to help you when you implement it in your production environment.
2. We have User Profile Service been running for a while. Some articles mentioned that you may want to delete it first. From my opinion, you don't have to, especially if your environment has large number of users or they have updated/added information to their profiles.
3. Before you start making changes, make sure both services are running. If you are not sure their status, you may want to go to the Central Administration site and restart both of them, one at a time.
4. After using PowerShell to enable NetBiosDomainNamesEnabled attribute, run the command with "True" to confirm it is up and running.
5. Reset IIS and restart timer job services. I did not do it in the test environment but had to do it in production one.
6. Some article mentioned that you can delete the profile sync connection before you executing the PowerSheel command. I did not do this first and you may want consider to delete it first. However, make sure you have a screen shot of the connection settings page before you delete it.
7. When you delete the connection and failed, don't panic and just restart both profile services again from the Central Administration site. Try to delete the connection again. If it is not there after you restart both services, you are fine.
8. After the new connection is created, run full sync once and give it several night to verify the number of users are imported. If the number does not seem to be right, make sure you have selected all OUs that have users. Rerun full sync if necessary.

The whole process may take over night to import and re-process all profile data. When it is done, you should be able to find all users are mapping to the Net BIOS domain name.

Hope this will help you to go through the changes smoother.

Account Permissions Needed to Integrate SSRS with SharePoint 2010 in Separated Machines

When Microsoft released SharePoint 2010 and SSRS 2008 R2, the integration process is lot smoother and easier then before. There are tons of information on-line to show you how to do it. I can easily find how to plan the environment, what kind of service accounts and permissions I need, how do I configure in different scenarios.

So, with so much information, I should be able to do it easily without too much trouble. Well, not exactly. One of the problems I have experienced in the past years with SharePoint configuration information is, a high percentage of them out there have assumed something but were not described clearly. For example, when I tried to configure MOSS 2007 to integrate with SSRS 2005, most of the articles I found at the time assumed that your environment was using Kerberos. However, we did not use Kerberos so it's hard to find out what should be done. This is no one's fault and it's almost impossible to put every possible scenarios into an articles. We just need to keep this in mind when we do our research.

The environment I was trying to work on was:
One WFE
One SSRS without database
One database server with all SharePoint databases

The service accounts I have are:
One Farm setup and admin account, which has DB Creator and Security Admin role. It does not have any other roles to the database system and it could not drop any databases.
One SSRS service account, which has no other rights in the database or farm.

The farm setup and admin account had created databases for web and service applications. When I logged on to the SSRS server using the farm admin account and started the SSRS Configuration tool, I had no problems to add SSRS service account and create web application for Report Server. I came to an error messages when I executed script to generate two databases for SSRS service. Though the databases were created but the whole process stopped and returned Insufficient Permissions errors.

I tried to add the SSRS service account with DBO role to the two newly created databases, I was not able to connect them through the SSRS configuration tool again. I got different error message said these two databases were not in the correct format.
I have followed the articles I can find regarding service account requirements and still not able to figure out why. Then I recalled that when we configured MOSS and SSRS 2005 integration, we needed farm admin account to have database System Admin role to the instance. Usually this is only assigned to the service accounts used by DBA team and not service accounts used by applications. I asked for this role in our instance and everything went through without another errors.

As far as I could recall, I haven't read an article mentioned this role or I may not do a good job when I researched it. Any way, this is my experience and if you run into errors when integrate SSRS with SharePoint 2010, give this a try.

Install SQL 2008 Express Management Studio

If you are using standalone instance of SharePoint 2010 and want to add SQL Express 2008 Management Studio to the machine, you may encounter errors during installation. The option looks valid is to add feature to current instance. however, it is not the correct one.

After some search on line, I found this blog with detail information Turns out you need to select New Instance option (I have no idea why) to continue. So if you were not able to install management studio for SQL Express 2008, try this article first.

Where is the Datasheet View in SharePoint 2010

If you have installed Office 2010 64-bit to a 64-bit OS machine, you may find out you are not able to use Datasheet view in a library or list. This will happen to users who is working on a single machine or VM environment with SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 installed together.

So, what can you do?

According to Microsoft, you can install Office 2010 32-bit instead. The other option is mentioned in this blog, install Access Runtime for 2007 or 2010. When that blog was published, Access Runtime 2010 is still in Beta version. Now you download the full version from here.

Find closed web parts all over your portal

For most users, it's very common to close, instead delete a web part from pages, especially the landing page of a site. As an administrator, you can go to each page and open web part maintenance page to check and removed closed ones.

However, how do we find out which site has the most and deal with them first if you have hundred of sites to manage? You can use a SQL query to geerate a list. (MIcrosoft said do not touch your database, so, this is just for your own reference and risk).

select ''+dirname+'/'+ leafname+'?contents=1'
from alldocs inner join webparts on
Alldocs.id=webparts.tp_pageurlid
where tp_isincluded=0

New book: The Black Bats: CIA Spy Flights over China from Taiwan 1951-1969

I never met Chris before but Clarence Fu is one of my best friends in military aviation field. We have known each other for more than 20 years.

Clarence has published couple books regarding military aviation history of Republic Air Force, including F-100, F-104 service records with ROCAF, covert airborne missions during the early eras of cold war.

History of U-2 missions with ROCAF was rarely mentioned in the English world and I am more than happy to see books like this available. If you are living near National Museum of US Airforce, Chris is going to introduce this book. You can find the news at: http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123199296

You can find this book here: http://www.schifferbooks.com/newschiffer/book_template.php?isbn=9780764335136

THE 1958 QUEMOY CRISIS AN ORAL HISTORY

I like to read history books, especially military history. In recent years, I have chance to know or obtain some good materials that I like to introduce to you. Although this conflict happened more than 50 years ago, rarely this type of historical information was published in English.

THE 1958 QUEMOY CRISIS AN ORAL HISTORY is published by the Military History and Translation office under Ministry of National Defense of Republic of China (Taiwan is usually called by westerners). This was the last major battle between Taiwan and Communist China and some of the U.S. military personals were involved.




The team worked on this book interviewed 28 people in the both military services and some of them became higher ranking officers in both countries. Lots of photos show readers people and events during that periods from different point of views.

I first heard this book last year from a friend of mine. I got it when I went back to Taiwan to visit families. I also had chance to obtain the other two in this series also published in English and I will introduce them later.

If you would like to order a copy from the published, here is the web site. The author of this blog offers couple copies he received and I am not sure he still has any available.

Enjoy it.