Exploring SharePoint 2010: Managed accounts

in this first post of a series of post that will follow describes the new feature “managed accounts” feature introduced with the new version of SharePoint 2010. This feature is listed on this link under “sites” and is available in all SharePoint 2010 versions.

What is the managed accounts feature?

Usually, in a SharePoint farm an administrator is concerned in managing more than one account needed by the farm to function properly (e.g., service account, farm account, application pool accounts etc.). Most of the time, it was necessary to change the passwords of these accounts depending on security needs or corporate policies. This task was not always easy to accomplish with the versions earlier than SharePoint 2010. With the introduction of SharePoint 2010 this problem was solved by introducing the managed accounts feature. You have to register an account as managed account in SharePoint 2010 if you want to use it either as a service account or application pool account. In addition, you have the possibility to delegate the password change tasks directly to SharePoint.

Requirements

The password change of the managed accounts feature does only work if your account is not set to “User cannot change password”. If this flag is set, the change password functionality is greyed out.

If you want to receive e-mail notification events, the e-mail settings of the farm must be configured with a valid e-mail address and server.

The management accounts in central admin

The managed accounts feature is reachable in the central administration under the “security” tab. You will find there under “General Security” two options that are of interest for us:

• configure managed accounts: this page gives you the ability to register a managed account and manage the passwords of it
• configure password change settings: the page that specifies the e-mail with all the notifications needed to receive password change notifications

Configure managed accounts

When you press the “Configure managed accounts” link, you will jump directly into the managed accounts overview page. In this page you get an overview of all your managed accounts of the farm and the scheduled password changes.

You can either register a new managed account with the “Register Managed Account”, and edit or delete existing managed accounts. If you choose to edit an existing managed account, you will see something like that:

You can see that most options are self-explanatory. You can either change the password immediately with a password you choose, or you enable the automatic password change. You can setup when the password changes deepening on the expiry policy settings of your company. In addition, an administrator can be notified by mail to get an overview about all actions that occur.

Configure password change settings

When you press the “Configure Password Change Settings” you will jump directly into an settings page that gives you the possibility to specify the e-mail address that should receive all notifications related to the password changes of your managed accounts.

Summary

The managed accounts feature of all versions of SharePoint 2010 simplifies the password management of your service accounts and application pool accounts used in your farm.

 

Hope this helps,

Patrick

What is SharePoint?

My answer that follows every time I’m asked what I’m doing for my living is: I’m a consultant in the field of computer science that is specialized into Microsoft-based technologies. My main focus lies into SharePoint-based technologies.

And for 99% of the times, this question follows: Nice. But what is SharePoint?

In this post I’m trying to answer this question and to give an overview of the main capabilities introduced with the new version of SharePoint 2010. The content of this post is based on my past experience with SharePoint and content picked up from the SharePoint’s official website.

What is SharePoint?

A definition, on what SharePoint is, is described below:

“SharePoint is an extensible web-based platform used to create collaboration solutions.”

The words extensible web-based platform tell us that we have a system that provides us a set of basic functionalities that we can use either out of the box or by customizing our system with our own rules. The customization of SharePoint can either be done directly on the system with or without the intervention of a software developer. This system can be reached in a communities intranet or, if desired, also from the internet.

This extensible platform can be used to create solutions that leverage the collaboration between people in a community, thus, gaining people’s efficiency in information access and exchange due to standardized ways of interacting and creating content for the community.

What are the capabilities of SharePoint?

The unified collaboration infrastructure of SharePoint 2010, which is currently the latest version of SharePoint, is subdivided by Microsoft in following capabilities. More information about these capabilities can be found on this official site:

• Sites
• Communities
• Content
• Search
• Insights
• Composites

Each of these capabilities provides a set of out of the box functionalities that are provided in three different versions of SharePoint:

• SharePoint 2010 Foundation
• SharePoint 2010 Standard
• SharePoint 2010 Enterprise

The difference between the versions of SharePoint listed above lies on the pricing and number of functionalities provided. A general overview of all the features, their corresponding capabilities, and the versions of SharePoint that use these features, is given on this official link.

Summary

SharePoint is an extensible web-based platform used to create collaboration solutions for communities. The current version of SharePoint provides 6 different capabilities that group all the features provided by this platform in three different versions of SharePoint. In the next months, I’m going to explore with you step by step these features.

 

Hope this helps,

Patrick

SharePoint 2007 installation on a Windows Server 2008 R2: This program is blocked due to compatibility issues

Hi,

nowadays, we are only speaking about SharePoint 2010. However, there remain still cases where you need to make a fresh installation of SharePoint 2007 on a new operating system such as Windows Server 2008 R2. If you are one of the lucky ones, that has the very first disc of SharePoint 2007 without SP2, you will encounter this error when you try to install it on Windows Server 2008:

“This program is blocked due to compatibility issues

Check online to see if solutions are available from the Microsoft website. If solution are found, Windows will automatically display a website that lists steps you can take.

Program: Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Please read Microsoft Knowledge Base article: 962935”

Don’t worry about this exception and you don’t need a new SharePoint 2007 disc with SP2 included. The solution to this problem is very simple. You have the possibility to “upgrade” your SharePoint 2007 disc by slipstreaming it with the desired service packs. Slipstream your disc to SP2 and you won’t get the exception anymore. Some months ago, I wrote a post that explains exactly how to do it.

 

Hope this helps,

Patrick