Well Ajay and I have been BUSY. I’ve moved on to a consulting position and Ajay moved on from consulting to the top dog, Microsoft. It occurred to us, we’ve been lazy. So hopefully in the future we’ll get more content up here soon. In the meantime here is a link to a free course on Managing Infrastructure in Azure. Enjoy!
Search Health Reports
Microsoft has announced a new tool to help diagnose and troubleshoot SharePoint Search. Very handy indeed.
Creating and Activating Search Topology in SharePoint 2016
If you’ve managed to get the opportunity to mess with the newly released SharePoint 2016 Preview, and have been messing around with Search, you may have run in to an issue with not being able to create the search topology.
Thankfully, the errors in 2016 seem to be quite informative. What it’s saying is that the topology can’t be activated without the “Search” or “Single Server Farm” or “Custom” role enabled. My VM was configured using the “Application” role, hence the error.
Worry not! This is an easy fix to resolve the issue.
Just browse to Central Admin – System Settings – Convert Server Role in this Farm.
From the drop-down select “Search” and click Apply.
Voila!
Hope this helps!
Find Dead SharePoint Farm SQL Server
So…ever inherit a dead SharePoint Farm? Getting the “Cannot connect to the configuration database” error. Can’t run Powershell. No one knows who setup the Farm, what servers are involved or part of the Farm. Can’t run any Inventory scripts..etc. Sound familiar? Ahhh the life of a SharePoint Admin.
Well guess what…want to know how SharePoint locates its Config DB? Well it’s in the registry of your SP servers. Ridiculously simple and scary.
SharePoint 2007: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Secure\ConfigDB
SharePoint 2010: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\Secure\ConfigDB
SharePoint 2013: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\15.0\Secure\ConfigDB (Need to double check if this is still the case)
Recover Farm Account Password
Ever inherit a SharePoint Farm and then were told “No we don’t have the Farm Account Password” or any of the Farm passwords for that matter. Ugh…That makes it quite difficult to get in the game doesn’t it? Well here is a simple way to recover that password along with passwords for your WebApps or Service Apps. One could argue this is too simple so please do not misuse this.
Get User Profile Sync Connection Information
Have you ever inherited a SharePoint 2010 Farm and needed to rebuild the User Profile Service? No? Consider yourself lucky. If you have then you have undoubtedly ran into the problem of needing the AD Sync information to get profiles from the proper OU, CN etc. This little Powershell script will provide you with the Connection Account, Domain Information and Included and Excluded OU’s and CN’s. I found this a few years back. Credit is given to the original writer of the script as I only tweaked a minor portion of the script. All I can say is this one definitely is a must have.
Unused Site Collection Inventory
Here’s a little Powershell script to get an inventory of all your site collections to get an idea on what may or may not be in use as we discussed in a previous post. Some of this is borrowed from various places and then edited and tweaked to fit my own needs. You can generate a CSV or edit it to create a nice HTML grid. This script is the CSV version. It gives you the Site, Owner, Secondary Contact, Last Modified, Last Security Modified, Used Storage, and Storage Quota.
What’s new with versioning in SharePoint 2013
Versioning is one of the many things we love about SharePoint. It’s not very sexy, but something most of us absolutely need in our SharePoint environments. It’s there to bail you out if you screw up a document, or a content page, or a page layout. Versioning is available on almost all kinds of objects barring a few, like WebParts.
Why Self-Service Site creation is a bad idea for the Enterprise.
This is a relatively hidden feature that most organizations don’t use or maybe they do and aren’t aware, but when it is it can certainly be a godsend in an open environment or a nightmare in what is supposed to be a more secure one.
Orphaned Site Collections or sites..but what about the content?
Ok so we all know or should know by now SharePoint is a weird little beast. Sometime it does things people with years of experience can’t explain. Take for instance orphaned site collections. Have you ever migrated or deleted some sites, only to find something went wrong and you now have orphaned sites? Well if you haven’t yet trust me it will happen.
Sharepoint Admin Stuff 