AD LDS, SharePoint and Forms Based Authentication

Posted by George Khalil in SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, Windows on Apr 30th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Ever wanted to provide clients or other external parties such as vendors, affiliates etc access to your SharePoint Sites without having to provide them with a Windows Active Directory Account? Luckily, SharePoint provides you with the ability to setup multiple authentication providers and in today’s post I will provide you with step by step instructions on how this can be easily achieved utilising Windows 2008 Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) formerly known as Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM). Previously, the most common method of providing Forms...

Exchange.. Thou shall not forward

Posted by George Khalil in Exchange, Exchange 2007 on Apr 21st, 2009 | 0 Comments

I came across a minor situation today when setting up a forwarding rule against an Exchange Public folder. Having done this many times in the past, I knew I would get this accomplished in a matter of minutes. So I began by creating the Public Folder, mail enabling it and then when into the properties of the public folder itself to create a rule which would forward the items as they arrive to multiple recipients both internal and external to the organisation. The forwarding was behaving as expected for internal recipients but none of the external recipients were receiving the emails that were being...

SharePoint, Exchange and Office 14 becomes 2010

Posted by George Khalil in Exchange, Office, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 on Apr 15th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Microsoft has announced the official names of the next release of 3 major products, Exchange, SharePoint and Office. Initially labelled version 14 for all 3 I can sense “the better together” marketing theme that Microsoft have used in the past when it came to releasing the same 3 products in 2007. I will discuss some of the highlights below for each product. Exchange 2010 now available in beta can actually be downloaded from the Microsoft TechNet Site. Some of the features noted include enhancements to the “anywhere experience” providing enhanced universal inbox experience...

Virtualising your SharePoint Environment

Posted by George Khalil in SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, Virtualisation on Apr 14th, 2009 | 0 Comments

To virtualise or not to virtualise? I thought I would provide you with some insight into my SharePoint infrastructure setup and hopefully place some minds at ease when it comes to virtualisation and SharePoint. First and foremost, all of my servers are running in a virtual environment and have been for quite some time. Virtualisation is handled by VMware Infrastructure v3.5 across 3 beefy ESX Hosts running dual Quad Core Xeon processors with 32GB RAM each connected to a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network with 15K Disks. The ESX hosts are also housing other virtual machines outside of the...

SQL 2008 Service Pack 1 released .. Did it break my SharePoint Farm?

Posted by George Khalil in SQL, SharePoint on Apr 10th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Microsoft has recently released Service Pack 1 for SQL 2008 which you can download from here. Being the brave person that I am, I decided to update my SQL instance housing my SharePoint databases as soon as I could. Even though it doesn’t contain any new features but mainly bug fixes and a rollup of cumulative updates 1-3, I have a habit of being up to date! So, today was the day! After successfully updating my VMware ESX hosts to update 4, I decided I would continue with the theme of “updating” and upgrade one of my SQL 2008 boxes which is dedicated to housing my SharePoint databases....

SharePoint, My Site and Tracking Colleagues

Posted by George Khalil in SharePoint, SharePoint 2007 on Apr 7th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Social Networking meets SharePoint! My Site is SharePoint’s answer to Web 2.0 social networking public sites like Facebook and LinkedIn specifically tailored for the corporate workplace. For any organisation especially those located across disparate locations it provides the ability to create synergy between those offices and users within offices. Today’s focus is on colleagues and the colleague tracker web part. Colleagues are those users that are part of your Workgroup plus those users you add manually that are not directly part of your Workgroup. Your Workgroup is automatically populated as...

People Picker, SharePoint and Forest Trusts

Posted by George Khalil in SharePoint, SharePoint 2007 on Apr 1st, 2009 | 0 Comments

Everything in my SharePoint Farm was working well until ….. I decided to install the recent February 2009 Uber packages from Microsoft, don’t ask me why but I have a habit of trying to keep up to date, even though Microsoft explicitly states when you download the hefty packages that you should only install them if you are experiencing one of the issues listed in the KB article and should wait till the next service pack. Have you ever sat down and read one of these Cumulative Update KB’s, they go on for pages and how am I suppose to know if I am actually a recipient of one of the hundred’s of...