Thanks again to all the attendees to my session and here are the slides.
My session at The International SharePoint Conference 2012
With the past 2 years delivering a greenfield SharePoint 2010 platform to a global law firm my session focuses on the aspect of SharePoint often overlooked – maintaining it after its implemented.
For those who have attended my previous sessions I continue the theme of sharing real-world experiences. My session aims to provide you with some key takeaways and considerations for any organisation looking at delivering solutions based on the SharePoint platform.
More information on my session can be found on the International SharePoint Conference 2012 agenda found here http://www.internationalsharepointconference.com/Pages/Sessions.aspx#CS712.
If you do attend my session and use twitter please use the hashtag #CS712 and I’ll happily pick up with you any discussion points further after or just come and see me at the end or throughout the event.
Finally, if you haven't got yourself a ticket to attend the event I highly recommend you do, meeting and sharing experience with industry experts is invaluable and a great opportunity to ask those questions you haven't been able to find answers to previously. The organiser Combined knowledge host a great event and I’m certainly look forward to yet again being a part of it.
I look forward to meeting new and seeing old friends!
See you there.
Paul
All good things come to an end…
I am pleased to announce a life long ambition of mine has come true and I’m shortly due to join Microsoft, UK.
After my second spell working at Trinity Expert Systems I leave with great memories working with some fantastic people and a company with no doubt a great future ahead. Not only have I worked with some great people within Trinity I have met some great clients who have made the last 4 years fly. If my time at Microsoft is as good as it has been at Trinity I am sure to enjoy the next few years ahead.
I’m looking forward to the challenge ahead and thank all those who I have worked with who have helped me get to where I am today.
User Profile Sync DB growing out of control
*** UPDATE 20/04/12 ***
February 2012 SharePoint 2010 cumulative update now includes several stored procedures:
“This hotfix package provides store procedures that clean up the Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) history tables during profile synchronization jobs.”
So the only reason you should be carrying out the steps in my post below is if you really need to (and I mean SQL is bursting at the seams) and applying February 2010 CU is some time away as this needs to be tested in non-production environments before releasing.
Information on the February 2012 CU can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2597150 also make sure you also review and download the SharePoint Foundation February 2012 CU http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2597132.
*** END OF UPDATE ***
Before I dive into this blog a quick question for you SharePoint people – Do you know the current size of all your production databases? and I don’t just mean content databases. Read on…
I recently noticed that just under a year after go-live a production SharePoint 2010 farm user profile sync database had expanded to 12GB. The sync database is for staging imports into the profile database as well as storing configuration information (more information here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662538.aspx). Therefore its not where the profile information lives long term as its a ‘staging’ database before committing to the profile store.
The impact of this database spiralling out of control was that SQL backups were unnecessarily taking longer as was SharePoint backups thus requiring more space to store and when considering if you retain weeks / months of backups this could have a large impact.
A colleague of mine Paul Hunt pointed me in the direction of this blog post which basically advises that after raising a call with Microsoft this database will continue to grow and there is no timer job (automation) to clear this out. Personally from the blog referred to I’m always nervous of running SQL scripts against databases due to potential issues with Microsoft support.
Reading http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff681014.aspx#resetSync this basically states:
“you can safely reset a User Profile Synchronization database without losing information in the profile store”
So proceeding with the steps (and testing in Pre Production) to reset the sync database, this did the trick and reduced the database to under 100MB from 12GB which meant happy storage and SQL database teams!
A couple of things to note is that you need to make sure you reset SQL permissions on the Sync DB and also make a note of all the synchronisation connections as the PowerShell script above will remove all connections and subsequent filters which aren't clearly identified from the landing page of the synchronisation configuration.
Finally this isn't a long term fix and as suggested in the blog post earlier a longer term resolution needs to be sought.
As always I welcome your thoughts.
Targeting SharePoint search scopes to different audiences – Part 3
Part 3 – Adding tabs to Search Center
Following on from Part 2 this post in the series describes how to create the tabs and secure them to only be seen by certain users (In my case ‘sales’).
To create a tab there is quite a simple process and to do this all you need to do is edit a couple of lists stored in the search center called 'Tabs in Search Pages’ and ‘Tabs in Search Results’
Select the first list above and add a new item to the list.
Tabs in Search Pages
At this stage you need to remember the name of the page you created in Part 2 as you will need to enter this in the next screen.
Once you’ve entered the information correctly click save.
This is the crucial bit where we set the security on tab to targeted users. On the list where the item ‘Pauls blog’ appears select this item and from the ribbon click item permissions.
Remove permissions to all users and add the sales AD group.
Follow the same steps as Tabs for Search Pages above for Tabs for Search Results list.
Once you have followed the steps above you should now have a newly created targeted tab within your enterprise search center as shown below.
Tabs in Search Page
Tabs in Results Page
Real world examples
To put some real world on this the sort of scenarios this could apply to may be rolling out people finder (My Sites) to certain departments or searching of legacy systems to specific users.
It’s also worth noting that this is series of posts focuses on non SharePoint (anonymous) related content where security trimming results do not apply. If security m ay be an issue this needs to be considered as part of the design.
Conclusion
This scope is not necessarily 100% secure as you could drop a search web part into a site and narrow it down this way but to do this you would need site collection admin rights so the risk is minimal.
This blog does not focus on additional security trimming of content and without testing and design you may be providing users to unauthorised results so the advice here is use an account to access other systems with minimal rights. If you do need an elevated results pane why not create 2 scopes / results pages and use different crawl accounts providing access only to authorised users to the elevated results.
I hope this has been of use to you.
