SharePoint Secrets

The “User” in the User Profile Service In a typical business system, a user is determined by the identity presented to the system. Once this identity is confirmed, business system follows a certain set of rules and policies to give appropriate access. But there is rich information about this user’s activity in the system that the corporation overall can benefit from and the user can benefit from. In the User Profile Service, we think of the user at the center of it all as a “person” in the profile store who has a face -through the Profile, My Site, News feed; has a web service that can be crawled - for example for Social search; a store backing the person up and; relationships and a networks in the enterprise. Need for the User Profile Synchronization Service With that mindset, that is “person” at the center, as the cornerstone of the User Profile Service architecture, the question becomes, how does one get started in accumulating interesting information about a user in the user profil...

Planning and implementing Exclusion Filters for SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization (UPS) is without doubt one of the most important aspects of any UPS deployment. By making use of Exclusion Filters we can narrow down the objects we sync with. Exclusion Filters reduce the amount of “junk” in the Profile database and can significantly decrease the time taken to perform synchronization runs. I will be posting more about Exclusion Filters in general soon, but for this post I will concentrate on the most commonly used filter – that of the userAccountControl attribute in Active Directory. This is by far the one I am asked about most, and is commonly misunderstood. The userAccountControl attribute is used to store the account options for an AD user object. These options include the status of the account (e.g. disabled, or locked out). Each option is a property flag. These flags are cumulative and thus there is only ever one value for userAccountControl. Therefore it makes sen...

After upgrading our SharePoint 2007 server to 2010 I got this error when doing any people search: No refinements available. Property doesn’t exist or is used in a manner inconsistent with schema settings Small fix: Edit the People Core Result Web Part on the search result page and expand the “Display properties” and make sure “Use Location Virtualization” is checked.