Wictor Wilen

Last Friday I got the fantastic message that I had successfully passed the Microsoft Certified Architect - SharePoint 2010 (MCA) certification, something I’m really proud of - but something most of the community never ever heard of. During this weekend I’ve been pinged and messaged by a lots of people asking the question “What is a Microsoft Certified Architect?”. In this post I intend to answer it as thorough as possible, including my own personal aspects of it.

The best free SharePoint magazine published online, the DIWUG SharePoint e-Magazine, did yesterday release their sixth edition. As usual this is a great edition with a mix of articles for every aspects of the SharePoint universe. The articles are written by SharePoint community members and the magazine is compiled and managed by Mirjam van Olst and Marianne van Wanrooij. This edition contains articles ranging from hard core Service Application federation, to SharePoint Online and Azure development to articles on how to engage your users and project teams in SharePoint. As usual - something you just must read!

Another post you think! Does this guy have a life? Well, actually I do. But once you get me started , I’m hard to stop… This sixth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 is going to show you how to leverage some of the features that Azure ACS provides you with when using Facebook as Identity Provider. I’m going to show you how to use the Facebook Graph API and retrieve information about the user (and possible his/hers friends) - this is of interest if you’re going to build a community or something similar on top of SharePoint 2010. For instance we can use the information from Facebook and push into the SharePoint 2010 User Profile service once the user has signed up..

This is the fifth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 and this time it is time to augment some claims using the Azure ACS. We’ll do this to prepare for the next exciting part. For this post I assume you have configured at least one Web Application to use Facebook login using Azure ACS - make sure that you’ve followed post 1 and post 3 and optionally post 4 thoroughly.

This post serves as an index for all the articles in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This series is a set [not yet determined amount] of articles where I show you how to leverage the Azure Access Controls Services (ACS) in combination with SharePoint 2010 to make it easier for you to use identity providers such as Google ID, Windows Live ID, Facebook AuthN etc.

Back with another promised post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This time I’m going to show you how to work with multiple web applications. We’re going to use the stuff we configured in part 1 (basic setup) and part 3 (Facebook setup), and hopefully we’re avoiding the problems discussed in part 2 (common problems). Scenario In this article I would like to show you how to use Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 when we have multiple Web Applications in SharePoint. The sample will assume the same web application as used in the previous posts, but now with a dedicated My Site Host Web Application (called http://my). If we just enable the same Trusted Identity Provider to the “My” Web Application, the user will be redirected to the Azure ACS log in page, but when he/she is redirected back it will redirect back to the other web application (called http://sp2010 in the previous posts), because that’s the web application we configured in the Return URL in Azure ACS.

Welcome back to a third post in the Visual Guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. In the first part I showed you how to do the basic configuration of Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 and log in using a Google Id. The second part discussed the most common problems I’ve seen so far. In this post we’ll continue extending the ACS Relying Party to support another Identity Provider - namely Facebook! Depending on what type of site/community you’re trying to build with your SharePoint 2010 site it might be of interest to use Facebook login (they have like a gazillion of users or something). The Facebook AuthN parts are a bit different than the others OOB IP’s in Azure ACS - but not complicated at all, so let’s get started…

This is a the second part of the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. I hope you’ve read part 1 which showed you how to configure SharePoint 2010 to use Windows Azure Access Control Services, ACS, as the federated Identity Provider, IP. In this post I’ll go through the most common errors that you might stumble upon (most likely due to the fact that you didn’t follow part 1 thoroughly). These errors are also applicable to other providers such as ADFS.

The SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool (SMT), created by Microsoft, is a great little tool for moving/migrating search settings from one SharePoint Search Service Application to another, and even from a SharePoint 2007 SSP to a SharePoint 2010 SSA or FAST for SharePoint. The tool is available for download from the MSDN Archive - both as a binary and its source code. It is a console application that creates an XML when exporting the settings and uses the same XML when importing the settings, and it works great in a scripting environment. The SMT that’s available from MSDN Archive allows you to migrate Best Bets, Search Scopes and Site Collection Search settings.