Windows Server 2008 R2

How to use PowerShell to populate Active Directory with plenty enough users for SharePoint

When testing SharePoint or any other software that uses Active Directory or any kind of data storage it is important to test with lot of data, data with variations and real life data. One area that is often forgotten is Active Directory, ok you create 10 or 20 test users, perhaps 50 or 100 users called Mr. Test Testson32 or similar, but that is not enough. I like to use some real world data for my Active Directories both for testing and for sure it looks more fancy when doing a demo with SharePoint (especially with these new social features in SharePoint 2013). So I’m going to show you some of my scripts I use for this.

SharePoint

Do you want to know more about the Microsoft Certified Master or Architect programs?

I bet you will! The Advanced Certification Team at Microsoft Learning will start a new Live Meeting series where you can learn more about the Microsoft Certified Master and Microsoft Certified Architect programs. It will be regularly held meetings where they will go into details about the programs. The program managers will make you understand the program mission and vision, how to prepare for a certification, how to apply for participation and the value of the programs. If you’re interested in one or more of these programs I recommend you to attend one of the live meetings or watch the recordings. Of course attending the live meetings will allow you to directly ask questions to the program managers!

SharePoint

Tips for doing SharePoint demos on virtual machines

It’s Friday and thought that I should share some small tips on how to make your SharePoint demonstration experience better. I assume that you have a quite powerful laptop with virtual machines running SharePoint. I used to do my demos directly in the virtual machine, in full screen mode. This requires that I have all the necessary client components installed such as Office, SharePoint Designer, the Windows Server Desktop Experience feature enabled etc. All this of course take resources such as memory and CPU from the virtual machine. Also Internet Explorer consumes CPU cycles and if you’re using Firefox in the demo you get another memory hog in your virtual machine.

SharePoint 2010

My SharePoint 2010 development rigs

SharePoint 2010 is one greedy beast and you can’t settle with your plain old laptop; first of all you need a x64 bit environment and second of all you need some RAM. Developing for SharePoint 2007 required just a 32-bit machine, less than 4 gigs of RAM and Virtual PC and you could do most of your work without complaining to much. SharePoint 2010 requires some more thought through development environment .

SharePoint

Fix the SharePoint DCOM 10016 error on Windows Server 2008 R2

If you have been installing SharePoint you have probably also seen and fixed the DCOM 10016 error. This error occurs in the event log when the SharePoint service accounts doesn’t have the necessary permissions (Local Activation to the IIS WAMREG admin service). Your farm will still function, but your event log will be cluttered. On a Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 machine you would just fire up the dcomcnfg utility (with elevated privileges) and enable Local Activation for your domain account.