Thank you Microsoft for introducing the managed accounts, else I would be clicking away for a long time, having to go through each application pool to change the password (map this scenario to MOSS 2007 or WSSv3). With managed accounts associated with application pools, it was a matter of changing the password for the managed account and it would ‘cascade’ down…

If you have seen my re-imaging VMs on the fly series, you would have seen that I am not using one service account in my SharePoint virtual development environment!

To update the password from the Central Administration GUI > Security > General Security > Configure Managed Accounts and click edit on the relevant managed account and then select Change password now and then select Use existing password. Enter the password that was entered in AD and click OK.

However, in a situation where I had 5 farms and 8 managed accounts per farm, it would mean I would be clicking 40 times at least to get this job done… ( not accounting for the clicks listed in the steps above )

So, I decided to get my hands dirty with PowerShell! Here is the script to use an ‘existing password’ from the active directory (after it has been changed in the ADS) for my managed account that I am using for all my demo web applications

#Set Execution Policy
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -force

#Import SharePoint Module
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -EA silentlycontinue

$m = Get-SPManagedAccount -Identity “sharepoint\sa-spcontent”

Set-SPManagedAccount -Identity $m  -ExistingPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString “pass@word2″ -AsPlainText -force) –confirm

iisreset

PowerShell experts, your feedback will be highly appreciated!

This script got the job done, but if there are better ways of doing this, suggestions welcome.

Related posts:

1. SharePoint: Change Service Account Passwords
2. SharePointv2: Access Denied After Changing AD Password
3. PowerShell To Change SharePoint Diagnostic Log File Location

PowerShell Script To Change Managed Account Password was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Now that you have captured your bootable virtual hard drive that was prepared for SharePoint Installation, you can apply that to another active partition or a virtual hard drive and then install whichever flavour of SharePoint you please!

As seen in the earlier post, capturing a virtual hard drive to create a Windows Image File is time consuming (compared to taking a snapshot in VMWare or Hyper-V) and memory intensive as well, however the advantage is that you can leverage on bare metal power – like having dual boot or multi-boot environment on your laptop.

So let’s apply the Windows Image File to the virtual hard disk or you could this another partition as well.

This completes the series & I hope it has been of value to you.

Related posts:

1. Capturing VHD To WIM
2. Create a bootable VHD
3. Attach VHD and boot OS in Hyper-V

Applying WIM To VHD was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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No more attaching backups of your content database and powershell to restore the deleted SharePoint site!

Head over to the site collection recycle bin under /AdminRecycleBin.aspx?View=2 and restore.

View 2 is the recycle bin that only site collection administrators have access to and is the ‘bin’ which receives content that is deleted from the end user recycle bin.

In the case of site deleted, it does not go to the end user recycle bin (view=1) but straight to the site collection recycle bin (view=2)

That’s it! You now have your site that can be restored as easily as any other list or library item!

If you’d rather go with PowerShell, you now have some new PowerShell friends to get to know

Get-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Server 2010)

Get-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Remove-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Server 2010)

Remove-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Restore-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Server 2010)

Restore-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Thank you Microsoft SharePoint Team!

Related posts:

1. Looking forward to this Service Pack 1!
2. Aussie First Internet Facing Site on SharePoint 2010
3. How To Create SharePoint 2010 Site Collection In Its Own DB

SharePoint 2010: Service Pack 1 Feature Recovering Site From Recycle Bin was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Once you have finished with the task of preparing the virtual machine, it’s time to create a Windows Image File (WIM) for re-use at a later stage.

Navigate to the folder where you have imagex.exe

Run this command

D:\Virtualisation\imagex.exe /capture m: d:\justsharepoint.wim “NKR”

Figure here under explains the command

/capture m: = the virtual hard drive where we have installed and configured Windows Server 2008R2, Active Directory,SQL Server 2008 R2 etc. as per the previous post.

Capturing an image is a memory intensive process!

Of course nothing like taking a snapshot, it is slow to capture but then you get bare metal power!

This image took 22 minutes and 24 seconds.

That’s it!

Next post in the series will show you how this can be applied to another partition on the drive or another virtual hard drive.

Related posts:

1. Create an Operating System VHD from DVD
2. Reimaging SharePoint VMs on the fly!
3. Create a bootable VHD

Capturing VHD To WIM was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Quick recap: In the earlier post, we have created a vhd and enabled the vhd to be bootable.

In this post, I am now logged into the vhd and ready to prepare my virtual machine for installing SharePoint 2010.

This is what we need to have configured, before we can even get started with the installation of SharePoint 2010.

1. Windows Roles and Features
   1. Active Directory
   2. Desktop Experience
   3. SMTP
   4. Windows PowerShell ISE
2. Populate Active Directory with sample users
3. Create Service Accounts for installation and management of SharePoint 2010
4. Disable IE Enhanced Security
5. Enable Remote Desktop
6. Installation and configuration of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
7. Installation of hmailserver
8. Installation of SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisite installers
9. Firewall and Anti-Virus

Windows Server 2008 R2 Features

Active Directory

I will not walk you through on how to install Active Directory Role, but will point out resources that you can refer for populating your active directory with sample users.

Once the active directory is installed on your demo server, next step is to enable features.

Windows Roles and Features

• Todd Klindt’s Blog Post – Setup a test environment
• Set it up manually

Populate Active Directory with sample users

• One of the steps outlined above
• Download the batch file to populate dummy users for SharePoint OR
• Creating 100 AD Users with PowerShell

Create Service Accounts for SharePoint 2010

All accounts will be domain users. Specific permissions are listed in the next table.

Specific Permissions that you need to assign

Installation and configuration of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Installation of SQL Server 2008 R2 as per these settings

Sample Databases

Download Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2. Install.

SQL Configuration Manager

Open SQL Configuration Manager and under SQL Server Network Configuration, click Protocols and enable Named Pipes

SQL Management Studio

In SQL Management Studio, create a new login for dom
ain\sa-spinstall and add it to the dbcreators and securityadmin roles

Install hMailserver

Download hMailserver

Installation of hMailserver & configuration of hMailserver for SharePoint

Installation of SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisite installers

• Online or Download the prerequisites
• Install prerequisites from a network share
• Installing SharePoint 2010 prerequisites offline from a local path using arguments file

Installation of Anti-Virus

Earlier, I had blogged on how you can install an unmanaged client of Microsoft Forefront. Refer to the blog post and install the anti-virus.

Quick Recap

That’s it! We are now done creating an image with

1. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (with Service Pack 1)
2. Active Directory – Sample Users and Managed Service Accounts for SharePoint 2010
3. Installation and configuration of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
4. Installation of hmailserver
5. Installation of SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisite installers
6. Installation of anti-virus

Now that we have the virtual machine ready for installation of SharePoint 2010, in the next post (which will be really a very very short post compared to this one) we will make the final move before installing SharePoint 2010!

Related posts:

1. Preparing for WSS4 Installation on Windows7
2. SharePoint: WSS Installation On A DC – PSConfig Goodness
3. TechNet Virtual Lab: 2007 Microsoft Office System

Preparing Virtual Machine for SharePoint Installation was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Back in the days when SharePoint 2010 was in beta and I happened to be at the Ignite Training in Bangalore, I had come across few features that I wanted to disable – for fun!

This is one of them – disabling the download from Office.com feature at the farm level, so you don’t have site owners downloading these templates and creating sites using this site template.

Well, this post in the draft folder finally saw the light of the day only because I saw this question pop-up on the TechNet Forums and I decided to finish this post at the same time as answering the question on the forum.

Solution

First get the features on the farm

get-spfeature | sort displayname

You will see "DownloadFromOfficeDotCom"

Take note of the -identity

Now to disable the feature

disable-spfeature –identity

That’s it! No more Office.com templates for SharePoint

There is one more feature that I had saved in drafts and will finally go live next week…

Related posts:

1. SharePoint: Howto disable editing sites with SharePoint Designer
2. SharePoint: Demo Templates

Disable OfficeDotCom Templates For SharePoint was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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I am interested in this service pack more then ever, for a reason – self service recovery of site collections and sites! As a site collection administrator, if your user has deleted a site what options do you have to recover them?

If you have a recent backup (which you would) and on-site (which you should not) then out of the box you can recover the site from an unattached content database… but that’s going to cost – time and resources.

With this Service Pack 1, SharePoint Administrators  will be able to recover sites from the recycle bin as easily as recovering end user content – libraries, lists and items.

I have always reiterated in my training and conference sessions, that you could recover end user content from the recycle bin but not sites… which will change with the release of the SharePoint Service Pack 1.

Post release, I will show you how easy it is!

To know what’s coming in SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1, head over to the SharePoint Team Blog

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 3
2. Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 3 (SP3)
3. Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (32-bit x86)

Looking forward to this Service Pack 1! was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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