Alpesh Nakar's Blog » SharePoint Administrator

PowerShell Script To Change Managed Account Password

Alpesh — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:59:00 +0000

Of all days in the week, on Sunday [August 21, 2011] I decided to tease my SharePoint 2010 development environment! I decided to change all the SharePoint 2010 Service Account(s)password.

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.

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

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Applying WIM To VHD

Alpesh — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:35:00 +0000

This is a continuation of the series Re Imaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

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.

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

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Capturing VHD To WIM

Alpesh — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:00:00 +0000

This is a continuation of the series Re Imaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

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.

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

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Disable OfficeDotCom Templates For SharePoint

Alpesh — Wed, 25 May 2011 11:45:00 +0000

This is one feature you are likely to disable sooner or later. Very recently I saw the first template pop up in SharePoint when you click on More Options to create content.

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…

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

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Looking forward to this Service Pack 1!

Alpesh — Thu, 19 May 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Yes, it’s coming! If you haven’t heard, read then here is the repeat of the buzz… SharePoint Service Pack 1 is expected to be released in late June, 2011!

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

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

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Move SharePoint 2010 Site Collection To Another Database

Alpesh — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:31:00 +0000

I have seen this question pop-up in the forums and I think I also got an email from one of my blog readers asking how they can move a site collection from one database to another database.

This can be done via SharePoint 2010 Management Shell [aka PowerShell] and this is what you need to do.

You must have the content database in place [created before you do this operation] for a particular web application and then use the following

Move-SPSite “http://justsharepoint.com/sites/team” –DestinationDatabase “ContentDatabase02” -confirm:$false

IIS reset

Done. Your site collection is now in ContentDatabase02

Move SharePoint 2010 Site Collection To Another Database was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Remove SharePoint 2010 Social Tags Ribbon Control

Alpesh — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:00:00 +0000

In recent weeks, SharePoint 2010 deployments have kicked off and I am collecting as much information as possible and will be sharing them here as time permits.

Just saw this on the MSDN Forums today and I think this one ‘trick’ I must make a note of such, just in case.

This is an unusual request, but a valid one, since I strongly believe and advise (since SharePoint 2007 days – geez sounds antiquated!) that social aspects aka My Sites should be the last thing to be switched on in a SharePoint roll out… especially when the organisation and IW’s are just embarking on their SharePoint journey. That’s my opinion based on my experience here.

Well to track back to this forum thread, the requirement was to Remove "I like It" , "Tags & Notes"

Solution

From Central Administration

Navigate to System Settings

Manage Farm Features (_admin/ManageFarmFeatures.aspx)

Deactivate the Social Tags and Note Board Ribbon Controls

From SharePoint 2010 Management Shell

Disable-SPFeature –Identity SocialRibbonControl

That’s it!

Remove SharePoint 2010 Social Tags Ribbon Control was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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