RE: Secure Token Service Basics

Just what is an STS anyway:

A Security Token Service (STS) is the plumbing that builds, signs, and issues security tokens using the interoperable protocols.

 

Difference between Active STS and Passive STS:

 

	Active STS mode	Passive STS mode
Definition(sort of)	In Active Federation your Relying Party (RP) has its login window (web page) and asks the STS for security token. "Active" to anything capable of using WS-Trust which is the protocol you use to obtain a token from an STS.	Passive Federation is when Relying Party (RP) does not have a login page and redirected to the login page located on STS. Since Web browsers cannot directly make SOAP calls they dumbly redirect to an STS and get the tokens.
Examples	Web Services/WCF	web applications(ASP.NET)
Hosting	Self-hosted / IIS	IIS/or any web server.
What protocol is involved?	WS-Trust protocol	WS-Federation passive protocol.   The lack of SOAP capabilities forced some creative solution for "emulating" WS-Trust on top of GET, POST and cookies: the result is the above mentioned dance of redirects, where the browser goes back & forth between previously established addresses on the resource and requestor domains and using cookies for communicating authentication information. THIS is what is meant by passive federation.

 

 

 

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/archive/2008/06/05/active-passive-and-passive-aggressive.aspx

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View PropertyBag using SharePoint Designer

The Property Bag Settings can store any metadata as Key-Value pairs such as connection strings, server names, file paths, and other miscellaneous settings needed by your SharePoint application.

In SharePoint Designer: To view the property bag. Go to Site -> Site Settings. Then click on the Parameters tab (not sure why they didn't just call it Property Bag). On this tab, you can see the values of all of your custom property bag values (it doesn't show anything built-in). If you need to, you can also modify and remove values from the property bag here. Hopefully this tip is useful sometime in the future when you need to check the values of your property bag. It sure beats the alternative of writing code to display it or firing up the debugger.

There is also a CodePlex project that adds a page in central admin to set the property bag at various levels(server,farm, webapp, site collection)
http://pbs.codeplex.com/
This one for SP2010:
http://pbs2010.codeplex.com/

Cancel a blocked SharePoint Jobs

If a SharePoint solution deployment fails, yet the timer job is created and not running, you will be unable to redeploy or retract the solution. The retract / deploy buttons will not be present in Central Admin and stsadm will declare that a "deployment or retraction is already under way for the solution". You can find yourself in this state if the “Windows SharePoint Services Administration” service is stopped when you first attempt to deploy, but even after you realise your mistake and start that service, the solution deployment is still stuck.
The answer is hidden in that long list of stsadm operations:
use the stsadm -o enumdeployments to get a list of running jobs and the id's and then use the
stsadm –o canceldeployment –id

This command will cancel the timer job that is meant to deploy the solution. Once it has been cleared, you can deploy successfully. Obtain the id parameter from the url to the appropriate deployment timer job in the Operations -> Timer Job Definitions page

Get the List of users in an AD group

1.       First get the AD path of the object you are trying to the members:

dsquery * -filter (cn=WWAPP-A-CPAAZDashboard)

You can even do like this: dsquery * -filter (userPrincipalName=user123*) or dsquery * -filter (cn=computername)

 

2.       Use the dsget and pass in the path:

dsget group "CN=WWAPP-A-CPAAZDashboard,OU=Groups,OU=WWCRO,OU=WorldWide,DC= companyname,DC=net" -members

3.       Now you can pipe the result of this command to another dsget to get the other AD attributes; Final command:

dsget group "CN=WWAPP-A-CPAAZDashboard,OU=Groups,OU=WWCRO,OU=WorldWide,DC=companyname,DC=net" -members | dsget user -samid –display

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Making SharePoint Offline Solutions(during Site Maintenance)

ASP.NET 2.0 introduced the ability to take an application offline by placing a html file named app_offline.htm at the root of the web application. When this file is present, all requests are routed to the static html page. SharePoint Offline extends this ASP.NEt 2.0 feature to SharePoint, and enables you to schedule when an application will be online/offline as well as the ability to set a custom offline message for each web application.

SharePoint feature activation problem.

If you are one of those who are having problems with feature activation even when you made sure that the dll is in the GAC and everything is looks good while SharePoint gives the following error:

Failed to create feature receiver object from assembly "xyzzyFeatureReceiver_0", type "Conchango.xyzzyFeatureReceiver" for feature b2cb42e3-4f0a-4380-aaba-1ef9cd526f20: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: type
at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic)
at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFeatureDefinition.get_ReceiverObject()

In my case the feature activation works fine in the Test environment but not on the Dev Environment.

I don't think its a true statement: "Your feature and it's feature receiver must have the same root namespace or the solution will not deploy."

In my application design, I have a feature receiver and the feature in separate namespaces and it still works.

Solution: It worked when I use the -force option while activating the feature.

STSADM -o activatefeature -n Quintiles.SDMConfigChanges -url http://entportdlb.inet.quintiles.com/SDMMapping -force

Saving an existing word document to Sharepoint

Solution to the following problems:

"while i am trying to save the document using save as dialog box,unable to save it to document library.but instead it is getting saved under my documents folder"

"UNC Path of SharePoint Document library not valid"

"We have a user that is having issues with word documents in document
libraries. When she opens a Word Document on SharePoint site and makes
changes to it and then wants to save it back to SharePoint document library,
she is getting prompted for "MyDocuments" on her personal C drive instead of
being provided the path to the SharePoint document library. The user has
Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003 SP2 installed on her machine. She has also
added the Sharepoint site as a trusted site to IE."

The Solution:
•On Windows Server 2003, set the WebClient service startup to automatic, then start the service. You may need to reboot the server for this to fully take effect.

•On Windows Server 2008, install the Desktop Experience feature, then restart the server.

Problem:
"The Folder is no longer available. The web server is busy. Please try again later."
Solution:
Issue turned out to be the ISA server - if you ensure that your Sharepoint Site is excluded from the ISA, you should find the issue disappears!
The issue could also with users using VPN.