Cory Peters

Managed Account Password Management

by Cory Peters on March 29, 2011 in Blog with 2 Comments

I like the idea of SharePoint managing my passwords for me. I like the idea of no human knowing what the service account passwords are so that they are forced to log into their own admin account before modifying anything within SharePoint. The problem with this is that I just can’t trust SharePoint to handle this for me and even if I do it is very difficult to have a recovery strategy.

I’ve now been bitten by this issue twice in two separate environments. I can’t say what causes it but for some reason the Farm account fails to update cleanly and Central Administration is completely unaccessible. Thank goodness for my old friend PowerShell.

So you’re either here because your farm is inaccessible or you’re here because you need the PowerShell for resetting a managed account password. Either way… here you go.

Modify Password for Managed Account using PowerShell

$pw = ConvertTo-SecureString -String p@ssword1 -AsPlainText -Force
$account = Get-SPManagedAccount DOMAIN\User
Set-SPManagedAccount -Identity $account -NewPassword $pw -ConfirmPassword $pw -SetNewPassword

Now… if this fails for you because you can’t access the farm due to permissions issues then you have a much larger issue on your hands. You can try to give a user access to the content and configuration databases, local administrator rights and Shell Admin role within SQL Server but honestly I haven’t tested that scenario yet.

For now I’m recommending that companies do not utilize the automatic password management features of SharePoint 2010.

Adding a View More Link to Web Parts

by Cory Peters on January 12, 2011 in Blog with No comments

When we’re designing or mocking up a SharePoint Intranet, Extranet or Internet we always talk about content roll up. SharePoint does a great job with content roll up OOTB (within the same Site Collection at least) using the Content Query Web Part. However, any time you show the client the power of the Content Query Web Part a typical question usually follows…

I love how I can see the top 5 most recent documents… but where is the link to “view more”? How do I get to the rest of the documents?

Like anything else with SharePoint it’s the 80-90% that’s easy and the little questions like this that cause the grief. Now, you could modify the Content Query Web Part styles but that’s not very manageable. Or you could drop a Content Editor Web Part on the page but that seems like a lot of work for one link. Heck, with SharePoint 2010 you could even use an inline Web Part in your main content area and just include the link yourself.

Isn’t there an easier way?

What if you wanted something that looks like this:
Let’s keep this simple, make it flexible and allow you to use this technique on any Web Part, OOTB or custom. Continue reading →

Who is Rich Haddock?

by Cory Peters on December 6, 2010 in Blog with 2 Comments

I was recently working on some new blog topics and a possible white paper when I stumbled across this little bit in SharePoint 2010. If you have worked in-depth with SharePoint publishing then you will undoubtedly be familiar with the Reusable Content capabilities within SharePoint. So, when playing around with Reusable Content in SharePoint 2010 I found this:

As you can see… SharePoint 2010 ships with three pieces of reusable content out of the box. Now I can understand the copyright and the quote but when I saw the Byline I immediately had to ask myself the question that I doubt anyone else cares about: Continue reading →

Adding Links to Site Settings

by Cory Peters on December 3, 2010 in Blog with 1 Comment

In part 1 I covered Adding Links to Central Administration but now it’s time to take a look at how I added links to the site settings screen for my CodePlex creation SharePoint 2010 Site Styles. Note that the process is almost identical.

So the final goal is something that looks like this:

Just like part 1 this solution uses feature activation (no code required) to make this happen. Here we go! Continue reading →

Cleaning up Multi Choice fields in Content Query Web Part

by Cory Peters on November 24, 2010 in Blog with No comments

I recently had to put together a Content Query Web Part that displayed a multiple choice field. By default the multiple choice field displays delimited with “;#”. Additionally sometimes you will find this combination of characters on the beginning and the ending of the string. Here is my XSLT template to clean up the choice field and substitute your replacement characters. Additionally I split out some of the supporting templates as they are very useful on their own.

Usage

<xsl:variable name="CleanFieldValue">
     <xsl:call -template name="cleanMultiChoice">
          <xsl:with -param name="choiceValue" select="@FieldValue"/>
     </xsl:call>
</xsl:variable>
 
<xsl:call -template name="replaceCharsInString">
     <xsl:with -param name="stringIn" select="$CleanFieldValue"/>
     <xsl:with -param name="charsIn" select="';#'"/>
     <xsl:with -param name="charsOut" select="', '"/>
</xsl:call>

Continue reading →

Adding Links to Central Administration

by Cory Peters on November 14, 2010 in Blog with 2 Comments

This is part 1 of a series regarding my recent CodePlex addition SharePoint 2010 Site Styles. I’ve decided to blog on 4 of the concepts that I used in creating the add-on. These are topics that have been blogged about before but hopefully relating to a real working code base will provide some additional value.

The goal is to get some new links to appear within Central Administration. The finished product looks like this:
Continue reading →