Quickly Check Build Numbers for Common Microsoft Applications

If you ever have a problem trying to identify which version of your application its build number relates to, then I've got something pretty useful to help you out.

For the past year I've been referencing a community-authored blog that posts current build number references for common Microsoft applications and provides a download link to each cumulative update or service pack.

The list of applications that are referenced include System Center and SQL (definitely one you'll use a lot here). It's regularly updated (the new 2016 Tech Preview releases are all there) and goes back quite a few versions - MOM 2000 is even listed!

There's a handy navigation ribbon to choose your application or if you like, just use the tags.

Here's the blog URL:

https://buildnumbers.wordpress.com/

Building Your Very Own Internal or External SCOM MP Catalog

This is essentially a cross-post to highlight some of the awesome work that my buddy Tao Yang has been working on in his spare time.

Recently and for whatever reason, the official Microsoft Pinpoint Site has been missing some of the more recent releases of SCOM management packs. Now, before people start panicking and complaining that they can't get access to any new MP's for their SCOM environments, you can be safe in the knowledge that the Microsoft MP Wiki is the first place to check for all of the latest and greatest MP releases:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/16174.microsoft-management-packs.aspx

You can also get access to MP's by performing a quick Google (Bing) search for the MP name or by searching the Microsoft Download Center site.

The Microsoft Pinpoint site used to be a one-stop-shop for all your Microsoft (and even some approved third-party vendor) management packs and if nothing else, it was a handy place to go and quickly download what you're looking for.

The On-Premise Solution

As the Pinpoint solution isn't as reliable as it used to be, Tao first started working on his own private 'MP Catalog' for SCOM that leverages the power of Service Management Automation (SMA) and SharePoint 2013 to deliver a fully dynamic and up-to-date list of all available Microsoft MP's that looks something like this.....

Check out Tao's walkthrough on how to get this up and running here.

The Off-Premise Solution

Not content on delivering an internal version of his private catalog, he then got to work on creating a similar solution up in Microsoft Azure using Azure Automation and SharePoint Online as his preferred model.

You can see this second awesome post here.

Whether or not you ever intend on actually deploying your own SCOM MP Catalog onsite or off-prem, what Tao has done shows the automation extensibility that comes with both SMA and Azure Automation. I highly recommend you take a read over both posts as there's some very useful information and scripts that can easily be used or tweaked for different purposes to suit your needs.

Great work Tao and thanks for sharing this content with the community :)

E-Book Gallery for Microsoft Technologies - Your One Stop Shop!

I've just seen a tweet from Microsoft's Yung Chou about a relatively unknown TechNet Wiki page titled the 'E-Book Gallery for Microsoft Technologies'.

This Wiki page has easily over 100 different E-Books covering technologies such as Lync, SharePoint, SQL, System Center, Visual Studio, Azure (the list goes on and on) and there's also a diverse number of e-books in languages other than English.

 

The best thing about all these e-books is of course that they're all FREE!

 

I highly recommend you check out this excellent resource and get the downloads going for as many of them as you need to keep in touch with the growing number of different technologies that Microsoft has to offer.

Check out the Wiki here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11608.e-book-gallery-for-microsoft-technologies.aspx

Enjoy :)

Enabling UAG 2010 UPN Logon

Another UAG 2010 issue that we came across!!

By default, true UPN logon (e.g. username@domain.com) is not enabled when logging onto a UAG trunk. As a result, we had a site with UAG 2010 enabled and an SSL Portal presenting OWA and Sharepoint out to the internet. We had SSO configured for AD authentication.

When we would logon to the SSL Portal with a standard username such as kevin.greene, then OWA and Sharepoint would work fine. When we attempted to logon to the portal with a UPN such as kevin.greene@domain.com, then the OWA application would work fine, but the Sharepoint app would present us with a 'Permission Not Granted' error message and would proceed no further. When we monitored the UAG Web Monitor, we found that UAG was processing the UPN logon as domain\kevin.greene@domain.com and when Sharepoint attempted to read this logon string, it didn't want to know about it!!!

We found this on Microsoft's Technet site that pointed us in the right direction to resolving the UPN logon issue:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee809087.aspx

If you take a look at the section that describes the 'TranslateUPN' registry key, there are 5 steps to follow that will enable UPN logon to pass through correctly to the Sharepoint server.

Hope this saves someone else out there some time on site!!

Publishing Sharepoint 2007 with UAG 2010 SSL Portal

We have been working on a site which requires a bespoke configuration to present their internal applications such as OWA, Sharepoint,CRM and some legacy out onto the Internet.

The solution that we have recommended to securely publish these resources and integrate them into Active Directory authentication is to install TMG 2010 alongside UAG 2010 within a Microsoft Hyper V 2008 R2 cluster environment.

We had suggested to the customer that they could present the resources either through a single url SSL Portal - e.g. https://vpn.domainname.com/ or through individual application trunks such as - https://owa.domainname.com/ or https://sharepoint.domainname.com/

When we went about deploying the remote access, the OWA publishing worked straight away both inside the UAG SSL Portal and also as an individual trunk through https://webmail.domainname.com/

The problems all started when we tried to get the published Sharepoint resources out through UAG. Firstly, this customer had a contiguous namespace for their DNS as per the recommended configuration by Microsoft, e.g. internal was domainname.com and external was domainname.com. Secondly, they were accessing their internal Sharepoint server over port 80 (HTTP) and naturally wanted to access their external Sharepoint resource through port 443 (SSL).

When the Sharepoint was presented through the SSL Portal configuration, we would have all of the applications contained within one single window after the original Single Sign On (SSO)of Active Directory was authenticated. The url at the top of this Portal was https://vpn.domainname.com/

When we clicked on the Sharepoint application to open the site, the site would open in an new page, but would have a url of https://vpn.domainname.com/

Although most of the links worked, when documents were tested to be checked in or out, created or deleted, we came across a number of errors and quickly realised that we needed to translate the original url of the internal Sharepoint site across to the UAG SSL Portal application - https://sharepoint.domainname.com/ instead of the Portal url of https://vpn.domainname.com/

This is where the fun began! Mainly because of our lack of experience on the installation of this product, and also because of the lack of concise documentation on UAG, we had all kinds of issues trying to get this to work.

Eventually, we called in our resources from Microsoft Ireland who put me in touch with a UAG Specialist in the UK. Here is the basics of what we had to do in order to get the URL Translation working between Sharepoint and UAG 2010:


1.Changed the Web Servers Tab and Portal link tab so that https://sharepoint.domainname.com was used as the public host name for SharePoint

2.Changed the Path on the Web Servers tab to ‘/’

3.Used a ‘fake’ host header to allow SharePoint to distinguish between intranet and internet clients

4.Configured SharePoint AAM rules to generate the correct public URLs for Internet clients
It's worth noting that these steps were additonally on top of the original configuration that we had implemented and they were the changes needed to get the configuration working the way we needed.
After all that, I'm now at last much clearer on configuring UAG 2010 with Sharepoint thankfully!