As Office 365 gains popularity and companies begin to approach truly hybrid deployments with technologies like SSO and ADFS the need to understand how it all integrates is much more important.

It’s a long standing practice for administrators to name new AD Domains with non routable suffixes (enterprise.local) or those that do not reflect their actual .com domain name bur rather the organizational hierarchy (company uses abcwidgets.com for their internet presence but abc.corp.net for their AD.)   The reasons for this vary, including simplicity and a misguided effort at increased security.  It’s also likely that when the AD infrastructure was originally built, 10+ years in some cases, the idea of connecting the AD to the internet was never considered.  This makes sense as Active Directory has been around since Windows 2000 server (1999) whereas ADFS came with WIndows Server 2003 R2 (2005.)

As we know ADFS (and Office 365 components that leverage it) must utilize a publicly routable domain name.  Thus our AD Domain for use with ADFS must not be something like .local and we must also ‘own’ the domain (not domain.corp.net as we do not own corp.net.)  For many potential adopters of Office 365 this is been too high a burden to bare and has hindered.  Fortunately we can use something called domain (UPN) suffixes to add our public .com to our internal AD .local and use all of the goodies ADFS and Office 365 offers us.  Microsoft has a TechNet Article on the subject but as usual it’s devoid of any screenshots or further information.  Fortunately it’s a very straight forward process which I’ll explain below:

Continue reading ‘Configure Active Directory for Office 365 and ADFS’

This is more of an annoyance than an issue – as it does not appear to cause any problems, however I am having problems with setting the owner of an audience in SharePoint 2010.  I am able to choose the owner via people picker and resolve the name fine, however once clicking save it doesn’t seem to ‘stick.’  When you view the audience properties the owner appears as a claims token, and when you go back to modify the owner it isn’t resolved (as indicated by the red line under the name.)

Note that I’ve replicated this across multiple farms – all running SharePoint 2010 SP1 w/ June 2011 CU (14.0.6105.5000) and it is persistent - I’m unsure if this is an issue with our build process, the patch level or otherwise.  Note that none of the webapps on these farms are using claims – however claims is use by SharePoint by default, internally.

As you can see below once the owner has been modified it appears as a claims token.

Continue reading ‘SharePoint 2010 audience owner won’t resolve’

Quick! What site template is your portal using?  It’s ok, I didn’t know either.. and I had a brief moment of frustration finding out.  As always I knew powershell was the answer, but exactly how eluded me for a brief while.  I remembered reading about Get-SPWebTemplate over at Jeff DeVerter’s Social-Point Blog which will list all of the templates installed on the farm, but not on a site/web basis.  I directed my attention towards Get-SPSite but that’s Continue reading ‘Find which template a site collection is using’