Some SharePoint users always show up as DOMAIN\username

Posted on May 8, 2017 by dakojususheel@gmail.com

This is a common issue that most of SharePoint Admin or Developers come across where some users do not resolve to First Name Last Name but instead, they resolve as ‘domain\username’.

For instance, it resolves as microsoft\sdakoju instead of Susheel Dakoju within the address book of SharePoint.

Following two steps seems to have worked for me. I am just jotting them down and might help someone out there facing the same issue.

Run Set-SPUser PowerShell Command
1. Specifies that user information will be synchronized from the user directory store.
```
Set-SPUser -Identity ‘i:0#.w|microsoft\sdakoju’ –Web https://yourdomain/ –SyncFromAD
```
Delete the user from the UIL (User Information List) – (Optional)
1. The User Information List (“/_catalogs/users/simple.aspx” or “_catalogs/users/detail.aspx”) is a hidden list in each site collection that is only visible and accessible to Site Collection Administrators. The User Information List stores metadata information about a user.
2. It is totally safe to delete the user from this list, the user will get added or recreated when the user visits the sites.

Regarding how this might have happened in the first place, I did not perform any root cause analysis due to pressing timeline to resolve the issue.

There could be multiple reasons, following is

Username or some user information may have been edited in Active Directory.
For instance, some users move from temp to full time so the username might have changed to the one without temp.
- sdakoju-temp to sdakoju or
- sdakoju-domain1 to sdakoju-domain etc.
There could be an error or issue while the SharePoint profile Sync is running.
- Check the error log for more details.
Core user profile services and other supporting services might not have recovered due to unplanned reboot or patching.

Happy TroubleShooting!!

Managed Metadata Services – SharePoint 2010/2013: Part 2/4 – Creating your first Managed Metadata Service Application

Posted on February 18, 2015 by dakojususheel@gmail.com

This blog post Part 2/4 is all about what Managed Metadata is for SharePoint, why is it so important to maintain accurate and consisted metadata across portals and how SharePoint can help manage metadata.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Creating your first Managed Metadata Service Application
Part 3: Creating Term set, Terms and Tagging content with managed terms.
Part 4: Leveraging Termset to create and update Site Navigation

Step 1: Create new Managed Metadata Service using ‘New’ under ‘Service Applications’ section with in the ribbon.

Add new Managed Metadata Service

Step 2: Give appropriate name to your service application, database name and you may create or use an existing application pool.

Step 3: Confirm if the Service Application is created. Please see highlighted below.

Step 4: Make sure Managed Metadata Web Service is started under Central Administration > System Settings > Manage services on server

You may have encountered the following error. Please see the resolution following the screen capture.

Make sure your ‘Managed Metadata Web Service’ is started.

Step 5: Reset IIS. Highly recommended.

You are all set! Congratulate yourself, you created your first Managed Metadata Service.

Things to observe:

1. You should see at a database created with the name you gave to the Database in step 2.

Managed Metadata Service Database

2. Also there Should be an entry in the IIS, click explore and you should see a folder with .svc file.

Explore Managed Metadata IIS Entry

Please continue to read other related blog posts for more understanding of Managed Metadata services with SharePoint.

SharePoint Fast Search Concepts and Terminology – Part 3/4

Posted on February 13, 2015 by dakojususheel@gmail.com

This blog post is Part 3/3 of blog post series that will help you to get familiar with few concepts and terminologies referred in any search technology. As this blog series is more focused towards ‘Fast Search for SharePoint’ you may see jargon relevant to this.

Please check other related posts Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

The following graphic gives ten thousand foot view of what I am trying to capture and explain in this blog post series.

7.Rank Tuning

By definition ‘Rank’ is the position in the hierarchy, in the search world ‘Rank’ is the position of the search result item in the result set. For instance, lets consider Bing or Google Search, when you search for ‘shoes’ or ‘vacation’ or in fact any search term you will find lot of search results. The first few results are the one user would click and finally end up being the revenue generators. So it is important to have your website show up in the first few results and is influenced by Rank. Seriously, how many times did you pass the first page of Google search results? So there are various technique that can be used to tune your Ranking. In the Fast Search world we have the following techniques.

7.1 Static/Quality Rank Tuning: URL Depth, Doc Rank, Site Rank, Hard Wired Boost

As the name indicates this the technique works independent of the search term. Which means that you would like to rank items independent of what user searches. Confused? OK, let me go through few examples and you would realize that you can tune Ranking independent of search terms.

URL Depth Ranking:
Observe the below URLs and think about which of the two link, you would prefer to click?

1. http://www.sdakoju.wordpress.com/post/2015/mostpopular/fastsearchconfiguration

OR

2. http://www.sdakoju.wordpress.com/FS4SPConfiguration

I would choose the second one, because it is more readable, clean and a more friendly URL. The depth of the URL is very less compared to the first one. ‘Depth’ indicates the importance or popularity of the page. The more deep the the page lies with in the site, the less popular the page is. Obviously, you would always highlight your popular pages as your landing or one level below items. Search engines would like to show popular pages and not disliked or unknown pages lying some where deep down in the site.

Doc Rank:
If you have a page that is referenced across multiple pages, it influences the rank. Pages like these are ranked higher.

Site Rank:
This is similar to Doc Rank, the more links pointing the site or items with in the site the site has a higher rank

Hard Wired Boost:
Items can be give static ranking via Powershell and forcefully shown are high rank items

7.2 Dynamic Ranking:

This ranking value is based on query and its relation to the result set. This ranking is based on an multiple techniques/algorithms that influence ranking. Covering those is out of scope of this blog post. Please refer to Tune Dynamic Rank

SharePoint Fast Search Concepts and Terminology – Part 2/4

Posted on February 9, 2015 by dakojususheel@gmail.com

This blog post is Part 2/4 of blog post series that will help you to get familiar with few concepts and terminologies referred in any search technology. As this blog series is more focused towards ‘Fast Search for SharePoint’ you may see jargon relevant to this.

Please check other related posts Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

The following graphic gives ten thousand foot view of what I am trying to capture and explain in this blog post series.

5. Recall and Precision

The total number of results in the result set for a query. You have to find a fair balance between Recall and Precision. The results set should not be too large and should avoid noise as much as possible. If the Recall is too large or too small it will hamper Precision.

There are various techniques to improve Recall such as Synonyms, Stemming etc.

Synonyms:

This is pretty common technique and a very obvious one. For instance, if you search for “happy” the search would also query for “joy”, “elated”, “merry” etc.

Stemming:

The use of Stemming is to get to the root form of a word. Stemming compares the root forms of the search terms to the documents in its content sources. For example, if the user enters “viewer” as the query, the search engine searches for “view” and returns all documents with view, viewer, viewing, preview, review etc

Recall and Precision Balance

6. Corpus

Corpus is Latin term for body. In the Search world, it refers to the scope of all the content sources the crawler would crawl and indexes. Following gives an example of what Corpus can include.

Corpus in Search

Errors were encountered during the configuration of the Search Service Application.

Posted on February 2, 2015 by dakojususheel@gmail.com

I have encountered the following exception after configuring Domain Controller on my stand alone SharePoint 2013 Azure VM.

The actual exceptions is “Windows NT user or group ‘SDsdakoju’ not found. Check the name again. at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection, Action`1 wrapCloseInAction) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.”

Root Cause:
Since I did not start off with a Domain Controller, all my SQL accounts were in “machinenameusername” format, so the SQL server Logins did not get the updated username format “domainnameusername”

Following is the screen capture of the exception

Windows NT user or group not found

Resolution:

I have modified the user accounts to “domainname/username” . I set my domain as ‘SD’. Please see below Before-After screen captures. Everything else is self-explanatory.

Errors were encountered during the configuration of the Search Service Application

Screen capture showing before and after changes to the SQL Logins

Hope this helps to resolve your issue.

Run Set-SPUser PowerShell Command

Delete the user from the UIL (User Information List) – (Optional)