SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

A short blog post to highlight a workaround to a recent issue we experienced on a Project Server 2010 deployment. When trying to set the PerformancePoint unattended account we received an error:

The account credentials for the Unattended Service Account are not valid. Verify the domain user name and password are correct and that the account is located in a Trusted Domain

We experienced the same error via the UI in Central Admin and via PowerShell. The fix / workaround was quite simple in the end. This particular client had the HP ProtectTools enabled, this blocks any passwords being sent as plain text. We added an <SE>\ tag as shown below in the password string:

Set-SPPerformancePointSecureDataValues -ServiceApplication "PerformancePoint Service Application" -DataSourceUnattendedServiceAccount (New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential "domain\user", (ConvertTo-SecureString "<SE>\password" -AsPlainText -Force))

With this tag in place the HP ProtectTools ignored that fact that the password was plain text and the unattended account was set successfully. This workaround only works when setting the unattended account using the example PowerShell script above. It doesn’t work in the UI.