SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

While working on a recent project one of the tasks we had to perform was to publish a Service Application across 2 SharePoint 2013 farms.

The steps involved are clearly set out on this TechNet Article

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ff621100.aspx

The SA we were publishing was the User Profile.

The first step is to Exchange the Trust Certificates between the Publishing and Consuming farms, this is very straight forward with clear instructions. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ee704552.aspx

The next step is to publish the service application from the publishing farm, again a straightforward task.

https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/ee704545.aspx#ProcCA

The Service Applications that can be published are

• Business Data Connectivity

• Machine Translation

• Managed Metadata

• User Profile

• Search

• Secure Store

The next step is to set permissions on the published Service Application on the publishing farm

https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/ff700211.aspx

using the ID of the consuming farm.

Finally connect to the published Service Application from the consuming farm

https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/ee704558.aspx

We followed all the above steps to publish and consume the User Profile Service Application all this seemed to work fine until we came to use a site on the consuming farm.

On a site on the consuming farm we were getting the “Sorry, this site hasn’t been shared with you” message from site contents, site, settings and the site sharing screens from an account in the site owners group, trying to get to user settings was throwing a correlation error.

Checking the ULS log on the consuming farm, we were showing errors trying to connect to the SQL instance for the publishing farm.

As both the publishing and consuming farms were built with a SQL alias the fix was to create the alias for the publishing farm on the servers for the consuming farm, this allowed the consuming farm to be able to connect to the SQL instance for the publishing farm.