SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

The User Profile Service is an incredibly powerful part of SharePoint. When used correctly it vastly improves the experience of your users by adding a real sense of personal ownership of your sites and their content.

Unfortunately like any complex system, identifying and fixing issues can be a painful process. There is minimal information provided in the site and almost none regarding the connection between the service and Active Directory.

In SharePoint 2010, the user profile sync is controlled by the ForeFront Identity Manager service, this is a Windows service that handles the connections between Active Directory, any BDC connections defined and the SharePoint site collections and sites.

The workings of the service are somewhat impenetrable, but if you wish to see what it is doing and follow the sync process, it comes with a nice GUI interface.

This can be run directly on the server from the path X:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Synchronization Service\UIShell\miisclient.exe

When running during a sync you can see any issues encountered such as permissions problems.

via Chris on SharePoint http://spchris.com/2013/04/forefront-identify-manager-client/

SharePoint and Project Server Consultant MCITP – SharePoint Administrator 2010 MCTS – Microsoft Project 2010 – Managing Projects, Project Server 2010, Configuration, SharePoint 2010, Configuration Prince 2 – Practitioner This article has been cross posted from spchris.com (original article)

Quite often when working with data within a SharePoint environment, we wish to link the data to images hosted within a third party system.

This is often seen in the form of staff pictures that are hosted on a third party HR platform rather than within Active Directory, so the User Profile service images are of no use to us.

Unfortunately there is no real way of detecting if the image on the third party system actually exists, which means that rather than seeing the nice friendly missing profile image, you get a horrible missing image box.

This can be overcome with some simple JavaScript:

(function(){

    var defaultImage = "/_layouts/15/images/PersonPlaceholder.200x150x32.png";

    var profileImage = document.createElement("img");

    // Define an error handler, this will fire if there is an
    // error loading the URL for the staff image and redirect
    // it to the missing user profile image in the hive.

    profileImage.onError = function() {

        this.src = defaultImage;

    }

    // Point the image element to our staff images then attach
    // it to the DOM.

    profileImage.src = "http://hr/staffimages/" + employeeId + ".png";

    // Note that the employeeId variable referenced above is to be
    // provided externally and is beyond the scope of this post.

    var container = document.getElementById("profileImageContainer");

    if (container) {
        container.appendChild(profileImage);
    }
})();

With this code in place any missing images will automatically serve the default image instead.

This method will work anywhere you need to serve images and have no way of detecting if the image to be served exists or not.

SharePoint and Project Server Consultant MCITP – SharePoint Administrator 2010 MCTS – Microsoft Project 2010 – Managing Projects, Project Server 2010, Configuration, SharePoint 2010, Configuration Prince 2 – Practitioner This article has been cross posted from spchris.com (original article)