Configuring outgoing email in SharePoint 2010 with Exchange 2010 – Step by Step Guide

The environment
This article builds on the SharePoint Farm setup that I have documented here. It consists of the following servers which would form a common basis in most large organizations.

• Windows 2008 R2 server running Active Directory Domain Services
• Windows 2008 R2 server running SQL 2008 R2
• Windows 2008 R2 server running SharePoint 2010 RTM
• Windows 2008 R2 server running Exchange 2010 RTM
• Windows 7 client running Office 2010 RTM

SharePoint 2010 allows you to configure any SMTP service including the one which I had setup in my previous article to send outgoing email, however we will utilise Exchange 2010 (same instructions apply for Exchange 2007) to provide email delivery to our end users.  Instructions on configuring the SMTP service (i.e. you are not using Microsoft Exchange in your environment) can be found on TechNet.
Creating a Receive Connector in Exchange 2010

If you recall from my previous article when we were configuring incoming email, we created a “Send Connector” in Exchange to forward the messages to the SMTP service that we had configured and installed.  This time round we will create a “Receive Connector” in Exchange 2010.
Launch the Exchange Management Console and navigate to Server Configuration / Hub Transport / New Receive Connector.  The New Receive Connector wizard is invoked.
Enter a descriptive name and ensure “Custom” is selected as the intended use.

Click Next
Leave “All Available IPv4” in your Local Network settings unless you have specific Exchange IP requirements.

Click Next
Edit the IP address of your SharePoint 2010 server.

Click Next

Click New
You will now notice that our SharePoint 2010 Outgoing mail connector is listed with our default Exchange 2010 Receive Connectors..  
We will now venture into its properties and make a minor permission change.  Click on the “Permission Groups” tab and select Anonymous users.

Click Apply.
Configuring outgoing email in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration
Launch Central Administration and navigate to System Settings / E-Mail and Test Messages / Configure outgoing e-mail settings.

Enter your Outbound SMTP server, i.e. your Exchange server where we created our receive connector and specify a From and Reply-to address.

Click OK
Testing our configuration
Lets navigate to our SharePoint 2010 web application and create an Alert .  In my example I will create an immediate alert for Announcements.
Navigate to your Announcement List and click on List Tools/List and then click on “Alert Me” located in the ribbon interface.

Select “Set alert on this list” and select your Alert options.  Ensure that you have “send notifications immediately” selected for testing purposes.


Click OK
You should receive your notification email that you have successfully subscribed soon after creating your alert.

I will now create a Test Announcement to ensure that the actual alert is delivered.

Alas! 5 minutes later (based on the immediate timer job definition schedule) we have received our email alert confirming that our SharePoint configuration with Exchange was successful.

Did you know that you can also configure outgoing email for a specific Web application?  You might want to do this if you have multiple SharePoint Web Applications hosting specific site collections and would want a different From and or Reply Address setup.
Even though we are now going to configure outgoing email for a specific Web application, you are still required to setup the default farm outgoing email settings as per the above.
Configuring outgoing email for a specific Web application in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration
Launch Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Web Applications.
Select one of your Web Applications and then select “General Settings” from the Ribbon.

Select “Outgoing E-Mail” from the drop down.
It will pick up your default farm settings that we entered in earlier in which you can now change the From and Reply-to address to something more specific for the selected Web application.

Click OK
We are done!  I hope you have found this step by step guide in configuring outgoing email in SharePoint 2010 with Exchange useful, and stay tuned as we continue our journey in configuring our SharePoint 2010 Farm.

Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010

I first introduced Service Applications and User Profile Service Synchronization back when SharePoint 2010 was in beta, and as many of you who would have attempted this feat, would have come to realize that there were a couple of known issues, in particular those around utilizing a least privilege model with service accounts.  I’m confident in stating that these issues have now been resolved with RTM and in today’s article I will share with you my step by step guide in setting up the User Profile Service application, focusing on its configuration and administration and how we can enable the creation of user profiles via an Active Directory import .
SharePoint 2010 introduces the notion of “Service Applications” which build’s upon the “Shared Services Provider (SSP)” which was introduced in SharePoint 2007.  Service Applications are individual services that can be configured independently and can be shared across other sites within your farm with some service applications that can also be configured across farms.
The individual service applications provided with SharePoint 2010 are listed as follows;

• Access Services
• Business Data Connectivity
• Document Conversion
• Excel Services
• Managed Metadata Service
• PerformancePoint
• Search Service
• Secure Store
• State Service
• Visio Graphics Service
• User Profile Service

This article will build upon our initial SharePoint 2010 install utilizing the least privilege model which I have documented here, so check it out if you haven’t already done so.
Managed Metadata Service
The User Profile service requires that the Managed Metadata Service is setup and configured first before attempting setting up our first User Profile Service.  The Managed Metadata service allows you to utilize managed metadata and provides you with the ability to share content types across sites.  You can read more about Managed Metadata here.
To setup our Managed Metadata Service, navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.
Click New and select “Managed Metadata Service”
Enter the follow details;
Name: Managed Metadata Service
Database Server: 
Database Name: Managed Metadata DB

I will utilize the sp_farm account for the Application Pool Identity.

Click Create.
Lastly, navigate to Central Administration / System Settings / Manage services on server and start the Managed Metadata Web Service.

User Profile Service
Now that we have successfully configured our Managed Metadata service we can now focus our attention on the User Profile Service.  The User Profile Service provides our SharePoint farm with all the social networking features that we have come to love in SharePoint 2007, plus more.  It forms the basis of My Site support, User profile pages, Audiences and some of the newer features in SharePoint 2010 social computing such as social tagging.
Before we begin, we need to ensure that our Farm account (DOMAIN\sp_farm) is listed as a member of the Local Administrator’s group where the User Profile Synchronization (UPS) service will be deployed.  Please make a note to remove the DOMAIN\sp_farm account from the Local Administrator’s group after provisioning the User Profile Synchronization service.  Please also note, that if you ever have to re-provision the UPS service at a later date, that you will need to ensure the DOMAIN\sp_farm account is added back to the Local Administrator’s group.
Let’s now navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.
Click New and select “User Profile Service Application”

The “Create New User Profile Service Application” window pops up in which you will enter the following details; (you will obviously enter in the details based on your environment setup)
Name: User Profiles
Create new application pool: SharePoint – User Profiles

Register a new managed account: e.g. DOMAIN\sp_userprofiles (nb: this account will need to be provisioned in Active Directory first)

Enter your Profile Database server details and database authentication.  You will notice that SharePoint 2010 introduces the ability to configure Failover Server which allows you to associate your SharePoint databases with another SQL server for failover purposes utilising SQL Server database mirroring.   We will not specify a Failover Database server for any of our databases at this present time.

Specify your Synchronization Database which is used to store configuration and staging data for synchronization of profile data such as that from Active Directory.

Next, specify your Social Tagging Database which is used to store tags and notes that are created by users.  Social Tagging is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 which is not only displayed against the items that user’s are tagging, but are also displayed in the user’s activity feed.

Next, select your Profile Synchronization Instance Server.
In the proceeding section, we will not create a My Site Host URL and will leave this for part two of this series.
Click Create.

You should now have the User Profiles service application listed and  started.

We will now venture back into Central Administration / System Settings / Manage services on server.
Scroll down to the User Profile Service and User Profile Synchronisation Service and start both.  The User Profile Service should start without any further user interaction, however the User Profile Synchronization Service will ask for your SharePoint Farm credentials.

Click Ok.
Both services should now be listed as started.

This in turn, will correctly configure and start our ForeFront Identity Manager Windows Services (FIM).

We will now configure our User Profile Connection to our Active Directory Domain.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.
Click on User Profiles / Manage.

Click on Configure Synchronizations connections / Create New Connection.
Enter the follow details;
Connection Name:
Type: Active Directory
Auto discover domain controller or specify a domain controller
Authentication Provider Type: Windows Authentication
Account Name / Password:
Port: 389

Click on Populate Containers

Click OK.
Your connection should now be listed as follows upon successful creation.

We can now easily setup connection filters against our Active Directory User Profile connection by clicking on the connection that was just created and selecting “Edit Connection Filters”.
Specify and Add any User or Group exclusions and then click OK.

Next we will Configure a Synchronization Timer Job via Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications / User Profiles.

Click Enable
We will finish off by initiating a full synchronization via Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications / User Profiles / Start Profile Synchronization.

In order to confirm that the import was a success, the Number of User Profiles should now be set to the number of users in your organization, in my case I have 269 dummy users in my Active Directory domain.  Word of note; this will take some time and is considerably slower than an Active Directory User Profile import in SharePoint 2007.

You can also venture into Manage User Profiles and search for users (please take note that SharePoint 2010 does not display any users by default and that you will have to search for them).

Edit a User Profile to ensure that all the necessary Active Directory attributes were successfully imported.

We have now successfully completed a User Profile Synchronization which will form as a basis for User’s My Sites in my next article.  Until then, happy SharePointing!!
References
http://sharepointgeorge.com/
User Profile Service administration (SharePoint Server 2010) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721050.aspx
Configure profile synchronization (SharePoint Server 2010) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721049.aspx

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Configuring Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010

We all have to agree that search plays an integral part of any successful SharePoint deployment and is an area that Microsoft continues to invest in with each new release of SharePoint. Microsoft went as far as acquiring FAST 2 years ago which it now offers as a separate add-on to SharePoint for those willing to invest in high end enterprise search.  In addition to FAST, SharePoint 2010 search comes in a number of flavors each offering their own feature set and capabilities which I have duplicated at the end of this article as an Appendix for convenience.
Today we will introduce SharePoint Server 2010 Search and eventually work our way up to Microsoft’s latest and greatest FAST Search Server in a near future article.  Before we deep dive into the step by step guide I will begin by listing some of the new features that you will come to expect from SharePoint Server 2010 Search.   These are as follows;

• Boolean query syntax has finally been introduced.  These include AND, OR and NOT operators in your search queries.
• Suggestions whilst typing and after running search queries, a feature that we have come to love with major search engines such as Google and Bing.
• Integrating SharePoint enterprise search with Windows 7, allowing end users to utilise the Windows 7 search box to locate SharePoint 2010 content.
• Results display has been refined to provide filters for search results such as document type, categories and managed properties.
• View in Browser capabilities, allows end users to view documents within their own browser utilising Office Web Apps and not having to rely on launching the necessary Microsoft Office Application, or even the need of having it installed on their local machine.  This is handy when browsing your SharePoint site via Kiosks and Internet Cafes that may not be running the Microsoft Office Suite.
• Last but not least, there have been a number of improvements to People Search, including phonetic name and nickname matching, and improved relevance and self search.

Now that we have a taste for what’s to come, let’s begin our configuration.
SharePoint Server Search is a service application which we have come to learn about over the past few articles that it is independent of other services and is no longer tied to the Shared Services Provider (SSP) that was introduced in SharePoint 2007.
SharePoint 2010 search architecture is made up of the Crawler, Indexing Engine, Query Engine and the User Interface and Query Object Model.  We now have greater flexibility and expandability with our search design in 2010 and can setup not only multiple Query Servers but can now scale out our Index server and add multiple instances.
Below is a logical overview of the components that will make up our SharePoint 2010 search configuration.

Configuring the Service Application
As always we begin our journey in Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.
Click New / Search Service Application.
Name: Enter a name for your Service Application.
FAST Service Application: Select “None” (we will leave the configuration of FAST for a future article)
Search Service Account: Click on Register new managed account and ensure your domain account has already been provisioned in Active Directory.  I have created a separate search account; e.g. DOMAIN\sp_search

Application Pool for Search Admin Web Service: Create a new application pool for your search admin web service application.

Application Pool for Search Query and Site Settings Web Service: Create a new application pool for your search query web service application.

Click Create
The search service application will begin its configuration process.

You will eventually be presented with confirmation that the search service application was created successfully.
If we now navigate back to Application Management / Manage Service Applications, you will notice that 2 additional services have been added to our list.  These are;

1. Search Service Application (Typical Search Administration page which is similar to that in SharePoint 2007. From here we can create content crawl rules, reset indexes, setup content sources etc).
2. WSS_UsageApplication (This is a new service in SharePoint 2010 that specifically handles our Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application.  This service application handles web analytics such as usage, search query usage, rating usage etc  More on this in a future article).

Let’s now launch the Search Administration page by clicking on our Search Service Application.

Our Default content access account should be set to the account that we had specified at the time of provisioning the Search Service Application; i.e. DOMAIN\sp_search
Confirming Permissions
There are a couple of areas to note that we should check to ensure that our Default content access acount (sp_search) has been provided with the appropriate access permissions.  Let’s first begin by checking our User Profile Service Application by Navigating to Service Applications / User Profiles.  Just highlight the User Profiles and select Administrators from the ribbon.

Our newly provisioned sp_search account should have “Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers” selected as a permission.

We will also confirm that our sp_search account has the necessary “Read” permissions against the Web Applications being crawled.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Web Applications.  Again, highlight the Web Application in question and from the ribbon select User Policy.

Ensure that the Search Crawling Account is set to the sp_search domain account.

Content Sources
Let’s venture into our content sources listed in the Quick Launch navigation bar under Crawling.
As was the case with SharePoint 2007, our Local SharePoint sites will be detected by default, albeit without a crawl schedule.

Check to see that your Start Addresses are located within your content source via editing the content source from the drop down menu.  These includes all SharePoint Web Applications and the sps3 “User Profiles” address.

You can easily create your crawl schedule by clicking on Local SharePoint sites and scrolling down to Crawl Schedules.

Let’s initiate a Full Crawl by clicking on Start all Crawls from the Manage Content Sources page.
Once your crawl has completed, you should confirm that there were no errors encountered during the initial crawl.  Usually any errors noted are most likely due to incorrect permission assignments.
Creating a “Basic Search Center” Site
If you haven’t done so already, from your top level site, click on Site Actions / New Site.
Select “Basic Search Center”

Enter a Name and URL and click on Create.
This will provision the Search Center similar to the below.

Creating an “Enterprise Search Center” Site
Let’s also create an Enterprise Search Center for comparison.  The key difference here is that we are provided with two tabs for searching, one for Sites and the other for People.  The “Enterprise Search Center” will be the search site of choice for most organizations running SharePoint Server.
From Central Administration / Application Management / Site Collections, click on Create site collections.   Ensure you are creating the Site Collection below the relevant Web Application.
Enter your Title, Description etc and select the Enterprise Tab under Template selection.  Select the Enterprise Search Center, specify your site collection administrators and click OK.

This will provision the Enterprise Search Center similar to the below.

As we have already completed an initial Full crawl earlier, I can now test my new search centers by performing a couple of searches.
Searching Content

Searching People

Now I ran into an issue when trying to search for content located in My Sites.  The crawl log displayed the following warning;
“This item and all items under it will not be crawled because the owner has set the NoCrawl flag to prevent it from being searchable”
In order to fix this issue (and this is true for any Site Collection), is to navigate to your My Site host and click on Site Actions / Site Settings.
Click on “Search and offline availability” under Site Administration, and ensure that you have Indexing Site Content, Allow this site to appear in search results? set to “Yes”.

After enabling the indexing of My Sites, I was able to successfully perform My Site Content searches and the warning disappeared from the Crawl Log.
That’s all that is to it in setting up a search center in its most basic form.  From here you can expand your service applications over multiple servers providing you with redundancy, scalability and increased performance .  Until next time, happy searching 
References:
TechNet :: Getting Started with Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010 Products

Appendix
SharePoint Versions Search Comparison

Feature	SharePoint Foundation 2010	Search Server 2010 Express	Search Server 2010	SharePoint Server 2010	FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
Basic site search	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Best Bets		Y	Y	Y	Y
Visual Best Bets					Y
Similar Results					Y
Duplicate Results					Y
Search Scopes		Y	Y	Y	Y
Search Enhancement based on user context					Y
Crawled and Managed Properties		Y	Y	Y	Y*
Query Federation		Y	Y	Y	Y
Query Suggestions		Y	Y	Y	Y
Sort Results on Managed Properties or Rank Profiles					Y
Relevancy Tuning by Document or Site Promotions		Y	Y	Y	Y*
Shallow Results Refinement		Y	Y	Y	Y
Deep Results Refinement					Y
Document Preview					Y
Windows 7 Federation		Y	Y	Y	Y
People Search				Y	Y
Social Search				Y	Y
Taxonomy Integration				Y	Y
Multi-Tenant Hosting				Y	Y
Rich Web Indexing Support					Y

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