Zach Rosenfield

SharePoint Program Manager, Infrastructure

Zach Rosenfield's SharePoint Blog > Posts > SharePoint Administration Toolkit 2.0 is Now Available!

8/28/2008

SharePoint Administration Toolkit 2.0 is Now Available!

I’m excited to announce that the second version of the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit is available for download! As I said back in April, we would be offering regular updates to this toolkit with new features and functionality for both Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3.0. With this release we added functionality to address some of the challenges associated with running a highly available and/or geographically disperse MOSS 2007 deployment—particularly aimed at synchronizing user profiles in the Shared Service Provider (SSP). Let’s look at these two areas:

High Availability
In order to provide a highly available Shared Service Provider, your deployment needs two identical SSPs available at all times. While this is easily done with search (each SSP has its own crawler and can create their own index)—keeping user profile data in sync is a bit more involved. You can see detailed instructions on running a highly available environment on Microsoft TechNet:

Highly Available Architecture Diagram

Geographical Replication
If your company is geographically disperse, you may not want to have a single MySite farm serving your users worldwide since some users may experience significant lag in response times depending on WAN bandwidth and traffic characteristics. Instead, it may be better to have several SSP farms located around the globe. Just like in the highly available environment, this configuration would require that user profile data is kept in sync.

Since synchronizing user profiles is something available in the MOSS 2007 product, some of you might wonder what we’ve done in the toolkit! Well, if you’ve ever tried to use the User Profile web services to achieve synchronized profiles—you’ve noticed it’s a very involved process with lots of code (and therefore a lot of room for mistakes). In this release, we’ve built a supported tool for scheduling partial or full replications of any number of your user profile attributes:

Profile Replication Engine

For a full overview of features and instructions see the official Microsoft TechNet articles for MOSS 2007 and WSS v3.0.

The download links for the SharePoint Administration Toolkit v2.0
x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F8EEA8F0-FA30-4C10-ABC9-217EEACEC9CE&displaylang=en
x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=263CD480-F6EB-4FA3-9F2E-2D47618505F2&displaylang=en

Zach Rosenfield
Program Manager, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Posted at 5:21 PM by Zach (SharePoint - MSFT) | Category: SharePoint Administration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (16)

Comments

You rock!!!!

Most required tool when we go for geographically dispersed set up. I appreciate your work.

at 8/28/2008 8:30 PM

Error writing log file?

I am trying to get the User Profile Replication Engine to work on two farms. I can do a full replication, but when I try to start the web service for Incremental Sync, it stops immediately. The error in the event log says "Failed to write log file. Could not find a part of the path 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Replication Engine\log\Inc_Instrumentation_sharepoint2007\mysite_633571704980941511.log'." (where sharepoint2007\mysite is the URL to the target my site).
The service account is administrator on the server, and has full control on the log file folder. Any ideas?

at 9/16/2008 5:07 AM

RE: Error writing log file?

Jan,

It's most likely a problem with your source and destination URLs. They should be the url of the Web Application that contains your mysites--and not a specific Site. I.e.:

http:// + host name + colon + port number.

For example:

http://my:8000

Zach (SharePoint - MSFT) at 9/19/2008 12:40 PM

Batch Site Manager

What is BSM using behind the scenes - import/export or the stsadm cmd mergecontentdbs? Are there any size limitations (as there would be if import/export are being used)?

at 10/3/2008 11:37 AM

Re: Batch Site Manager

Yes--the BSM uses Import/Export in the backend as we support both RTM and SP1 (the stsadm mergecontentdb command is new to SP1). There are the same database limitations and speed as import and export, which we are working on adding to the BSM documentation.

Thanks for pointing this out!

Zach (SharePoint - MSFT) at 10/3/2008 4:19 PM

User profiles vs People Picker

Will replicating the user profiles help on the sub-par performance of the people picker in highly distributed environments, e.g. with users in ten different domains across the globe ?

at 10/20/2008 12:11 AM

Replication Engine Error

Hi!

The following error is displayed when trying to do a incremental replication:

"String was not recognized as a valid DateTime"

Conditions: One Farm, two SSPs, replication from one to the other. Source URL is the first MySite-Host, destination URL the second one. Change Token from the source is displayed correctly, permissions on the SSPs are set.

We also have problems to determine which is the correct "User Domain" and Full Replication starts and stops without any result (no errors / error logs).

I also posted a question at TechNet: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/ac0c7a17-f0fb-4502-a5f6-5587b168a000

Maybe you can help us with this, we're really stumped with this at the moment.

at 10/22/2008 4:30 AM

RE: User profiles vs People Picker

The replication engine does not have any implications on the People Picker--it is entirely for high available and geographical replication of data in the profile service.

Zach (SharePoint - MSFT) at 10/28/2008 6:19 PM

Re: Replication Engine Error

Hope this helps:

For full replication issue the URL needed is the one provided by users. It is most likely that the source URL or destination URL or domain list is not set correctly.

For incremental replication issue, it is also likely the wrong setting for URLs according to the error message you are seeing.

Zach (SharePoint - MSFT) at 10/31/2008 10:22 AM

How Do I...

Hi, This looks like a good tool and helps a little in my scenario. We are setting up a corporate directory using MySites and User Profiles, where each company within the organisation has their own SSP (due to different branding, profile property and search requirements). Each SSP imports the full directory from a single AD domain but because the information is not sent back to AD from each SSP, the information in the User Profiles for individuals outside each company is very out of date.

I have these questions:
- How can I sync a sub-set of profiles, e.g. all in one AD group to another SSP?
- How can I automate the process? Is there a config file that I can populate to keep it under config control?
- How can I run several instances of the replication? All my SSPs are running in the same farm and the ideal place to run the replication is on an application server dedicated to indexing. I don't seem to be able to run the tool more than once but have several SSPs to sync.
- How can I map properties to the destination if they have a different name?
- How does the tool handle collisions, i.e. where updates are made on both sides?
- Is there a complimentary tool or function that will send updates made in MySites back to AD when they are mapped and editable?

It looks good but it's only really halfway there for my use. I am looking at writing my own tool to do what we need to do which is a shame as this is a good start.

Any help is appreciated.

Many thanks.

at 12/17/2008 5:46 AM

Multiple Server Farm Install

We are not currently planning on using the Profile Replication engine. Only the Batch Site Manager and Alert fix.

When I install the admin toolkit on a single server in our 3 server farm, I end up getting a "Failed to find the XML file at location '12\Template\Features\BatchSiteManagerLinks\feature.xml'" when browsing to the Workflow manager on a site collection (Site Actions> Site Settings> Workflows).

So I looked in the 12 hive and the "BatchSiteManagerLinks" was only on the one server that I installed the toolkit on.

I re-read the instructions and there was nothing referring to having to install it on multiple servers. Since there was an STSADM command that the exe called, I assumed it would automatically install on all 3 servers. Most features do.

So I installed it on the other two servers and got the error referred to in the instructions: "Failed to register Batch Site Manager", on both servers.

However, the error is no longer there.

First, should the instructions include something about installing it on all WFE?

Second, even though it was already registered without error on the first server, do I need to run the two commands on the 2nd and 3rd servers?

at 12/17/2008 11:00 AM

different farm and domains

We are migrating to a new farm and domain. I'm trying to get it to replicate all the data, I have the users in both SSPs, but obviously they have different IDs, AccountNames, and SIDs, though their Usernames are the same.

I finally got it configured to copy the properties that I checked, and hit Start full replication. Right now I'm watching it seem to do nothing except increase Time Elapsed.

So first of all can it perform the replication on username alone?
Secondly are there actually any examples anywhere? I saw one blog that had "user replication examples" in the title but it was use cases not examples of it being used.

Finally if I am totally wrong and it wont' replicate based on username, can you point to a link where I can just bang out some code to do this? It's just one time so..
Thanks
chrisb76@yahoo.com

at 2/2/2009 2:26 PM

Interesting article on how to resolve Error due to SharePoint Administration Toolkit

http://home.dzeee.net/blogs/sp/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=50

at 4/13/2009 12:23 PM

Re: Interesting Article

That's a strange error situation--Batch Site Manager should only be run from Central Admin which is why it's only installed on that server.

Additionally, if you look at the help docs you'll notice that in order to run 'jobs' on other machines you have to install the BSM tool on those machines as well.

Hope that clears it up.

Zach (SharePoint - MSFT) at 4/14/2009 8:06 AM

"Local account validation failed" error

I am trying to get version 3.0 of the user profile replication engine running. I managed to set up and perform full replication, but when I want to start the service for incremental replication, I get "Local account validation failed". The account I am using to run the service is a domain account, has local admin rights on the server, and has the permission "log on as a service". Any ideas?

at 4/20/2009 3:33 AM

How to...

Did any one figured out how to automate the User Profile Replication process? Like schedule Incremental replication everynight or something like that!!!

at 7/6/2009 9:11 AM

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