In this post I’m going to do an end-to-end walk through on how to configure SharePoint 2010 and ADFS v2 together to use SAML claims authentication. I’ll includes steps and PowerShell scripts to demonstrate and will try and bring all of the...

Hopefully folks are starting to get some use out of the multitude of SharePoint 2010 postings I’ve been tossing up here. This is a new one that I was a little hesitant to put together…given my history in SharePoint 2007 I don’t want...

Here's another in what seems like a growing list of permissions gotchas in SharePoint 2010. Assume if you will, you are a crack developer and building a custom application for SharePoint 2010. You're writing code on your development server, which has...

I found myself getting really tired of constantly modifying configuration files when setting up forms based auth (FBA) in SharePoint 2010. There's even more work now then there was in the previous release, because now we have an additional web.config...

As you know or will soon learn, Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2013 is no longer a service application that is part of your SharePoint farm. Instead it is installed as a separate farm, which provides a number of advantages, such as reuse between multiple...

SharePoint 2013 brings with it a brand new application model, which we euphemistically refer to as the “app model” or “cloud app model”. While it brings a whole new set of opportunities from a development perspective, it also carries...

As described in the first post in this series, the Drop Off Library is created when you activate the Content Organizer feature. As soon as you configure the Content Organizer to start routing documents (which, actually it does when you activate the feature...

Hey folks, I’m here to tell you that I too now have my own story of getting burned by an anomaly of using claims authentication that I wish would have been clearer to me. This is such a fundamental aspect of deploying it that I want to make sure...

In this blog I thought I’d show how to use some of the cool new features in SharePoint 2010 with some of our old favorites from SharePoint 2007 to create an interesting search results experience. We’re going to do all of this WITHOUT WRITING ANY CODE...

This is the first in a series of blogs in which I'll talk about writing a custom claims provider. First, it's probably worth understanding a little background on what a claims provider is and why we might want to use one. A claims provider in SharePoint...

In SharePoint 2007 writing a custom login page for a forms based authentication (FBA) site was not too terribly hard. There were a few things to know, most of which weren’t SharePoint specific, and some tips to have your login form take on the look...

As I was working on understanding the process for expiring login cookies recently, I found what seemed like a pretty big problem. For SAML claims users, once they got their login cookie from ADFS, they would never seem to time out. Meaning they could...

I've been working on a developer tool off and on for months now to help working with the query engine in SharePoint 2010. It's come far enough along that it's probably ready for some folks to start using it. I've been debating about putting it up on CodePlex...

I had this happen with a CU recently, and I saw someone that had the same problem with SP1. You download and install some patch - a CU or service pack. The final step after installation is to run psconfig on each server in the farm. However, psconfig...

NEW PREFACE TO THIS POSTING, AND OPEN COMMENT TO THE SITE OWNER: Since the blog site was upgraded to the latest version of whatever the blazes this thing is, the formatting has stunk like a pig on the 4th of July. I usually spend a fair amount of time...

The question has been coming up more frequently lately about how does one configure multiple web apps that use claims authentication in SharePoint 2010. The primary point of confusion usually comes around the SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuer. As I noted in...

A while ago I posted an entry on how to configure your custom claims provider to replace the out of the box claims provider ( http://blogs.technet.com/speschka/archive/2010/04/28/how-to-override-the-default-name-resolution-and-claims-provider-in- sharepoint...

I saw this question flying around the other day and thought it was kind of interesting. Someone was asking about the cool new thumbnail previews you get for items in search results in SharePoint 2013. They really liked how Microsoft Office documents work...

This is one of the 1001 or great new things about search in SharePoint 2013. In fact if I had the copious free time that would actually be kind of a fun challenge, writing a 1001 new things I like about Search, but I digress. In this particular case,...

SharePoint 2013 includes a number of new features to make it easier than ever before to style and publish web sites. One of those features is Design Manager; it allows you to do things like create different channels for your content – such as one...

I wanted to document this error here because I recently went nearly blind trying to solve it, and I never did find the exact cause when Bing'ing for it. Unfortunately it's a pretty generic error so it may very well have been out there, but it seems there...

One of the great new features around Search in SharePoint 2010 is the concept of query suggestions. There are pre-query and post-query suggestions. A pre-query suggestion is a type-ahead feature that appears in the search box on the search page. As you...

The Content Organizer feature is a new routing feature that extends, enhances, and makes more broadly available the routing engine used in the Records Center site template from SharePoint 2007. It not only allows you to automatically route documents to...

SharePoint 2010 adds some new features to support hosting environments, which we generally refer to as multi tenant support. In the beta release, the core multitenant infrastructure is not turned on by default. It requires a custom service application...

Well folks, it's been a while since I've added to the blog, and ironically I find myself on Christmas morning finally chasing down a little "bugger" that was causing me considerable grief yesterday afternoon. So Merry Christmas, and here are a couple...