Just published out version 1.2 of uManage.  It now includes a little more automated setup process as well as the new Admin Portal which as of right now only allows the system administrator to view and change some system settings.  The next release (~ 1.5) will really have a lot of the new functionality that will start to make the product really usable in an organization for managing users.  I got a request from one of the previous releases for some screenshots.  I added more to CodePlex and will include them here as well.  If you have an Active Directory test environment the app takes less than 10 minutes to have up and running, so just give it a shot, worst comes to worse and you remove it.

Check it out now: http://umanage.codeplex.com

Check back here for more in the future!

-Brent

Well, it has been a busy week but I managed to find a few hours to update uManage to include a setup wizard as well as fix the first issue.  For those who just want to download it visit Codeplex.

The setup wizard was always in the master plan to make it easy to setup the application as well as in the future allow IT Pro’s who may not know much about ASP.NET to simply download the application as part of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer.  So essentially, once downloaded IIS and the File System would already be configured and simply need someone to run through the wizard to configure everything else.  Pretty simple I think.

In addition the first issue fix was included.  Of course I was the one that logged it but nonetheless it was important.  In Version 1.0 the membership section was not encrypted which meant that the username and password could potentially be read by anyone who has access to the file system and possibly not to the domain.  They could be employees or potential hackers who want to cause problems.  Either way when the setup wizard is run it encrypts the membership provider section which makes it pretty hard to get to the username and password for the application.

Of course anyone who uses this application really should create a new user account that has delegated rights to mitigate any major security problems.  I will have a new post soon on how to set all of that up as I have a feeling the developers out there might not know what that is all about.  Security is still important people!

Well off to pack for a trip, but check back soon for updates.

-Brent

Well, over the past week or so I have been working on a new ASP.NET web application.  It really served two or three purposes for me.  One was to brush up on Active Directory programming which is really not that much fun, but is still required in most enterprise programming scenarios simply because it is usually readily available for SSO type services for applications.  The second which was way more fun was to get more familiar with Visual Studio 2010 and in particular the .NET 4.0 framework.  A lot of the new ASP.NET features are well needed and deserved in my opinion but that is a whole other post on its own.  The last reason to do this was really the fact that I could not find a self-service style portal available on the internet for free or that was a regular website and not some SharePoint implementation.  So I wrote my own!

The initial plan was simply to create a website that allows users to access the site and update their personal information like telephone numbers to take the burden off of IT and HR to have to add the information.  Of course not to pawn off any more work from IT to HR but the next logical step is to create an HR dashboard in the system that allows help desk techs and HR to create new employees in the system or even to disable and delete employees from the system.  After all HR already enters employees into Payroll, benefits, and god knows what else.  At least now the information can be stored in AD and potentially be usable by other applications.  The current implementation does not implement a lot of the hidden attributes like Assistant, Employee ID, Badge Number, etc. but depending on feedback they can easily be added.

The best part about all of this is that Administrators still have full control over how users are created, which OU’s they should be added to, etc.  In the future I want to integrate Exchange support as well so that it really is a seamless process for creating users.  Worst case scenario the System Administrator’s job is a little easier.

The project is hosted on CodePlex and is available under the Ms-PL license which is an OSI compliant license so its really a benefit to all.  Did I mention it’s free?

That’s all for now!

-Brent

I was working on modifying SharePoint URLs again which if your not sure how to do I have another post about that here.  My problem came up when I was updating the Shared Service Provider (SSP) The complete error message that appears in the application event log has this description:

Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. (0x80041205)

For some this is a very frustrating error message because it does not provide a whole lot of information.  The solution that solved my problem had to do with the IIS Loopback Check.  In essence the Loopback Check is designed to thwart off potential security attacks to the server.  It is important to note that this problem for me was only found while utilizing Windows Integrated Security.  The error message comes up because the Search Provider tries to login and hit the web server so much and so quickly that the server thinks it is being attacked and therefore blocks the traffic and login.

There are two options to fix this problem.  The first is to simply disable the loopback check but this poses a serious security issue if your site is heavily utilized and moreover public.  The second and more secure solution is to specify allowed sites.  I would highly suggest taking the time to add in allowed sites since with either solution you have to edit the registry.  For the actual fixes I have posted the link to the Microsoft KB article below that contains the process to follow.  The article says it only applies to IIS 5 and 6 however it resolved my problem on IIS7 as well.  I think less people would have a problem with this in SharePoint if it were titled better.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Please let me know if this does or does not work for you

-Brent

I came across the need to force a site to load secure over SSL using IIS7.  The important thing was the the application would not even load for the user unless it was opened over SSL.  I searched online and found an easy way to get IIS7 to only allow HTTPS traffic to pass to the application however since the application already existed it was going to cause me a problem because people had already set their bookmarks up for the standard HTTP address.  So I did more searching to automatically load the HTTPS version instead and for smarter browsers tell them to pick up on the change.  I modified some code snippets I had found plus embedded it into a familiar IIS7 error message in the event the transfer failed.  I have attached a ZIP file with the new error page.

Read the contents of the html file to get instructions on how to load it into IIS.

-Brent