
Tag Archives: Service Applications

Unable to open any Excel Services spreadsheet “We’re sorry. We ran into a problem completing your request. Please try again in a few minutes.”
Resolution:
IIS reset
Share service applications across farms in SharePoint 2013
In SharePoint 2013, some service applications can be shared across server farms.
By publishing a service application, you can optimize resources, avoid redundancy, and provide enterprise-wide services without installing a dedicated enterprise services farm. You can publish the following service applications in a SharePoint 2013 farm:
- Business Data Connectivity
- Machine Translation
- Managed Metadata
- User Profile
- Search
- Secure Store
Additionally, a SharePoint 2010 farm can consume services from a SharePoint 2013 Server farm. This allows for upgrade of multi-farm environments in which a farm hosting service applications is upgraded first. In this scenario, the service applications and features that the SharePoint 2010 farm experiences are limited to those that are available in SharePoint 2010. For example, a SharePoint 2010 farm cannot consume the Machine Translation service application from a SharePoint Server 2013 farm and does not benefit from the new features of the User Profile service application.
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There are significant restrictions on when services and content can be shared between a SharePoint 2010 farm and a SharePoint 2013 farm. Content type syndication uses the backup and restore mechanism in SharePoint Server to publish the content types across site collections. And backup and restore does not work across versions in the following scenarios:
To learn how to work with these restrictions and successfully share services and content between SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 farms go here: How to upgrade an environment that uses content type syndication (SharePoint Server 2013) |
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If the server farms are located in different domains, the User Profile service application requires both domains to trust one another. For the Business Data Connectivity service and Secure Store service application administration features to work from the consuming farm, the domain of the publishing farm must trust the domain of the consuming farm. Other cross-farm service applications work without a trust requirement between domains. |
The User Profile service must reside in the same datacenter as the content it supports — The performance of social features require the User Profile service application to be located in the same datacenter as My Sites, team sites, and community sites.
The farm that contains the service application and publishes the service application so that other farms can consume the service application is known as the publishing farm. The farm that connects to a remote location to use a service application that the remote location is hosting is known as the consuming farm.
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If you are familiar with SharePoint 2010, you might find it useful to think of the publishing farm as the parent farm and the consuming farm as a child farm. |
This article describes the steps that are required to publish and consume service applications across farms. These steps must be performed in the order listed.
- Exchange trust certificates between the farms.To start, an administrator of the consuming farm must provide two trust certificates to the administrator of the publishing farm: a root certificate and a security token service (STS) certificate. Additionally, an administrator of the publishing farm must provide a root certificate to the administrator of the consuming farm. By exchanging certificates, each farm acknowledges that the other farm can be trusted.For more information, see Exchange trust certificates between farms in SharePoint 2013.
- On the publishing farm, publish the service application.On the farm on which the service application is located, an administrator must explicitly publish the service application. Service applications that are not explicitly published are available to the local farm only.For more information, see Publish service applications in SharePoint 2013.
- On the consuming farm, set the permission to the appropriate service applicationsYou must give the consuming farm permission to the Application Discovery and Load Balancing Service Application on the publishing farm. After doing this, give the consuming farm permission to the published service applications that it will be consuming.For more information, see Set permissions to published service applications in SharePoint 2013.
- On the consuming farm, connect to the remote service application.After the publishing farm has published the service application, an administrator of the consuming farm can connect to that service application from the consuming farm if the address of the specific service application is known.For more information, see Connect to service applications on remote farms in SharePoint 2013.
Important:
You cannot share a User Profile service application across farms that reside in separate domains unless you first establish a domain-level trust between the two domains. - Add the shared service application to a Web application proxy group on the consuming farm.An administrator must associate the new service application connection with a local Web application on the consuming farm. Only Web applications that are configured to use this association can use the remote service application.For information about how to configure a Web application proxy group connection, see Add or remove service application connections from a web application in SharePoint 2013.
Note:
It is important that you plan the proxy group layout before you add service applications to proxy groups. - Configure server-to-server authentication between the publishing and consuming farms.To allow a web application or an application service to request a resource from a web application on another farm on behalf of a user, you have to configure server-to-server authentication between the farms. For more information, see Configure server-to-server authentication between publishing and consuming farms.
Note:
Web applications or application services that request resources from an application service on another farm do not require server-to-server authentication
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/0a785758-694c-4c5c-abe6-70a17b490c6e(Office.15).aspx
Considerations while provisioning the service application using pre-created databases”there is already a database exists with the same name”
* Recently I had worked with my customer to setup a new SharePoint farm with pre-created (DBA created) databases.
* Concept and prerequisites are very well documented inthis TechNet article. While testing the deployment what really matters were the creation of couple of service application.
* Bad guys were Usage Logging & State Service Application. All other service applications were easy to provision (we were using auto AutoSPInstallerhttp://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/ to automate the deployment using Power Shell).
* Except Usage Logging & State Service application all other service applications were able to use the pre-created database while provisioning the new service application using New-SP* commandlets.
* Usage Logging & State Service applications were complaining that the there is already a database exists with the same name.
* To work-around this, we have to approach the provision in a different way. I’m giving the provisioning script samples for both Usage Logging & State Service Applications.
Usage Logging Service Application :
Steps are explaining below.
1. Create new Usage Service Application with a temporary ( or default) database
2. After that, modify the Usage Service Application to use the pre-created database name, this will dismount the usage logging database created in step #1
3. Delete the database created in step #1 manually from the SQL server
Automating the Steps 1-2 given below.
add-pssnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell
Write-Host -ForegroundColor White "Provisioning WSS Usage Application..."
$SPUsageApplicationName = "WSS Usage Service Application"
$precreatedUsageDB = "WSS_Usage_Database"
$sqlserver = "spsql"
$tempUsageDB = "WSS_Usage_ToDelete"
New-SPUsageApplication -Name $SPUsageApplicationName -DatabaseName $tempUsageDB
$UsageServiceApp = Get-SPUsageApplication $SPUsageApplicationName
Set-SPUsageApplication -Identity $UsageServiceApp.ID -DatabaseName $precreatedUsageDB -DatabaseServer $sqlserver
Write-Host -ForegroundColor White "Re-provisioning Health Data Collection Proxy as by default it will be in stopped state"
$SPUsageApplicationProxy = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy | where {$_.DisplayName -eq $SPUsageApplicationName }
$SPUsageApplicationProxy.Provision()
Write-Host -ForegroundColor Blue "Done provisioning SP Usage Application."
State Service Application :
This is little different than Usage Logging Service Application provisioning.
Steps are explaining below.
1. First we have to mount the pre-created database to SharePoint and have to initialize it.
2. Use the same method as other service application provisioning, using New-SPStateServiceApplication and provide the pre-created database name.
3. Create state service application proxy.
add-pssnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell
$StateServiceDB = "State_Service_DB"
$StateServiceName = "State Service Application"
$StateServiceProxyName = "State Service Application Proxy"
Write-Host -ForegroundColor White "Provisioning State Service Application..."
Mount-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name $StateServiceDB | Initialize-SPStateServiceDatabase
New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name $StateServiceName -Database $StateServiceDB | Out-Null
Write-Host -ForegroundColor White "Creating State Service Application Proxy..."
$StateServiceApplication = Get-SPStateServiceApplication -identity $StateServiceName
$StateServiceApplication | New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name $StateServiceProxyName -DefaultProxyGroup
Write-Host -ForegroundColor Blue " - Done creating State Service Application."
Other service applications can be pointed in this scenario are
1. ASP.NET Session state service (Enable-SPSessionStateService). With that there is no way to specify a pre-created database ,
ASP.NET session state database schema is provisioned by ASP.NET by calling SQLServices class. once you use Enable-SPSessionStateService.
From my deployment experience this was the main issue and there was no any other deployment issues faced while going with the DBA pre-created deployment method. Hope this hint will help someone.

Configure User Profile Service and MySite SharePoint 2013 Part I
In this article we learn how to configure a user profile and My Site configuration in SharePoint 2013. In earlier versions of SharePoint, each user had a profile and a personal site (e.g., My Site).
The 2013 version of SharePoint splits My Site into three sections: Newsfeed, SkyDrive, and Sites. A global navigation bar provides access to each section. These social features are tightly integrated into SharePoint 2013, so you no longer need to launch a web browser to access them.
Use the following procedure to create a My Site Host site collection:
1.Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure has the following credentials:
The user account that performs this procedure is a farm administrator
The user account that performs this procedure is a member of the Administrators group on the computer that is running SharePoint Server.
2.First we have to create a web application for My Site; see:
3.On Central Administration, in the Application Management section, click Create site collections.
4.On the Create Site Collection page, in the Web Application section, select the My Site web application.
5.In the Title and Description section, type the title and description for the site collection.
6.In the Web Site Address section, select the path of the URL for the My Site host. In most cases, you can use the root directory (/).In the Template Selection section, click the Enterprise tab, and then select My Site Host.
7.In the Primary Site Collection Administrator section, type the user name (in the form ) for the user who will be the site collection administrator.
8.In the Secondary Site Collection Administrator section, type the user name for the secondary administrator of the site collection.
9.If you are using quotas to manage storage for site collections, in the Quota Template section, click a template in the Select a quota template list.
10.Click OK.
Use the following procedure to create a User Profile Service application:
1.Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure has the following credentials:
The user account that performs this procedure is a farm administrator
The user account that performs this procedure is a member of the Administrators group on the computer that is running a SharePoint Server.
2.On Central Administration, in the Application Management section, click Manage service applications.
3.On the Manage Service Application page, on the ribbon, click New, and then click User Profile Service Application.Image
4.In the Name section, type the User Profile service application name.
5.In the Application Pool section, select the application pool that the User Profile service application will run in (if it exists), or create a new application pool.
6.Accept the default settings for the profile database, the synchronization database, and the social tagging database (unless you want different names), and specify failover servers if you are using them.
7.In the Profile Synchronization Instance section, select the synchronization server.
8.In the My Site Host URL section, enter the My Site Host site collection URL that you created in the previous step.
9.In the My Site Managed Path section, enter the part of the path that, when appended to the My Site host URL, will give the path of the user’s My Sites. For example, if the My Site host URL is http://server:12345/ and you want each user’s My Site to be at http://server:12345/personal/<user name> then enter /personal for the My Site managed path. The managed path that you enter is created automatically. There does not have to already be a managed path with the name that you provide.
10.In the Site Naming Format section, select a naming scheme.
11.In the Default Proxy Group section, select whether you want the proxy of this User Profile Service to be a part of the default proxy group on this farm.
12.Click Create.
13.When the Create New User Profile Service Application page displays the message Profile Service Application successfully created, click OK.