Sharepoint: Error: Alert has been created successfully but you will not receive notifications until valid e-mail or mobile address has been provided in your profile.

When trying to setup an alert in Sharepoint you might get the following error message.

 

Sharepoint 2010 Configuring Outgoing Email in a Testlab

During the configuration of my Sharepoint 2010 testlab, I wanted to configure the outgoing email for Sharepoint 2010. Since this is a testlab, I didnt want to use a full featured Exchange environment. With an alternative smtp solution and some tweaks in Sharepoint, it is still a relatively easy setup.
For the SMTP solution I use Papercut. This is a very light SMTP server, just for receiving emails. This is a perfect lightweight solution since I don't want to send emails to Sharepoint.
 

Download Papercut from this location : http://papercut.codeplex.com/

Setup Papercut

- Unzip the Papercut package on your server
- Start Papercut and mount the SMTP service to a network adapter
- Leave the port at the default setting (port 25)



- Add the Papercut.exe to the startup folder

What SharePoint WSS 3.0 version am I running ?

An upgrade from WSS 3.0 to Sharepoint Foundation 2010 requires you to be running at least WSS 3.0 SP2 in order to be able to upgrade. The question that arises is what version am I running exactly ? 

Go to a SharePoint site, select Site Settings and check the version number which is listed under Site Information. The next table will tell which version number corresponds with which version name. 

Version Number	Version Name
12.0.0.6529	SP2+ February 10 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6524	SP2+ December 09 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6520	SP2+ October 09 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6514	SP2+ August 09 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6510	SP2+ June 09 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6504	SP2+ April 9 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6421	Service Pack 2
12.0.0.6341	SP1 + February 09 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6335	SP1 + December 08 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6331	SP1 + October 08 Cumulative Update
12.0.0.6327e	SP1 + August 08 Cumulative Updat
12.0.0.6318	SP1 + Infrastructure Update
12.0.0.6303	SP1 + Post SP1 Hotfix
12.0.0.6301	SP1 + Post SP1 Hotfix
12.0.0.6300	SP1 + Post SP1 Hotfix
12.0.0.6219	Service Pack 1
12.0.0.6039	October Public Update
12.0.0.6036	August 24, 2007 Hotfix Package
12.0.0.4518	WSS 3.0 RTM

Sharepoint 2010: Reset Farm Passphrase

People leaving the company can take some important undocumented knowledge with them. Lets say your SharePoint admin leaves the company for a better position somewhere else. Now you discover that he never took the time to document the farm's passphrase. 

While you can't retrieve the passprase, it is possible though to reset the passphrase using PowerShell: 

$passphrase = ConvertTo-SecureString -asPlainText –Force

Set-SPPassPhrase -PassPhrase $passphrase –Confirm

Make sure the account you're using is both farm admin and local admin

That's all!

Reset User Passwords with ActiveRoles PowerShell

With PowerShell and Quest ActiveRoles it's quite easy to do a bulk reset of user passwords. All you need is a .csv file and a few lines of PowerShell. 

First we will select the users from the AD which' user accounts we are going to reset. I used dsquery to query an OU and save the output to a .csv file.

dsquery user OU=Users,DC=CONTOSO,DC=COM  -limit 1000 > users.csv

Note that the default limit is set on 100 records. Use the -limit parameter to bypass this output limit.

Open the .csv file in excel, insert a row above the data and name this column users. 

 

Now when we have a .csv file containing all user accounts we are going to reset, it's time to write some PowerShell code. Make sure you're using the ActiveRoles console for this.

Connect-QADService -Proxy 

#Read CSV file with usernames
$users = Import-Csv "users.csv"
#New password
$password = "P@ssw0rd01"

foreach($entry in $users) {
    $currentuser = $entry.users
    Set-QADUser -Identity "$currentuser" -UserPassword $password -UserMustChangePassword $true

This script will change the password for every user and it will enforce the users the change their passwords when they login.

Check help for more parameters which can be used 
Get-Help Set-QADUser -full

Command Line: Change user password

It is possible to change the password of a local user from the command line. When installing a 2008 server I prefer to set most of the options from the commandline. In my opinion it's quicker and more important: it's scriptable. 

To change a user's password, use the following command:

net use [username] [newpassword]

net use administrator P@ssword01 

MDT 2012: Hide shell during installation

MDT 2012 introduced a new feature which is very convenient in my opinion. In MDT 2010 the shell was visible and active during installation. Which could lead to users interrupting a running installation. Now it's possible to hide the shell by using the following line in your customsettings.ini.

HIDESHELL=YES

Now you can get rid of your Post-It notes telling people to stay away from this computer.