SharePoint 2016: UserProfileApplicationProxy Proxy is null

Hi all!

After a looong time without installing a new SharePoint farm, yesterday it was the day 🙂 I needed to install a new farm, so I started doing it and it was everything so simple. After I installed the farm I was reveiwing the Event Viewer in order to see any errors, and I realize that the farm was throwing a lot of errors complaining about “UserProfileApplicationProxy Proxy is null”

The error itself, makes sense since I did not provisioned the User Profile Service Application, so what can I do? Disable the timers of course 🙂

  1. Log in to Central Administration
  2. Click the Monitoring link on the left and then under Timer Jobs click Review job definitions
  3. On the left click Job History
  4. Change the View from All to Failed Jobs
  5. Click the link for the failed job – in my case I am disabling the following jobs:- UserProfileApplicationProxy – Per Database User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization
    – UserProfileApplicationProxy – Unified Group Processing High Performance Job
  6. Click Disable

And that’s all, problem solved and not more errors in the event viewer. To the next thing!

Advertisements

How to check if an external user has accepted the invitation

From time to time, customers I receive calls from my customers saying that they send invitations from SPO to external users, but they claim that they did not receive nothing. This post will try to clarify the process, and how is it possible to check the user invitation status.

As you know, every invitation made into O365 (Teams, O365 Groups, SPO…) relies in Azure Active Directory, so our source of information will be there. So what are the steps that we need to follow?

The important thing here, is the source field. If the source field shows invited user, it means the user has not accepted the invitation. If that is the case, than you can click on resend invitation and this will trigger another invite for the user to redeem

inv

Once the user has redeemed the external user invite, you can check the source field, because depending on the Identity Source, the field will be updated regsarding the IS.

In this case, the user has been invited to a Microsoft Account (@outlook, @hotmail)

inv1

In this other case, the user has been invited from an Organization Account (note that the source is External Azure Active Directory)

inv2

That’s all!

 

Disable OWA attachment download

Due to some security requirements in a project, I need to disable the attachment download in OWA (with other security requirements acomplished with Access Control). To do that it was very simple and onlye was needed some clicks into the Exchange Online admin center:

First of all, access to the EXO AC, go to permissions, Outlook Web App policies, then you have two options, or create a new policy or to modifiy the default, one. Whatever option you choose, the only change needed is to uncheck the “Direct file Access” checkbox

owa-file-access

In case you create a new OWA policy and specify the following:

owa-file-access2

In case you create a new policy, remember to set the policy to a bunch of pilot users to test it first, before setting the policy to the whole company

But If you want to do it by PowerShell, you can do it by executing the following (remember to connect to EXO by PS):

Get-OwaMailboxPolicy | Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -DirectFileAccessOnPublicComputersEnabled $false -DirectFileAccessOnPrivateComputersEnabled $false

Once this has been done, the user is not able to download the file, but he can edit the file into the Online version of Office, great isn´t it?

Azure: Standard SSD Disks

Recently Microsoft announced that they are launching Standard SSD Disks for Azure MV. The main purpose of this is to replace standard HDD disks for those VM that are executing low level workloads.

We will continue having Standard HDD disks, since Standard SSD disks are in preview, so is probably that will be only available for some particular regions. The main point of this announcement is that Standard SSD disks are here to replace HDD disks, if we compare Standard SSD disks against HDD, we can get:

  • Smoother levels of performance
  • Lower latency

So, nowadays we have the following classification for SSD disks:

  • Standard SSD: For workloads where you do not need high IOPS.
  • Premium SSD: Higher IOPS and throughput than Standard disks, and offer a 99.5 percent SLA for single virtual machine services

Also we have to take into account that Standard SSD disks are a bit cheaper than HDD: Price

 

What is Azure File Sync?

Today I will talk about a new service that is it in preview in Azure, which is Azure File Sync (AFS). The main purpose of this new service is to integrate on-premises file servers with Azure in several ways:

  1. Synchronize selected folders of a File Server to the Azure Files service in a storage account. By doing this, the master copy will reside in Azure.
  2. Next thing to take into account is that Azure Backup will protect the copy of the files in Azure.
  3. In case you lose the file server due to ransomware or whatsoever, is it possible to recreate a new one and then get the data back online preserving the metadata of the files.

Azure File Sync

So, if you want to preserve your data of the file server AFS is a great alternative, you don’t have to migrate all the data and also you will take advantage of Azure features 🙂

If you want more info about it, you can check the following link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-public-preview-for-azure-file-sync/