Configure User Profiles Synchronization - Part 1

In this first part of article you will see how to configurar SharePoint 2010 Profiles Syncronization.

If you have managed Profiles in SharePoint 2007 through Shared Services Provider, you should remember that 2010 introduces "Service Applications" in substitution of the old SSP.

With "Service Applications" SharePoint can manages indipendenly every services that is provided across the farm. If you want to know more, you shuold read this Andrew's blog post.

Unfortunatly before running Profiles Syncronization, a dependency must be satisfied: Managed Metadata Service must be first created and configured correctly into your farm.

Go to your Central Administration -> Application Managment.
Click to Manage service applications

Add a new item "Managed Metadata Service"

To create correctly a new Web Application under the SharePoint Web Services, you will be asked to fill informations about the Application Pool that will run for this istance and the database that will be used.
The Database Server:

And the Application Pool:

Once the Managed Metadata Service has been configured, under you IIS you will notice that a new Web application have been created. This is where your Managed Metadata Service will resides.

Now, turn on your serverice: go to Central Administration -> System Settings -> Manage services on server and start the Managed Metadata Web Service.

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Now we can finally start the User Profiles Configuration.
Go to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications, and add a new item. This time we can select User Profile Service Application.

SharePoint 2010 will now create a new application pool and 3 new Databases to store infromations about:

• Profiles
• Syncronization
• Tagging

You will simply need to point to your Database's istance and provide an unique database name.
Application pool

Profile Database, for your profile properties

Syncronization Database, for your syncronization tasks with AD

Tagging Database, for your users tags

and finally the My site urls

Ok, now you can finally create your User Profile Service Application

Get back to Central Administration -> System Settings -> Manage services on server and start the following services:

• User Profile Service
• User Profile Synchronization Service

 

Once the User Profile Synchronization Service start's up, you will be asked to insert the identity of your service

As described in this Technet's article ,after starting the User Profile Synchronization service you should wait for 5-10 minutes before proceeding to the next step.

The main reason of this is because SharePoint 2010 now uses Forefron Identity Manager to handle syncronizations of your profiles. In fact if you look at your server's services you will notice:

• Forefront Identity Manager Service
• Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service
  Enables integration and management of identity information across multiple directories, systems and platforms. If this service is stopped or disabled, no synchronization or password management for objects in connected data sources will be performed.

They are disabled by default and the Log On would be set to /.
In this 10 minutes SharePoint will create 4 different local groups:

• FIMSyncBrowse
• FIMSyncJoiners
• FIMSyncOperators
• FIMSyncPasswordSet

And activate those 2 services.
If you try to create a new import connection in Sharepoint's Central Administration, you will receive this error:

Cannot navigate to the requested page because User Profile Synchronization service is not running. Please start the User Profile Synchronization service before creating a connection

So, be patient and wait.
In the next part of this series, you will se how to set up your Import Connections and how to manage them through the Forefont Identity Manager.

References:
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2009/10/19/the-new-service-application-architecture-in-sharepoint-server-2010.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721049.aspx