Monthly Archives: August 2016

Powershell, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013

Some farm products and patches were not detected

When patching a lot of SharePoint farms, you tend to come across a lot of different issues, I’ve noticed this issue come around more often than most in load balanced farms (which is every farm nearly!).

So the scenario I have a lot is patching 3-6 servers, when patches are applied, I run the PSConfig command or PSConfigUI and this is where the issue happens.

SharePointProductsConfigWizError

From the image above, when I try to run PSConfigUI I get the error, this is after patching all the servers in the farm and waiting to run the config wizard. SharePoint seems to think the rest of the servers in the farm don’t have the patches required however, I’m 100% sure these were installed on each server.

So how would I get SharePoint to understand that every other server in the farm has this patch that’s required? Well after a little digging in PowerShell I’ve found a command that gets the product on a local machine.

Patching1

If you only run this on one server, you’ll notice the error again. To fully correct this, you’ll need to run this on every server you’ve patched in your farm so the config wizard can recognise the patch level applied.

Powershell, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013

SharePoint Still using old name

So I find this issue comes about a lot of the time for female users, reasons being is when they get married, they take the mans surname. So when their name changes in AD, this doesn’t automatically reflect the same in SharePoint.

When Active Directory Syncs with SharePoint User Profile Service, it also does a sync in parallel with the User Information List (UIL). When new users are added or modified, these users will be added to the UIL. Unfortunately, when user names are changed, this doesn’t always update the UIL and therefore creates a second account for the new updated surname account.

To fix this, we have to merge the accounts together and delete the old one. Without carrying this out, you will probably notice that SharePont still uses your old account which you’ll notice in the top right corner of SharePoint.

So firstly you can check the UIL by going to the url below

http://YOURSITEHERE/_catalogs/users/simple.aspx

Following that, you’ll get a list of users that are in SharePoint, you can also find the users by going to Site Settings, People and Groups. Change the URL at the end to look at MembershipGroupId=0, the full URL can be seen below using my own site.

http://sharepoint-oc/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0

From here, you’ll notice two accounts for one user, so we’ll need to merge these using PowerShell and then delete the old.NameChange2

$user = Get-SPUser -Identity “CHIN\MDean” -Web “http://SharePoint-OC/”
Move-SPUser -Identity $user -NewAlias “CHIN\MTravis” -IgnoreSID

The script above moves your old account to the new account with the new surname. Including the permissions that were there.

Once Completed, go to the link below again and delete the old user.

http://sharepoint-oc/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0

It might require the user to log out and in for the update however, I’ve seen it just change without needing it sometimes.