SharePoint and AD Federated Services

Question

Hello,

This might be more of a pure AD question than SharePoint but we have an issue with duplicated NetBios names and wonder if AD FS might be a solution.

Our SharePoint Farm sites in a domain called company.com and we have AD trusts with other domains which work fine. However we would like to trust some other domains but cannot do so because of a clash of NetBios names - i.e. the other domains are called company.fr and company.de - so all three domains have the same NetBios name.

I'm wondering whether AD FS might be a solution around this issue but have also heard that AD FS also requires unique NetBios names.

Does anyone have any experience of using AD FS with SharePoint?

Answer 1

Hi,

there is a property NetBIOSDomainNamesEnabled which needs to be enabled as by default the value of this property is set to 'False'. To enable this, run below mentioned PowerShell commands -

1. get-spserviceapplication

This will output every service application specifically the User Profile Service Application as I can assume that you need to configure UPA for which you need these NetBIOS name  to be working.

2. $var=get-spserviceapplication -identity <GUID>

Here <GUID> refer to the GUID you will get by running step 1.

3. $var.NetBIOSDomainNamesEnabled

If this is true then it is enabled else follow further steps.

4. $var.NetBIOSDomainNamesEnabled = 'True'

here you are setting the property to True

5. $var.update()

6. $var.NetBIOSDomainNamesEnabled

This is simply running to confirm the result as 'true'.

Once this is done, you need to make a new sync connection as the existing one will not work. So make a new sync connection for UPA and run the job.

Also further if you want to understand ADFS, the link may help you on this - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/card/archive/2010/01/16/configuring-active-directory-federation-services-2-0.aspx

Hope this helps

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Thanks, Sumit Gupta SharePoint Consultant MCP, MCTS, CCNA