Service account for central Admin in SharePoint

As most of you probably know, SharePoint should be installed with two service accounts. One, lets call it spserviceaccount, should be the account that runs all SharePoint web applications, all mysites etc and the otherone, lets call it spappserviceaccount, should only run the central admin app-pool.

So why, well, imagine if you hade the same account even for central admin, what could happen? If, someone bad, was to hack the SharePoint so that it could start running bad programs, they would also be able to create new sites, delete sitecollections and more. Not very nice, hence we use a special app account central admin to make sure that we are just a bit safer.

How do we do set it?
Best way is to actually run the installation wizard as spappserviceaccount and make sure you set the right user in every step of the installation.

Already up and running and want to change it?
Well, I havn’t tried this, but it is supposed to be doable using stsadm, please check this kb-article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838

It should be something like:
stsadm –o updatefarmcredentials –userlogin DomainNameUserName -password NewPassword

But please check the article.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Ease the trouble of developing callouts

Developing callouts is tiresome, you have to do stop the IIS before each compilation, start it up right after and then CRM has to be just-in-time compiled by IIS, each time. As most of you who have done callout development, this is a nag and takes a lot of time. Stunware has released one way of handling this, which is good when doing large scale callouts, but for smaller callout development it has a bit of a overhead.

Microsoft Swedens CRM expert, Jonas Deibe, has written a posting on his blog concerning how to recycle the application pools instead of resetting the IIS, which means that CRM doesn’t have to be compiled just-in-time each time, saving you lots of hair, and time.

So, have a look at his posting: http://blogs.msdn.com/jonasd/archive/2007/03/28/use-build-events-to-recycle-application-pool-instead-of-iisreset.aspx

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se