This is Tim McConnell, Program Manager on the SharePoint Foundation team. For the 2010 release, I’ve worked with SharePoint platform and partner teams to deliver powerful, reliable, accessible user experiences. Like Office, Office Web Applications, Windows, and teams across Microsoft, everyone in SharePoint strives to remove barriers that make software difficult to use. Sometimes improvements can be obvious, like the reorganized Ribbon user interface. However, some users may not notice changes that can transform another user’s experience. Accessible software respects the range of different users’ experiences, and it accommodates everyone.

Standards

As a starting point, SharePoint adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, WCAG 2.0, and set a goal for Level AA. Becoming a W3C recommendation on December 11^th, 2008, WCAG 2.0 defines the expectations of and the techniques deployed in well-built, accessible Web sites. The SharePoint teams followed the spec’s developments, and we designed and tested SharePoint 2010 against the guidelines. WCAG 2.0 represents a modern, international standard that’s as valuable to developers as it is to Web users.

Core Investments

The four principles of WCAG 2.0 are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. For each area, SharePoint has made key investments, and here I’ll scratch the surface to describe a few:

Perceivable

• SharePoint 2010 delivers broad changes to describe content and media and to explain controls.
• The redesigned masterpage leverages CSS and presents content in the appropriate sequence.

Operable

• Keyboard interaction has been a cornerstone in our feature evaluations to maximize device compatibility and usability.
• Proper heading structures have been added to pages for informational, organizational, and navigational benefits.
• Core to a trustworthy interface is a dependable focus, and we’ve invested heavily in protecting the users focus and in deferring control to the user agent wherever possible.

Understandable

• Across SharePoint, we’ve improved language support, and we’ve integrated this information into our pages and into our advanced editors.
• SharePoint supports browser settings to zoom content and operating system features to increase font sizes.

Robust

• Our new design efforts let us declare DocTypes and specify CSS-standards rendering for our masterpages. This has dramatically improved our cross-browser support.
• Broad investments were made to update our markup to be like well-formed XML, and the new rich text editor has clean markup and a function to convert its content into XHTML.

We’ve tested these principles with and without Assistive Technologies to verify their value for all users.

ARIA Integration

ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and it specifies descriptive extensions for Web applications. Like WCAG, WAI-ARIA is from the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. In a nutshell, ARIA allows an inaccessible element, such as a div with an onclick attribute, to surface itself as a button control. This can be done with a new role attribute set to “button”—it’s that simple. SharePoint leverages ARIA in the Ribbon, in dialogs, in our new rich text editor, and elsewhere in the platform and in partner applications.

Examples of Accessibility Investments

Dialogs

In order to keep users in context for as long as possible, we’ve introduced in-browser dialogs. With a dialog, the experience of reading, editing, and creating SharePoint content moves more quickly. Since SharePoint dialogs do not open new browser windows, we’ve built in important accessibility features to help all users navigate successfully.

1. Focus: SharePoint describes its dialogs using multiple accessible techniques, and form dialogs will set focus on the first form element like they would after a navigation event.
2. Dismissing a dialog: depending on how a browser implements Access Keys, closing the dialog is a couple of key strokes away. For example, in Internet Explorer, a user can hit Alt+C to disregard a dialog; in Firefox users can hit Alt+Shift+C.
3. Confirming a dialog: when the necessary forms have been filled, users can hit Alt+O to accept the dialog or to submit the form.

The Ribbon

As the key component of the new SharePoint 2010 user interface, the Ribbon needs to deliver powerful, useful, and usable experience. We designed the Ribbon to be accessible from the beginning, and we took advantage of multiple tools and techniques to provide a rich experience.

Keyboard Support

Keyboard support comes from the ground up. Because the Ribbon is a complicated component, it has a simple link to skip all of its commands. To help users on keyboards and alternative input devices, the Ribbon provides hidden, in-context instructions that explain its structure and how it’s controlled. Each of the Ribbon’s commands and menu anchors appear within the page’s navigation order, so it’s always safe to explore either forwards or backwards.

Tab Access

Because the Ribbon appears at the top of SharePoint pages, it’s necessary to provide quick access. The Ribbon operates as a central control for all of the components on the page, so it’s impractical to navigate back and forth for every command. To accelerate Ribbon interaction, a new shortcut key combination, Ctrl+[, will jump the focus to the first available Ribbon tab. From there, users can move back toward the Quick Access Toolbar commands and the Site Actions menu, or users can move ahead to the other Ribbon tabs.

In the following picture, the Browse tab has been highlighted to demonstrate focus after entering the Ctrl+[ shortcut key combination.

Command Access

Similar to accessing Tabs, it’s also important to quickly access commands. For this SharePoint supports the Ctrl+] shortcut key combination. This shortcut works in one of two ways:

1. It selects the first command on the active Ribbon Tab.
2. It selects the last used command on the active Ribbon Tab.

To move between Groups of Ribbon commands enter one of the Ctrl+Arrow Left, Ctrl+Arrow Right, Shift+Arrow Left, or Shift+Arrow Right shortcut key combinations. These shortcuts will loop through the Groups to prevent users from accidentally navigating outside of the Ribbon. The shared use of Ctrl and Shift allows for maximum browser and Assistive Technology compatibility.

Enhanced Tooltips

Enhanced tooltips describe a command’s behavior and its availability without cluttering the user interface or slowing navigation. When trying to decipher small icons or to move between many rich commands, enhanced tooltips provide the extra bit of information needed to verify your actions.

ARIA Integration

Behind the scenes in each of the three Ribbon examples are ARIA role attributes describing the structure and purpose of the Ribbon controls. Here’s a short list of attributes:

• aria-labelledby – Rich control labels
• aria-describedby – Rich control descriptions via enhanced tooltips
• aria-haspopup – Notification information to warn when a control may pop-up another control
• aria-multiline – Describes text fields for large amounts on content
• And here’s a short list of ARIA roles used within SharePoint:
• tabpanel – An expanded Ribbon Tab
• tooltip – Ribbon tooltip content
• button – An interactive button control
• dialog – An interactive dialog

Each of these simple strings dramatically changes how browsers and Assistive Technologies communicate Web content to users. While a basic a anchor tag will work for most basic command scenarios, it’s better and more reassuring to fully provide ARIA’s role=”button” syntax for clear descriptions.

InfoPath Forms

Through investments made in InfoPath Forms Services 2010, form designers can easily design and publish forms with an accessible user experience.

Assistive Technology Friendly

InfoPath forms have been designed and tested to work with browsers and assistive technologies. Broad changes have been made to describe simple controls and complex controls with field validation and relationships.

ARIA Integration

WAI-ARIA has been used to further improve the user experience on assistive technologies: ARIA is used to notify the assistive technology of form updates, alerts, warnings, and other pop-up dialogs.

Keyboard Support

Users filling forms in IPFS 2010 have full keyboard support to access all necessary functionality. InfoPath has also done work to ensure that keyboard focus is maintained in a predictable manner during dynamic changes to the form.

Project Grid Editing

The ability to display and edit tabular data is a core component of any productivity suite. SharePoint is no exception. In SharePoint Foundation 2010 we have introduced a new JavaScript based grid control that allows users to modify SharePoint Project Tasks Lists, change Project schedules, and edit Access databases. From the very early planning stages of developing this control we began to craft requirements to ensure the control was accessible. The control has complex requirements around the support of Gantt Charts and hierarchy (for Project Server) as well as very large datasets, macros and custom user validation (for Access Services). In order to ensure accessibility for these features we made use of ARIA and robust keyboard shortcuts.

ARIA Integration

Like the Ribbon, ARIA is used to achieve support for these complex requirements. Here are additional examples of how Project uses ARIA:

• aria-owns – enables focus element to be set in a input element that maps to the entire control
• aria-activedescendant – enables virtual focus element to map to a specific cell within the grid
• aria-multiselectable – indicates that multiple cell selections can be made
• aria-expanded – indicate expand/collapse state within hierarchy
• aria-busy – indicates if a row has not yet been downloaded from the server

Keyboard Navigation

SharePoint’s Grid control was designed to support keyboard navigation from day one. We know that frequently when dealing with tabular data whether it is datasheets, lists or projects, users often have many items to display on screen. Because of this we provide a simple link that allows users to skip the grid when moving through elements on a page. Additionally the Grid supports many of the keyboard shortcuts you have come to expect in desktop applications. Cell navigation can be easily performed by using directional arrow keys as well as traditional tabbing. Moving up and down within grid is easy with common shortcuts like Page Up/Page Down as well as support for Home/End and many others. Support is even present for complex selection and expanding dropdowns (Alt+Down). In Project Server the control supports changing Gantt chart zoom levels all through a couple keypresses (CTRL+* & CTRL+/), as well as expanding and collapsing hierarchy.

Conclusion

Thanks for learning more about the investments that we’ve made to make SharePoint an exceptional, versatile, and accessible web application and platform. Web technologies move quickly, and we’re always seeking new ways to present dynamic Web experiences that work for everyone. We’re proud of the richness that we’ve delivered, and we hope that you’ll discover SharePoint 2010 to be both powerful and usable.

-Tim McConnell

This is Tim McConnell, Program Manager on the SharePoint Foundation team. For the 2010 release, I’ve worked with SharePoint platform and partner teams to deliver powerful, reliable, accessible user experiences. Like Office, Office Web Applications, Windows, and teams across Microsoft, everyone in SharePoint strives to remove barriers that make software difficult to use. Sometimes improvements can be obvious, like the reorganized Ribbon user interface. However, some users may not notice changes that can transform another user’s experience. Accessible software respects the range of different users’ experiences, and it accommodates everyone.

Standards

As a starting point, SharePoint adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, WCAG 2.0, and set a goal for Level AA. Becoming a W3C recommendation on December 11^th, 2008, WCAG 2.0 defines the expectations of and the techniques deployed in well-built, accessible Web sites. The SharePoint teams followed the spec’s developments, and we designed and tested SharePoint 2010 against the guidelines. WCAG 2.0 represents a modern, international standard that’s as valuable to developers as it is to Web users.

Core Investments

The four principles of WCAG 2.0 are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. For each area, SharePoint has made key investments, and here I’ll scratch the surface to describe a few:

Perceivable

• SharePoint 2010 delivers broad changes to describe content and media and to explain controls.
• The redesigned masterpage leverages CSS and presents content in the appropriate sequence.

Operable

• Keyboard interaction has been a cornerstone in our feature evaluations to maximize device compatibility and usability.
• Proper heading structures have been added to pages for informational, organizational, and navigational benefits.
• Core to a trustworthy interface is a dependable focus, and we’ve invested heavily in protecting the users focus and in deferring control to the user agent wherever possible.

Understandable

• Across SharePoint, we’ve improved language support, and we’ve integrated this information into our pages and into our advanced editors.
• SharePoint supports browser settings to zoom content and operating system features to increase font sizes.

Robust

• Our new design efforts let us declare DocTypes and specify CSS-standards rendering for our masterpages. This has dramatically improved our cross-browser support.
• Broad investments were made to update our markup to be like well-formed XML, and the new rich text editor has clean markup and a function to convert its content into XHTML.

We’ve tested these principles with and without Assistive Technologies to verify their value for all users.

ARIA Integration

ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and it specifies descriptive extensions for Web applications. Like WCAG, WAI-ARIA is from the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. In a nutshell, ARIA allows an inaccessible element, such as a div with an onclick attribute, to surface itself as a button control. This can be done with a new role attribute set to “button”—it’s that simple. SharePoint leverages ARIA in the Ribbon, in dialogs, in our new rich text editor, and elsewhere in the platform and in partner applications.

Examples of Accessibility Investments

Dialogs

In order to keep users in context for as long as possible, we’ve introduced in-browser dialogs. With a dialog, the experience of reading, editing, and creating SharePoint content moves more quickly. Since SharePoint dialogs do not open new browser windows, we’ve built in important accessibility features to help all users navigate successfully.

1. Focus: SharePoint describes its dialogs using multiple accessible techniques, and form dialogs will set focus on the first form element like they would after a navigation event.
2. Dismissing a dialog: depending on how a browser implements Access Keys, closing the dialog is a couple of key strokes away. For example, in Internet Explorer, a user can hit Alt+C to disregard a dialog; in Firefox users can hit Alt+Shift+C.
3. Confirming a dialog: when the necessary forms have been filled, users can hit Alt+O to accept the dialog or to submit the form.

The Ribbon

As the key component of the new SharePoint 2010 user interface, the Ribbon needs to deliver powerful, useful, and usable experience. We designed the Ribbon to be accessible from the beginning, and we took advantage of multiple tools and techniques to provide a rich experience.

Keyboard Support

Keyboard support comes from the ground up. Because the Ribbon is a complicated component, it has a simple link to skip all of its commands. To help users on keyboards and alternative input devices, the Ribbon provides hidden, in-context instructions that explain its structure and how it’s controlled. Each of the Ribbon’s commands and menu anchors appear within the page’s navigation order, so it’s always safe to explore either forwards or backwards.

Tab Access

Because the Ribbon appears at the top of SharePoint pages, it’s necessary to provide quick access. The Ribbon operates as a central control for all of the components on the page, so it’s impractical to navigate back and forth for every command. To accelerate Ribbon interaction, a new shortcut key combination, Ctrl+[, will jump the focus to the first available Ribbon tab. From there, users can move back toward the Quick Access Toolbar commands and the Site Actions menu, or users can move ahead to the other Ribbon tabs.

In the following picture, the Browse tab has been highlighted to demonstrate focus after entering the Ctrl+[ shortcut key combination.

Command Access

Similar to accessing Tabs, it’s also important to quickly access commands. For this SharePoint supports the Ctrl+] shortcut key combination. This shortcut works in one of two ways:

1. It selects the first command on the active Ribbon Tab.
2. It selects the last used command on the active Ribbon Tab.

To move between Groups of Ribbon commands enter one of the Ctrl+Arrow Left, Ctrl+Arrow Right, Shift+Arrow Left, or Shift+Arrow Right shortcut key combinations. These shortcuts will loop through the Groups to prevent users from accidentally navigating outside of the Ribbon. The shared use of Ctrl and Shift allows for maximum browser and Assistive Technology compatibility.

Enhanced Tooltips

Enhanced tooltips describe a command’s behavior and its availability without cluttering the user interface or slowing navigation. When trying to decipher small icons or to move between many rich commands, enhanced tooltips provide the extra bit of information needed to verify your actions.

ARIA Integration

Behind the scenes in each of the three Ribbon examples are ARIA role attributes describing the structure and purpose of the Ribbon controls. Here’s a short list of attributes:

• aria-labelledby – Rich control labels
• aria-describedby – Rich control descriptions via enhanced tooltips
• aria-haspopup – Notification information to warn when a control may pop-up another control
• aria-multiline – Describes text fields for large amounts on content
• And here’s a short list of ARIA roles used within SharePoint:
• tabpanel – An expanded Ribbon Tab
• tooltip – Ribbon tooltip content
• button – An interactive button control
• dialog – An interactive dialog

Each of these simple strings dramatically changes how browsers and Assistive Technologies communicate Web content to users. While a basic a anchor tag will work for most basic command scenarios, it’s better and more reassuring to fully provide ARIA’s role=”button” syntax for clear descriptions.

InfoPath Forms

Through investments made in InfoPath Forms Services 2010, form designers can easily design and publish forms with an accessible user experience.

Assistive Technology Friendly

InfoPath forms have been designed and tested to work with browsers and assistive technologies. Broad changes have been made to describe simple controls and complex controls with field validation and relationships.

ARIA Integration

WAI-ARIA has been used to further improve the user experience on assistive technologies: ARIA is used to notify the assistive technology of form updates, alerts, warnings, and other pop-up dialogs.

Keyboard Support

Users filling forms in IPFS 2010 have full keyboard support to access all necessary functionality. InfoPath has also done work to ensure that keyboard focus is maintained in a predictable manner during dynamic changes to the form.

Project Grid Editing

The ability to display and edit tabular data is a core component of any productivity suite. SharePoint is no exception. In SharePoint Foundation 2010 we have introduced a new JavaScript based grid control that allows users to modify SharePoint Project Tasks Lists, change Project schedules, and edit Access databases. From the very early planning stages of developing this control we began to craft requirements to ensure the control was accessible. The control has complex requirements around the support of Gantt Charts and hierarchy (for Project Server) as well as very large datasets, macros and custom user validation (for Access Services). In order to ensure accessibility for these features we made use of ARIA and robust keyboard shortcuts.

ARIA Integration

Like the Ribbon, ARIA is used to achieve support for these complex requirements. Here are additional examples of how Project uses ARIA:

• aria-owns – enables focus element to be set in a input element that maps to the entire control
• aria-activedescendant – enables virtual focus element to map to a specific cell within the grid
• aria-multiselectable – indicates that multiple cell selections can be made
• aria-expanded – indicate expand/collapse state within hierarchy
• aria-busy – indicates if a row has not yet been downloaded from the server

Keyboard Navigation

SharePoint’s Grid control was designed to support keyboard navigation from day one. We know that frequently when dealing with tabular data whether it is datasheets, lists or projects, users often have many items to display on screen. Because of this we provide a simple link that allows users to skip the grid when moving through elements on a page. Additionally the Grid supports many of the keyboard shortcuts you have come to expect in desktop applications. Cell navigation can be easily performed by using directional arrow keys as well as traditional tabbing. Moving up and down within grid is easy with common shortcuts like Page Up/Page Down as well as support for Home/End and many others. Support is even present for complex selection and expanding dropdowns (Alt+Down). In Project Server the control supports changing Gantt chart zoom levels all through a couple keypresses (CTRL+* & CTRL+/), as well as expanding and collapsing hierarchy.

Conclusion

Thanks for learning more about the investments that we’ve made to make SharePoint an exceptional, versatile, and accessible web application and platform. Web technologies move quickly, and we’re always seeking new ways to present dynamic Web experiences that work for everyone. We’re proud of the richness that we’ve delivered, and we hope that you’ll discover SharePoint 2010 to be both powerful and usable.

-Tim McConnell

Welcome to the first of a 4 part series where I’ll be guiding you through the do’s and don’ts of setting up SharePoint FBA on different versions of the SharePoint platforms, being MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010 as well as outlining specific differences, which I’ve bumped my head on a few times over the years to realize and become fully aware of.

For those of you that don’t know, Forms Based Authentication (FBA) allows a web user to access a SharePoint site and get access to the relevant permissions normally imposed using the groups and permissions within SharePoint. This is basically done by creating a database outlining the necessary roles and permissions that SharePoint can lookup to define what sort of permissions the user has when they logged in externally.

Due to SharePoint 2010 being only  recently released the following is more of a how I managed to flow through the process and doesn’t allow for much deviation form a vanilla deployment of SharePoint 2010 and its other dependent items, being IIS 7 and the Central Admin console.

This article details FBA configuration on a SharePoint 2010 site. If you are looking for information regarding the configuration of FBA on a SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3.0 site, have a look at Part 2 of this series of articles.

Setup your SharePoint 2010 site

1. In Central Admin, create a new site. By default, this will use Windows Authentication. Since we haven’t setup FBA yet, we need to setup the Web Application first as a Windows site.
2. Create the Web Application
3. Create a default Site Collection, and make a windows user (below we’ve used the Administrator account) a Site Administrator.

Setup your User Database

1. Setup the ASP.NET Membership Database. Note: You can use custom membership stores, DotNetNuke, even Live! credentials. But the .NET membership database is very simple to setup. This requires the SQL Server database. You can use the integrated version that is supplied with SharePoint, Express or a fully featured SQL Server (Standard or Enterprise) Edition.
2. Find the setup file aspnet_regsql.exe located at either of the following locations depending upon your OS:
   %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.5027
   %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.5027
3. When the ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard appears, select “Configure SQL Server for application services”, then click Next
4. Enter the SQL Server and Database name
5. Above, I have named the database FBADB
6. Click Next and Finish

Provide Access to the Membership Database

As an administrator, you’ll be able to add and modify user accounts. But from the SharePoint runtime, we’ll have to provide access to the membership store. This can be done in two ways. If using SSPI (Integrated Security) for the connectionstring from SharePoint, you’ll need to determine the Service Account that runs the Application Pool. Then you’ll provide access to this windows (or service) account in SQL Server to the FBADB database. Or, if you don’t want to use SSPI, or don’t want to take the time to figure out the startup service account for SharePoint you can simply create a login to the FBADB database. Following are steps for the second approach.

1. Open SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS 2008) and select Security , then Logins
2. Right Click Logins and Select “New Login”
3. Create a SQL Server account. Below, we’d created the account FBAService with password pw
4. Select “User Mapping”
5. Mark the checkbox next to FBADB, and select the row.
6. In “Database role membership”, make the user a dbo_owner.
7. Click OK to save the new user.

Setup IIS 7.0 Defaults

1. Open up Internet Information Services Manager
2. Select the Web Server, then double click Connection Strings
3. Click Add..
4. Enter the Server (.), Database (FBADB) and the Credentials for the user FBAService (by clicking the Set button). If you want to use SSPI, simpy select “Use Windows Integrated Security” instead.
5. Click OK to save
6. Click to Select the Server from the Connections pane again, and double click Providers.
7. On the Feature dropdown, select .NET Users. Your machine may take a while to respond while the configuration is read.
8. On the Actions menu, click Add.
9. On the Add Provider form, select SqlMembershipProvider as the Type
10. Provide a name: FBA.
11. Drop down ConnectionStringName and select FBADB
12. Set any other parameters you’d like. I set some Password related options for user interaction later.
13. Click OK to save
14. From the Feature dropdown, select .NET Roles, then click Add..
15. Provide a name: FBARole, and select Type: SqlRoleProvider
16. Select the ConnectionStringName: FBADB
17. Click OK to save the .NET role.

Setup the FBA Zone in SharePoint 2010

1. Browse to SharePoint 4.0 Central Administration, Select Security
2. In Application Security, select Specify Authentication Providers
3. Select the Web Application.
4. Click the Default Zone.
5. Ensure the Web Application is the correct one on the next page!
6. Change Authentication Type to Forms
7. Check Enable Anonymous (* note that this does not immediately enable Anonymous access; it merely makes the option available on the front-end web application *
8. Click Save.
9. When the process is finished, the membership provider should now display FBA.

What SharePoint has done behind the scenes is make the necessary changes to the IIS website to support Forms based authentication. But we still have a little problem. If we browse to the site right now, we won’t be prompted for Windows credentials anymore. Not only do we NOT have a user in the .NET membership database, but we have no FBA based administrators. Let’s tackle that next.

IIS 7.0 Web Site Configuration for SharePoint 2010 FBA

1. In IIS Manager, select the SharePoint site. In this example, we used the default site (80).
2. Double click the .NET Users icon
3. Click Set Default Provider from the actions pane on the left and select FBA
4. Click OK to save.
5. While we’re here, let’s add our first user. This will be used as an administrative account on the FBA site. Click Add..
6. Select a User, Email and Password. Depending upon parameters you defined earlier you may be prompted with challenge/response questions.
7. ** The password may require some strength by default. If you receive an error message that states the “password is invalid”, simply add a number or non-alpha character.
8. Next, select the SharePoint Central Administration v4 web site from the connections menu in IIS.
9. Click .Net Users, then in the Actions menu select “Set Default Provider” and set that to FBA.

Set the User as Site Administrator on the SharePoint 2010 Web Site

1. In SharePoint Central Admin v4, go to Application Management
2. In the Site Collections section, select “Change Site Collection Administrators”
3. On the next page, select the Site Collection we’ve been using.
4. You’ll note that the primary site collection administrator has a little red squiggly. Why? We don’t have Windows Authentication enabled for this site and therefore no way to resolve. Delete the Administator account.
5. In the field type the user created above (we used fbaadmin), then click the Check Names button. You should see a black underline noting that the name was resolved.

Test the site

1. In a Web Browser, when you access the site http://localhost(if that’s what you used), you’ll be presented with the SharePoint login screen, not a Windows login pop-up.
2. Login with the fbaadmin credentials and you should be able to access the site.

Add the reference to the user friendly people picker

You know the picker…so you can easily find those needles in the haystack. For that to work in Central Admin and this site against your .NET membership database, you need to add a reference to the provider.

1. In IIS Manager, browse to the Central Admin web application. Explore the folder and find the web.config file. Open in Notepad.
2. Find the <PeoplePickerWildcards> node and use the following:

<PeoplePickerWildcards>

<clear />

<add key=”FBA” value=”%” />

</PeoplePickerWildcards>

Note: If you plan to use the same membership database for multiple SharePoint sites AND you choose to encrypt the passwords, you’ll need to add one final step. In IIS 7,  on the first site, select the Machine Keys icon. Copy those keys. In the next site that you create, you’ll need to use the same machine keys and disable “Automatically Generate” and disable “Generate Unique Key”. This is crucial as the machine key is used to determine the encrypted password that is passed back to the .NET membership database

Conclusion

In closing the way that you’ve seen FBA being setup in moSS 2010 is very similar to the way it’s required to be setup in 2007. This is because as you can see the same method of authentication will be used for MOSS 2007. The few differences are with the way that  IIS 7 permissions which will be clear in the next article. In the next article I’ll attempt to go into depth with the configuration of MOSS 2007 FBA and show every aspect of the configuration with the assistance on one of my colleagues who has also spent many hours in understanding the way FBA has been architected and fuctons within MOSS 2007.

http://ccsblog.burtongroup.com/collaboration_and_content/201…(truncated)… by DecatecSharepoint Team

Mint Management Technologies (Pty) Ltd -  Profile

Mint Management Technologies (Pty) Ltd was established in 1971 and has rendered market intelligence gathering and deployment solutions to South African corporate and multi-national companies for over 38 years.

Mint Research (traditional) provided a traditional print media advertising verification service to the South African advertising industry.  It includes checking of CI’s against newspaper and magazine tear sheets; surveys monitoring competition and ad hoc provision of current and historic tear sheets.

This division also provided a New Age service which provides ad spend and promotional pricing of products and companies that advertise their offerings in publications, TV and radio, via in-store promotions, direct-to-home distributions and the Internet.  Its in-store observation enables virtual real-time reading of what happens in-store in terms of pricing, promotional activity, product availability, assortment offered, merchandising technique, share of facings, consumer behaviour and a check on the distribution agent.

Clients of Mint Research included retail specialists such as Woolworths, Shoprite and Pick n Pay.  The division also assists leading brands such as Clover, Proctor and Gamble, Kelloggs to manage its advertising output and vehicle manufacturers Volkswagen and Nissan.

Mint Mobile’s locally developed Territory Management System is a real time intelligence gathering solution. It enables sales people to schedule appointments, manage a customer database, process sales orders and collect research information at customer and product level by means of a mobile device. In addition, the system enables sales representatives to manage all customer appointments via a Microsoft calendar. Vehicle information, expenses and mileage logging can be entered into the system. Red flag issues captured will distribute alerts to the line or product managers involved, and are kept open until closed or solved. The system allows for detailed drill down reporting and analysis. A bi-directional messaging system allows for communication between the sales force and head office.

A dedicated Website enables sales managers to view and track the sales force progress. Drill down graphing allows managers to evaluate the sales force individually. It provides sales managers with real time snap shots of a sales representative’s daily performance in terms of orders, planning and execution thereof, types of contracts signed and accurate sales statistics. It fosters improved communication, provides sales managers with the ability to analyse and institute coaching within a real time environment.  The Website also allows for electronic images and detailed product information to be sent to the device.  A powerful reporting engine generates the necessary reports for the various management levels and these reports are scheduled to be automatically distributed in the desired format when required. Examples of report types are: Call Rates, Strike Rates, Call Coverage, Planned vs Actual etcetera. This solution ensures that customers enjoy real time status updates with regards to orders and stock levels.

They are able to review previous order patterns immediately and make better informed decisions. Sales representatives will be able to solve red flag issues far quicker as a result of the real time reporting and information at hand on Mint Mobile’s system, as well as provide customers with new product information as soon as it is launched.

In 2007, Mint Management Technologies (Pty) Ltd expanded its offering with the acquisition of Mint Net (Pty) Ltd.  Mint Net was established in 2000 and designed, implemented and supported over 40 Enterprise Content Management solutions globally.  These include Sappi Limited’s Global Intranet (4 continents), Ford & Mazda corporate web presence in South Africa, Microsoft South Africa Intranet, Deloitte’s Intranet and various others.

Clients of Mint include the pharmaceutical industry such as Adcock Ingram Health Care, Aspen Pharmacare, Novartis Consumer Health, Novartis Pharma SA and Pharmaplan to name a few, as well as the telecommunications industry namely Vodacom and MTN, and the banking industry namely Standard Bank, Nedbank, Absa, Investec and National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia.

If you would like to be featured on the SharePoint Magazine Partner Spotlight, please contact us