Track SharePoint 2010 Installations by Service Connection Point (AD Marker)

A new improvement in SharePoint 2010 is the support of Service Connection Point (Active Directory Marker). This can help IT Professionals to track SharePoint 2010 installations in their environment.

To use this new feature, administrator needs to create a container in Active Directory then set the right permission to the container before they implement SharePoint 2010 products in their environment. This can be done through ADSI Edit. Here’re the steps:

1. Start ADSI Edit on your domain controller, or use remote administration tool to connect to it from another machine.

2. Expand System.

3. Right click in the white area then choose New, Object…

4. Create a container.

5. Fill in the container name, by default this should be Microsoft SharePoint Products. You can use other names, but you need to create a group policy for the domain machines to set a string value ContainerDistinguishedName under registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\SharePoint. In this way PSConfig can detect the new name and change it accordingly.

6. Click Finish. The container is created.

 

7. Right click on the container, choose Properties.

8. Click Security.

9. Add the users you want to write to this container, and give them Create serviceConnectionPoint objects permission by clicking Advanced, then edit the object. When users who cannot write to this container install SharePoint 2010, no new entry will be created. A wise idea would be give Authenticated Users the permission so to track all the objects.

10. Install and provision a new SharePoint farm in the environment, and check if the SCP has been created successfully.  If everything works, you can find a new GUID object under Microsoft SharePoint Product Container. Right click it and select Properties, you can find that the server farm’s topology web services is recorded here. In this case it is https://sp2010:32844/Topology/topology.svc

I will post a script for listing all the SharePoint 2010 server names in Script Center later.

Update: the script is here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/af31bded-f33f-4c38-a4e8-eaa2fab1c459