harbar.net component based software & platform hygiene
July 2013 Blog Posts

Article: Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint 2013 Part Three: Switching an existing farm to use Domain CA issued certificates

In the previous parts of this article we covered the core concepts along with high availability, certificate and SharePoint considerations for Workflow Manager Farms, and the end to end configuration using Auto Generated Certificates. If you are not familiar with this material, make sure to read it before continuing as I assume you have done so! This part will cover switching the existing Workflow Manager farm to using Domain CA issued certificates. Whilst this part is intended as primarily step by step configuration guidance, I will take the opportunity to also explain a few things which didn’t make...

Article: Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint 2013 Part Two: End to End Configuration using Auto Generated Certificates and NLB

This second part will cover the deployment of a highly available, SSL, Workflow Manager Farm for SharePoint 2013 using auto generated certificates and Network Load Balancing. As discussed in part one, this is the most suitable deployment model for the majority of SharePoint On-premises customers. In addition it is also the easiest way to deploy for production. Whilst this part is intended as primarily step by step configuration guidance, I will take the opportunity to also explain a few things which didn’t make sense to cover in part one. Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint...

Article: Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint 2013 Part One: Core Concepts, High Availability, Certificate and SharePoint considerations

There’s not a lot of high quality documentation for Workflow Manager 1.0. What exists is generally accurate, however it’s the key missing information and lack of detail which presents challenges in the field. During the initial content development work for the MCSM: SharePoint it became clear there is a very large gap with respect to actually implementing the high level deployment guidance provided by the vendor. Following recent discussions in the MCSM: SharePoint community more generally, the topic again raised its head and led to the publication of this article. This guide is an attempt to help address that...

Configuring a Dedicated “Crawl Front End” with Request Management

I keep getting asked about how to use Request Management in SharePoint 2013 to configure a dedicated “crawl front end”. In other words how to use RM to ensure that your search crawl traffic gets sent to a specific machine or machines in the farm, which do not serve end user requests. Hopefully you already know that by simply turning on RM on your Web Servers in your farm and with no additional configuration, you get health based routing for free. And this is health based routing that actually works, unlike the default configuration of the most popular “intelligent”...