ASP.NET Membership Settings Fine-grained Control

Warning: This configuration page is to be used when there is a specific need to make fine-grained adjustments to your ASP.NET Membership settings in your web.config files. We recommend that you contact PremierPoint Solutions before using this page to make sure the changes you are contemplating are valid and correct. To apply the normal ASP.NET Membership settings to a new web application, use the Setup Wizard instead of this page.

Before running the ASP.NET Membership Settings, we recommend making a manual backup copy of the web.config files for your extranet web application. The file can be found at this path: C:inetpubwwwrootwssVirtualDirectories{folder for your extranet web application}. This should be done on each server in your SharePoint farm.

These settings can be used to "tweak" your web.config files for an extranet web application for each server in a SharePoint farm.

The need to use this page is typically only in advancedexceptional scenarios. Normally, the web.config files are automatically configured for an extranet web application when you run the Setup Wizard.

An example of when this feature might be useful is if the name changes of the SQL Server your ASP.NET Membership Database runs on. The scenario might happen if your organizaton makes a new SQL server available and you want to move your existing ASP.NET Membership Database to the new SQL Server and reconfigure your extranet web application to find the database on the new server. You could manually edit the web.config files on each server in your SharePoint farm, but the larger your farm the more work that would be required and the more chance for human error. With this feature, you can make the appropriate edits in Central Administration and then the Extranet Global Configuration Timer Job will take care of applying those changes to every server in your SharePoint farm.

Here is a screenshot walkthrough showing how this scenario would be accomplished using this feature:

First, you select an existing extranet web application in the Web Application drop down. When you do this, the page will load the web.config file for that web application and show the current settings in the text boxes.

For this web application, the name of the SQL Server that is currently used for the ASP.NET Membership Database is "swtest-sql" (Data Source ="swtest-sql"):

Let's say that you have moved the ASP.NET Membership Settings database to a new SQL server named "swtest-sql2". Until you change the connectionString setting in web.config file for the web application on each server in your farm, the new location for the database will not be used.

Your requested changes will be saved and queued up for application the next time the Extranet Global Configuration Timer Job runs (usually within the next 5 minutes):

If you navigate away from the page and then come back in 5 - 10 minutes, when you select the web application from the drop down, you should see that the new value has been applied to the web.config: