I’ve configured Forms Based Authentication (FBA) in SharePoint on several occasions – from 2007 right through to 2013, but until now I have never discovered a life-saving tool that Steve Peschka has written called Forms Based Authentication Configuration Manager (FBA Configuration Manager for SharePoint 2013) available on his TechNet Blog Share-n-dipity.
I’ve been there at least once or twice and I’m sure others have as well – where we’re happily modifying the web.config on half-a-dozen or more servers and as Steve so elegantly describes it, we “fat finger some random part of a web.config change” causing complete devastation to the running of SharePoint and to your progress. Well not any more my sysadmin friends, not any more not with this tool. It allows you to edit the connection string, people picker wildcard, membership provider, role provider details within the web.config for a specific web application. It then creates a backup copy and updates the web.config across all the servers in your farm through a timer job which is a really neat trick.
Having done this now on several occasions I thought I was pretty confident flying through the steps necessary within an hour or so…the occasional error would sneak in and then I would spend as long again troubleshooting the configuration. Steve’s Forms Based Authentication Configuration Manager has now completely removed the chances of any errors sneaking in and will make me even quicker configuring FBA in SharePoint. Thank you, Steve!