AzureCP becomes EntraCP

[Yvand]

AzureCP becomes EntraCP

Main improvements

• A new, greater design.
• The SharePoint solution type was changed to Application (instead of Web Front End), which makes administrative operations (install / update / delete) much easier and safer by design.
• A single location to configure the proxy for all the SharePoint processes / servers in the farm.
• Revisited NuGet dependencies, upgraded to their latest versions.

Overview of the changes

• A new solution name: EntraCP.wsp
• A new claims provider: EntraCP
• No compatibility with AzureCP
• The minimum SharePoint version required is 2016
• The minimum .NET Framework required is 4.8
• It no longer works on SharePoint 2013

Why those changes

Simply put, the weight of legacy: AzureCP had too many early design mistakes, that I could not fix without making breaking changes that created significant risks when updating it. So, I always privileged the most secure approach.

Nevertheless, a few months ago I decided to rewrite the code entirely, knowing it would have to be a completely new, renamed claims provider, with no compatibility with AzureCP.

In the middle of this work, Microsoft renamed Azure Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID, which made a nice timing with my work, and a new, easy name to pick up.

How to test EntraCP

Installing EntraCP is much easier and safer than AzureCP by design, because its solution package uses the deployment type ApplicationServer, which has 2 very cool benefits:

• Its features are installed with a specific, additional step, preventing conflicts.
• Its assemblies are deployed on truly all SharePoint servers.

Beside, EntraCP can be installed side by side with AzureCP.
First step is to download assembly-bindings.config and EntraCP.wsp from https://github.com/Yvand/AzureCP/releases/tag/nightly

To do on all SharePoint servers

• Double check that server has at least .NET Framework 4.8
• Open the machine.config file (%systemroot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config\Machine.config), and replace its tag <runtime /> with the content of the file assembly-bindings.config you downloaded.

Then, only on the server which runs the central administration:

• Add the solution to the farm: Add-SPSolution "C:\YvanData\dev\EntraCP.wsp"
• Deploy the solution: Install-SPSolution -Identity "EntraCP.wsp" -GACDeployment
• Install the features: Install-SPFeature -SolutionId "dd03bdd7-0645-475e-a852-f180b8bc8191" -AllExistingFeatures

Then, you can enable EntraCP by setting the property ClaimProviderName in cmdlet Get-SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuer

What about AzureCP SE?

Earlier, I announced AzureCP SE as a successof of AzureCP. After careful thinking, I changed my mind and decided to rename the whole project to EntraCP.
Please read this post to properly uninstall AzureCP SE.

Next steps

The release is close, I'm working on updating the site, but this is a lot of work.