Farm password has changed - does this affect ExCM?

We have had to change because of a Consultant leaving one of our Passwords in our Development SharePoint 2010 Farm. "spfarm" account.

We can't now get into the SharePoint 2010 Central Admission. We have worked our way round SQL and SP Web - Microsoft Server 2008R2 Service Accounts that needed changing and that has partially brought the website back up.

I am not sure if this would bring ExCM 2010 down as it might have lost its permissions(?) and as ExCM 2010 adds an extra section into SharePoint 2010 Central Admission I am wondering if this might bring this down as well. As usual in these cases its hard to un-pick all the problems any suggestions welcome.

- Thanks Bruce

Hi Bruce,

ExCM itself doesn't depend on any system-related passwords such as the spfarm account. However, to use ExCM you have to have Forms-based Authentication (FBA - a SharePoint feature) working properly and FBA requires a SQL Server database named ExtranetDirectory to be available to use to authenticate external users. FBA looks in the web applications web.config file to find the SQL Server that hosts the ExtranetDirectory database. Then, the account it uses to access the database is the IIS Application Pool Identity that your extranet web application runs under. So, if you have changed the password for the IIS Application Pool Identity that the web application uses, then you might have problem.

If the IIS Application Pool Identity's password hasn't changed, the ExCM should work fine.

Best regards,

Jeff Cate