How many users can ECTS Handle?

This has become a common question for a couple of my clients, to which I really don't have a good answer. However, with my clients we have found significant issues when attempting to use the User Manager web part in ECTS when we have 100+ users. In fact, recently the client has to use the ECTS forms based login so they can manage users because the Active Directory times out before the page loads.

Therefore my best answer, right now is: Not many.

While that is my current answer, that is not the final answer. I have recently begun work on a series of web parts to replace the default ECTS web parts. The goal is to make fast loading and easy to use web parts, which means sacrificing some of the custom call backs in favor of efficiency when the page is loaded.

One of the key changes I have made is to use the SPUtility.SendEmail(…) rather than the crazy database settings that ECTS has used. This provides several advantages, but most of all we can see if the send succeeded or failed. If it fails we can prompt the support user to manually send information like passwords to the user proactively rather than waiting for the user to again request a password reset or, worse, leave and never come back. The biggest issues I have seen is that once an account gets approved the approval e-mail does not get sent to the user and they never receive a password. If the approval e-mail is never sent a site support team must use the User Manger, which can time out easily, to reset the password and manually e-mail it to the user.

Currently, ECTS stores SMTP settings in the web.config and the ECTS database, which means you have SMTP information in three locations in your SharePoint site. By using the SPUtility.SendEmail(…) you only have the SMTP information in one location, SharePoint's Central Admin SMTP settings, where I feel it belongs.

Here is a comparison of the two main ECTS web parts used when managing external users.

ECTS User Manager  

This web part actually shows all of the users in ADAM. When you click on the Take Action button on the far right this is what you get.

I have discovered, looking at the code, that during the OnLoad event this web part gets ALL users from ADAM, regardless of what the current state. When you have a lot of users this can be a serious issue often resulting in the page timing out. Especially bad is when the web part loads and you are able to click on the take action link and select one of that action options at which point the page times out. In this case you are forced to start all over again, trying to load the entire list just to select the Take Action option.

My ECTS Enhanced User Manager

This is actually two web parts, the a | b | c |… is a connection provider which provides a filter for the CNs are searched for. This could be adapted to have a more, or less, capable filtering mechanism thus allowing greater flexibility of the user manager web part. Notice that the Reset Password, Toggle Enabled State, and Delete are all exposed immediately. This prevents us from having to recreate the list of ADAM users every time the web part is loaded. Exposing the actions along with the filter web part now reduces our need to query ADAM and reduces the search result set to a more manageable size. I have dropped the Modify capability in the current version, in the future I will add another connectable web part that will allow for editing of the selected user.

Another enhancement is when a password is reset the user who's password was reset receives an e-mail with the new password. I'm not sure if ECTS is supposed to do this as well, but from my experience, I have never received an e-mail when the password was reset. Instead support personnel actually have to copy the password and manually send it to the user.

My ECTS Enhanced User Approval   

Here, you will notice that the Requestor has been dropped from the default ECTS User Approval Web Part (not pictured).