I’ve had this happen a few times, and always wondered what was up.

Every once in a while, I’d try to run a powershell file that looked normal in my text editor, but when I ran it, would have a few extra characters in front.

This often surfaced when calling one powershell/batch file from another.

Today I copied the odd characters off the screen and searched for them on the internet.

I found this great blog post.

http://superuser.com/questions/601282/%CC%81%E2%95%97%E2%94%90-is-not-recognized-as-an-internal-or-external-command

Basically those 3 characters I was getting were “Beginning of File” characters -something some formats handle better than others.

The solution was simple – I went into Notepad++ and changed the file encoding to “UTF-8 no BOF” and then used the convert option right under that in the menu for good measure.

Problem solved, and more importantly, I understand now why it was happening.

Sam Hassani over at Brightstarr put together a couple of great articles on Exposing SharePoint over the internet through Web Access proxy (WAP) , a feature of Windows Server 2012R2.

These articles talk about WAP as a nice alternative to UAG and TMG (two security products Microsoft used to sell, but has since retired)  I haven’t followed the steps yet, but it looks like it might be a suitable fill in for CA Siteminder in some cases as well.

Part 1: http://www.brightstarr.com/sharepoint-technology-and-application-insights/securely-publishing-sharepoint-externally-using-web-application-proxy

Part 2: http://www.brightstarr.com/sharepoint-technology-and-application-insights/securely-publishing-sharepoint-externally-using-web-application-proxy-part-2

The best part of the above articles, in my opinion, is that they really make this stuff look easy and accessible – I can’t wait to try this out!

This article talks about several different options for using SSL certificates in SharePoint – it should be very helpful if you’re new to SSL or if you’re hitting one of the border cases such as multi-named Certificates.

• Single SharePoint Server, single URL + SSL
• Multiple Web Front end SharePoint servers, sharing one URL using one SSL certificate
• Single/Multiple SharePoint Server(s), with multiple URL’s each using different SSL certificates on different IP Addresses
• Single/Multiple SharePoint Server(s), with multiple URL’s each using the same wildcard SSL certificate on the same IP address
• Single/Multiple SharePoint Server(s), with multiple URL’s each using the same Mulitname (also known as Subject Alternative Name) SSL certificate on the same IP address

http://sharepointjack.com/ssl-certificates-and-sharepoint/