Paul Grimleys Blog

Auto Approving Documents in SharePoint Document Library

2010-02-23T22:11:00.001Z

Ok so this sounds kinda strange right? You ask the question why would you want to auto-approve documents in a library where there is approval set on the document library.

Well my scenario is this, I have project documents some which need approving and then some that don’t. I hear you say why not just have 2 document libraries for this, well I could but I setup some views to group the documents by content types / columns and to avoid customising SharePoint by creating a content query web part with custom XSLT I looked into using a SharePoint Designer workflow to accomplish this.

The other thing to remember here is that I have setup the document library to only show readers major versions of documents to readers of the document library. I also have the require checkout before editing the document enabled. See the screenshot below for advanced settings for the library:

So I have indentified specific content types that do not require approving and need to auto approve these documents. My challenge here is that once the workflow tries to change the document to ‘Approved’ it may see that the document has been modified and then change it back to ‘draft’, the document also needs to be checked out to make this change so this could cause a problem.

So below shows the step I created to attempt to update the approval status.

So here was the first attempt at running the workflow which failed due to the document not being checked out

So adding check out and check in around the update of the approval status is the next logical step.

And this was the error I got – unknown error – very helpful!

So I concluded that the only way to do this was to set ‘Require Check Out’ to ‘No’ under version settings for the document library.

And…. It worked - success!

So to conclude you can’t auto approve certain content types in a document library with ‘Require Check Out’ enabled for the document library. From a business impact disabling this option could result in multiple people editing the same document so this would need to be considered vs. the inconvenience of documents remaining in draft when they don’t need approval.

Using Google Analytics with Internal (Intranet) SharePoint Sites

2010-02-22T22:30:00.001Z

This article applies to both MOSS and WSS and is very easy to implement.

You may ask the question how does Google know about an internal user accessing a SharePoint site, well its simple. The Google script that runs is done so every time a user accesses the site and is therefore client side so it is the client session that registers the hit with Google Analytics (GA).

To implement Google Analytics successfully you will firstly need a GA account. From this account enter the SharePoint URL e.g. HTTP://intranet (don’t worry about Google resolving this to your SharePoint site because obviously it won’t!) follow the instructions and you should generate some code similiar to below:

Copy the code and place this into the active master.page for your SharePoint Site under the <HEAD> section and not just above the </BODY> section as is suggested in the Google walkthrough.

Hit the pages a few times and then keep checking your GA for stats. It will take up to 24 hours to update these stats however when you first implement your code the GA site will show a yellow warning triangle suggesting the analytics code hasn’t been installed, after a couple of hours this should change to confirm it has.

Wait 24 hours and you should then see some results come through and you’re done!

Credit to Mike Knowles blog for his excellent guide on this.

Connecting SharePoint RSS Viewer web part to a SharePoint List RSS Feed

2010-02-19T09:58:00.001Z

If you’ve ever tried to connect an RSS Viewer web part to a SharePoint List on the same web app / site collection you may have received the following error when you try to enter the feed:

The RSS webpart does not support authenticated feeds.

So from a quick browsing of the web I found very little that updated on Mark Arend’s blog. This talks about the need for Kerberos authentication if you require the list supplying the RSS feed to require authentication rather than allowing anonymous access which may or may not be an option depending on the uses of SharePoint.

Kerberos is somewhat a little challenging to setup and if you do need to have authenticated feeds there are some great Kerberos overviews for SharePoint by a colleague of mine Mike Cox which you can check out here. Just so you know enabling Kerberos in SharePoint isn’t a case of just enabling the option in Authentication Providers in SharePoint Central Admin.

SharePoint Web Servers not propagating newly created websites / web apps

2010-02-09T20:59:00.001Z

I recently had a scenario where web apps I’d created in my new SharePoint farm were not propagating to other servers in the farm.

To give you a little background the WFE and APP servers we’re in separate network segments running Windows 2008 R2 and therefore there was firewall restrictions between the segments.

After trying the usual IISRESET and restarting the services I realised that ports 56737 and 56738 were not open inbound on the servers to created a GPO for the firewall rules. After this still nothing so on the servers where the web apps had not created I restarted the WSS Web Application service from the servers in farm page on SharePoint Central Administration and the web apps appeared – problem solved!

SharePoint 2007 Meeting Workspace sub sites workaround

2010-02-03T21:05:00.002Z

I recently noticed that when creating a SharePoint Multipage Meeting workspace there is no option to create further sub sites!

I appreciate this is due to navigation issues for end users however I recently had a request to facilitate where possible out of the box SharePoint functionality.
So the workaround is a little bit of a cheat but it works so basically take the layouts page on another site for creating a site/workspace link which is:
_layouts/newsweb.aspx
Copy this to the end of the meeting workspace and this will allow you to create a new sub site below your multipage meeting workspace:
E.g. http://sharepoint/site/_layouts/newsweb.aspx

Emailing SharePoint 2007 Email Enabled Lists from Distribution Groups Not Working - Workaround

2010-02-03T20:48:00.001Z

Ok so here’s the scenario. I’ve setup incoming email on SharePoint with an excellent whitepaper provided by Steve Smith from Combined Knowledge.

So I have a SharePoint 2007 Farm with Exchange 2007 server and have successfully created incoming folders on SharePoint which successfully creates email contacts in an OU in AD so all good so far!

The list would happily accept emails from other email accounts if emailed directly however adding the newly created contact to a distribution group in Exchange and sending the mail via the Distribution Group would fail. I managed to come across this blog post and this solved the problem:

http://douglubey.com/ExchangeDistributionGroupDoesNotEmailSharepointEmailEnabledList.aspx

Basically deleting the contact SharePoint created and create one in Exchange adding this to the distribution group works!

I’d be interested to hear from any Exchange admins as to what is different in the creation of a contact in Exchange and that created by SharePoint.

Access Denied Trying to Access SharePoint 2007 Shared Services Provider using SSP Service Account

2010-02-03T20:10:00.001Z

I recently had an issue trying to attempt to access certain pages in the Shared Service Provider using the service account that runs the SSP!

Thanks to my colleague Ashkan for assisting me with this issue. Basically for some reason the account was not a member in areas it needed to be so I thought I’d write a blog to remind myself if this happens again and also help others struggling with this one.

Firstly I just want to make clear this issue is not due to the LSA registry setting described in a previous blog of mine here.

The SSP service account needs to be a member in the following locations:

Site collection admin for SSP Web App
SSP->Personalization service permissions (I checked all options)
Central Admin->Application Management-> Policy for Web Application (I chose Full Control)

This resolved the issue and I was then able to login!

I also posted my issue on TechNet forums and replied with this blog to close the loop.

SharePoint Person or Group Multiple Selections People Lookup Field Disappears from SharePoint Designer – Workaround

2010-02-03T19:47:00.003Z

I was recently asked to create a workflow for up and coming events. The requirement was to send an email to all attendees 2 weeks before the meeting was due to start.

I’d previously attempted a similar task in a previous blog which I never managed to resolve but thought I'd give it another go.

This post doesn’t cover the workflow see here for the full blog post. This blog entry covers the multi people look up column and an issue I found when trying to use the column in SharePoint Designer and how this was resolved.

So firstly I created an attendees column for the calendar entry as shown below (noting that ‘Allow multiple selections’ is set to ‘No’)

This will allow for the value to be selected from SharePoint Designer. However as with most meetings I've attended they generally involve more than one person so there is need here for multiple persons to be entered in this column - this is where the problem comes in! If you change the value of ‘Allow multiple selections’ is set to ‘Yes’ you can no longer select this field in SharePoint Designer Workflow.

The way to workaround this is to create your workflow with the option set to ‘No’.

Test your workflow and make sure it achieves the results you set out to and believe me you will need to test it more than once before you get it right. Then once you have tested and emails are successfully sent to the recipient change the value to ‘Yes’ and you can now send email to multiple people using SharePoint Designer workflow.

SharePoint Designer Reminder Email Workflow

2010-02-03T19:47:00.001Z

I was asked to design a workflow to extend the out of the box functionality to email meeting attendees 2 weeks before the meeting is due to start. Firstly create a SharePoint calendar list called ‘Events’.

The out of the box editable calendar columns are displayed below:

For the workflow you need to create two additional columns for the events list:

Calculated field called Reminder (Date and Time)
Person or Group called Attendees

The calculated column settings can be seen below basically offsetting the Start Time by 14 days (2 weeks) as [Start Date] – 14.

Then create the Person or Group column as shown below making sure that the ‘Allow multiple selections’ option is set to ‘No’:

If you create a new event now you will see an additional field for the Person or Group

Notice that the calculated field does not appear here as this is not an editable field and will automatically calculate in the background.

Next step is to open SharePoint Designer and create a new workflow (I’m assuming if your reading this post you have some level of understanding of SPD and will not be covering this step for step).

You will need 2 steps for the workflow. The first is to check date and pause the workflow if the date is not equal to Start Time – 14. The second step is once the Start Time does equal 14 days before event then send the email.

On the new workflow set the values as shown below:

Step 1 – Check Date

So the above basically checks if Reminder (14 days before event) is equal to today. If not then it pauses until the Reminder does equal today.

Step 2 – Send Email

In this step the action is again to check for the Reminder date equals today. Then send the email.

The email is where another blog post of mine discovered an issue and can be read here. The workflow sends an email to the the current items Attendees. The subject is also the title of that specific meeting. I also added some text to the main body where you could customise the email further by adding lookup references specific to that event such as start time etc.

Once you’ve created the 2 steps click finish and navigate to the event list and enter a new event 2 weeks away and make sure you set it for 5 minutes ahead so you have time to save the event.

NOTE: MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT CREATE THE TASKS AS A SYSTEM ACCOUNT OTHERWISE THE WORKFLOW WILL NOT WORK SEE KB ARTICLE: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947284

(This is not my actual diary!)

If you select the new entry created and select workflows you should see:

And if you click on ‘InProgress’ this will show you that the workflow is paused for 5 minutes and will then send the email:

That's it job done and expect to see an email in your inbox reminding you.

Hope that's of some use!

Converting VHS to MPG / DVD and Editing Video MPG’s using Free Video Dub and Pinnacle Studio Software

2010-01-06T17:18:00.001Z

I’m doing a bit of a tidy up at home at the moment and I am converting all my old VHS videos I have lying around in the loft for 2 reasons:

1. The longer they are in the loft the more likely it is they won’t work

2. Save space and store them safely on HDD / DVD.

Converting VHS to DVD

So firstly I decided to invest in a Dazzle Video Creator which basically captures the SCART output from the VHS and connects to the laptop via USB and can output MPG of different qualities or DVD. The manufacturer of Dazzle is pinnacle and a link to their website can be found here.

The leads provided with the Video Creator are RCA Phono and as most VHS video players are SCART leads I need to buy a converter which looks like this:

You can find these on Ebay called something similar to ‘SCART ADAPTER 3 x RCA PHONO S-Video Adaptor’ and only cost approx £2.

I wont go into how to use the Pinnacle Studio software but wanted to tell you about a really useful bit of software called Free Video Dub.

So the scenario is I’d press play on the VHS recorder and you’d get the usual fuzzy lines across the screen for the first couple of seconds and then 10 seconds or so of nothing. Unfortunately Pinnacle did not have the option to chop the mpg file that was output all it would do is create a reference file that was only useful in Pinnacle Studio – not great.

Editing Video MPG’s

So here’s where Free Video Dub comes in. Basically all you need to do is fire up this app select your input mpg file and then select an output mpg file and find the start and end points of the then cut off the rest, then you have a nice clean video file with no waste and also reduces the size of the mpg file as well.

A screenshot of the software can be seen below:

Hope that's of some use to someone!

IIS ‘Service Unavailable’ KB973917 broke my SharePoint sites Windows Server 2003

2009-12-10T11:54:00.004Z

I have this morning been looking into an issue with a clients SharePoint farm failing to load pages displaying ‘service unavailable’ when attempting to browse to the site.

Looking into event viewer I was receiving events as shown below:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1002
Date: 09/12/2009
Time: 14:26:07
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Application pool 'SharePoint Central Administration v3' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

Initially I thought that passwords had become corrupt and ran the stsadm commands to refresh the passwords with no joy following article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838.

Looking back through the logs I found that 9 windows updates had been applied on a schedule. I removed all 9 updates rebooted and my SharePoint farm was back up and running :)

By process of elimination I found that the ‘KB973917 - Update that implements Extended Protection for Authentication in Internet Information Services (IIS) ’http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=973917 was the cause of the problem.

Using add/remove programs I was able to remove the update reboot the server and all working fine. I also changed the clients settings to not download updates on the production environment (as show below).

The moral of the story here is to have test environments where patches are tested before applying to production environments.

***Update 10/12/09 - Fix***

Thanks to Jimmie from the Microsoft (Jimmie if you’re on Twitter let me know your id) who commented on my blog, the fix is as follows:

The issue is not due to the hotfix directly but simply that the server running IIS was not service packed to SP2 successfully. A scenario for this happening could be if the the server was service packed before the IIS components were installed. When installing the IIS components if the source i386 folder is not the latest this could present you with older DLL’s and in this case this conflicts with the hotfix which only works against the latest service pack 2 DLL’s.

To resolve this issue install the hotfix followed by a re-service pack of the server to service pack 2. This will update all the core IIS DLL’s to the relevant levels. To confirm this navigate to %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv and check that a DLL for example IISADMIN.DLL should be at build (3759 – Service Pack 2). This should now work avoiding incompatibilities between DLL’s.

Hope this is of some use to you!

***Update 11/01/10***

Following a recent Tweet noticed that this also causes an issue on Windows 2008 See Todd Klindt’s blog on this. Currently no fix for this one though!

Microsoft TechEd 2009 Experience / Thoughts / Feedback (Non Technical) #TEE09

2009-11-25T19:11:00.001Z

I was going to send some feedback to TechEd direct and thought I’d blog on it instead so here’s my experience of TechEd 2009.

TechEd 2009 was my first and my overall experience was pretty good. A big thank you to Berlin for a fantastic location for the event, I really enjoyed my Berlin experience and would not hesitate going back.

There was a great party on the Tuesday and Thursday evening after the sessions where everyone could relax and enjoy a German beer or two!

The sessions were well presented in most cases, although the interactive theatres suffered from too much noise from the TLC area which sometimes was a little distracting for both presenters and delegates.

I followed the SharePoint 2010 track fairly closely and as this was in demand some of my points reflect the experiences I had following this track so I’m not saying the whole event had these issues:

I missed 2 key sessions I penned in on the schedule ironically one of them being the SharePoint 2010 overview (the main session to kick off my week) was one of them. Both sessions were way oversubscribed for the size of the rooms. There were certainly bigger rooms at the venue which could have housed these..
Having missed a couple of key sessions my time in between was spent literally making sure i could get into each session so I'd end up 15-20 minutes early so not having much chance to enjoy the free beverages on offer.
Where I had planned lunchtime sessions these started 20 minutes after the morning session and with the food hall 10 minutes away then the lunch rush there was no chance of getting back so a couple of occasions i had to skip lunch (I probably needed it!)

Suggestions for next years TechEd:

With lunch sessions it would have been ideal if there was packed lunches available as I found no time for lunch on a couple of occasions
Networking area flags – A good idea would be to have some of the main countries flags so that you could identify people from your own country, this is not just because of the language issue but so you can identify people who may have worked in similar types of organisations as yourself e.g. local authorities
Session booking system to commit your schedule booking so if you do turn up 5 minutes before the sessions started you are guaranteed a seat, possibly using your barcode to swipe in.
The event was huge and there may be people you have worked with who you haven't seen for a while who may be sitting on the same session – perhaps before each session starts the projector scrolls a list of people who have registered to attended the session, this would give people the opportunity to see who they could possibly try and network with and who's attending the event.
Wireless – or lack of! Could hardly get on wireless and reliability was pretty poor this really needs addressing for the next event!
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY - As I heard of previous TechEd’s there was parties hosted by each country however this year there wasn't one :o( this was a shame and these should be brought back!

To conclude I would certainly go again as the main reason for attending was for the technical sessions and my ultimate aim was achieved.

How to Change Portal Site Connection for all new Mysites created in MOSS 2007

2009-11-22T17:37:00.001Z

Quite a common request when working with Mysites is how do you change the Portal Site Connection so that new Mysites can navigate back to the portal.

There is an easy way to change this setting globally so each new Mysite user does not have to manually change this.

I couldn’t find a way to do this from the SSP and following a bit of testing discovered that if you navigate to the root of Mysites web app and add to the end of the url _layouts/portal.aspx (e.g. http://mysites/_layouts/portal.aspx) and select Portal Site Connection

From here enter the portal connection details and this will then apply to all new Mysites created, unfortunately this does not apply to existing sites so make sure you apply this setting early to avoid either creating a custom feature or many support calls.

I’ll be at Microsoft Tech Ed 2009, Berlin #TEE09

2009-11-06T13:29:00.001Z

I’m attending Microsoft Tech Ed 2009, Berlin. Hopefully I’ll have plenty to blog about on and after the event and will also be tweeting whilst I'm there. You can follow me on Twitter @paulgrimley

Might see you there!

Extracting SharePoint 2007 document libraries from SQL databases - no installation required

2009-10-16T11:42:00.010+01:00

To cut a long story short a client recently ran into difficulties attempting to restore a document library. The following code was developed for a specific scenario where a document library had disappeared from a specific site and not showing in the recycle bin (Recycle bin worked fine on testing). I’m not sure as to how this document library has disappeared without being captured but it has!

I was against installing a full blown trial install on the SharePoint servers just to recover a single document and in this specific case there was only one environment available and time was of short supply. Appreciating a dev and test environment is the best way to work unfortunately this was unavailable and the data could not be removed from site (for obvious security reasons) to another farm to explore.

Before I supply the code I need to thank Neil Hodgkinson (Microsoft) and James Orton (Tesl) for their assistance in creating this script.

All my tests carried out have been run on a SQL VM ( see disclaimer below) however in theory you should be able to run this remotely from a desktop pc assuming the logged on user has the relevant rights to access SQL and firewall permits.

Download the script. You will need to edit the code to rename a few properties.

Server = "server" - enter the name and instance of the SQL server
database = "Moss_Content" - enter the name of the database you wish to recover the document library from (You can use SharePoint Central Admin to determine which content databases are assigned to which Web App)
location = "documents" – enter the name of the document library you wish to recover so for example this document library is called documents at the root of the site collection e.g. http://sharepoint /documents
outputPath = "c:\docs\" – This folder needs to be created prior to running the script otherwise it will fail!

Feel free to develop the code further but please do share and leave me a comment on this blog post if you do.

Further development suggestions:

Add a menu to navigate options
Output a list of all document libraries available to extract data from
Following on from the previous suggestion list all documents in a document library
Extract individual documents option (assuming the location and name of the document is known)

I hope this is of some use to you, although I would hope if you are reading this you a revisiting your backup strategy!

Disclaimer: The code provided in this blog is in no way supported by Microsoft or myself and should not be performed on production SharePoint SQL Databases. This operation should be carried out as a last resort and a backup and recovery strategy should be your method to restore data. Ensure this is performed on a test environment by using a copy of your data and discarding of the database after carrying out this operation.

Bypassing ISA 2006 HTTPS redirection rule with HTTP vulnerability publishing SharePoint and OWA - Fix

2009-10-13T15:06:00.002+01:00

It was recently pointed out to me that when a user attempts to log onto a SharePoint extranet published web site through ISA they can replace HTTPS in the header with HTTP and user credentials could potentially be sent over the web unencrypted.

For example if a user connects to the site entering http://sharepoint.extranet.com and is redirected to https://sharepoint.extranet.com/cookieauth.dll?<parameters> then the user manually modifies the URL back to HTTP e.g. http://sharepoint.extranet.com/cookieauth.dll?<parameters>.

This is obviously a security vulnerability and Microsoft have published a KB article (958607) describing how to resolve this which can be seen here.

If you have Exchange or SharePoint published via ISA 2006 I would strongly suggest either applying the ISA hot fix or workaround to resolve this.

Removing IIS 5 / 6 / 7 Server Header from SharePoint Installations

2009-10-13T13:58:00.001+01:00

Here is a guide to remove IIS server header Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 from IIS to stop your browser detecting the web server SharePoint is running on. This can be particularly useful if you are externally publishing SharePoint or other IIS .NET applications and want to reduce the information to your backend servers information.

Background

Without additional configuration you can identify what platform IIS is running on using a simple tool to view the http headers.

If you download and install a tool such as ieHTTPHeaders from here. From Internet Explorer enable the tool from ‘Tools->Display ieHTTPHeaders’. Load the homepage of SharePoint and you will notice that amongst the many headers and requests you will notice something similar to the below:

Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices: 12.0.0.6318
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

How to remove these from IIS

The last two lines can simply be removed from IIS by editing the properties of the web site under the custom HTTP headers section as shown below, noting this is IIS 6 but the same applies to IIS 7.

To remove the header Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 from IIS this requires a little more config!

Firstly you need to download URLScan (at the time of writing this is version 3.1) from Microsoft here. This is basically an ISAPI filter that needs to be applied to the website you wish to remove the headers from, making sure that if you have extended a SharePoint web app you assign the ISAPI filter to the correct one (i.e. the one created for external access).

Install URLScan, then from the same web app select ISAPI Filters tab and select add navigating to C:\windows\system32\inetsrv\urlscan and add urlscan.dll (IIS 7 may do this for you).

Then edit the urlscan.ini line

RemoveServerHeader=1 ; If 1, remove the 'Server' header from
; response. The default is 0.

Save the file and check the HTTP headers using ieHTTPHeaders and you should now not see the these headers when loading pages.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any thoughts.

Windows Live Spaces and Twitter Counter

2009-09-30T14:22:00.002+01:00

Useful Blog on adding TwitterCounter to Windows Live Space. Many Thanks to Paul Galvin for putting this together for me.

Quote

Windows Live Spaces and Twitter Counter

I was DM’d a message from twitter today and thought I’d blog the answer.

The question is: “Hey Paul, quick one for you,how did you get the twitter counter into your live space as the script code is blocked when saved Thx”

I did this by adding a custom html widget to my live spaces page and using the little code snippet:
<a href="http://twittercounter.com/?username=pagalvin"   
   title="TwitterCounter for @pagalvin">   
   <img src="http://twittercounter.com/counter/?username=pagalvin"     
        width=88     
        height=26    
        style="border:none"       
        alt="TwitterCounter for @pagalvin">
</a>
This uses a version of the twitter counter widget interface that gets past the windows live censor thing that we all hate so much and wish would get a bad case of poison ivy.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Technorati Tags: Twitter

Redirecting SharePoint Websites from Port 80 to 443 using IIS 6 and no code!

2009-08-18T17:29:00.001+01:00

Here’s a quick guide to redirect SharePoint websites from port 80 to 443 SSL without code.

Before you start you need to make sure that the host header for port 80 is not already assigned to the SharePoint Web App. If it is just edit the hostname and just call it something like ‘notused’ – kind of gives you a clue when other administrators log on that this is not in use.

Next step is to do is create an IIS web site using the IIS mmc and not through SharePoint. Lets say that the SharePoint site is called ‘sharepoint’ enter the details as shown below changing the IP address you have assigned for the sharepoint DNS record.

Once you have created the Web Application right click on it and select properties. Navigate to the home directory tab

Change ‘The content for this resource should come from:’ to A redirection to a URL

Enter the url https://sharepoint (Noting https) and check the box The exact URL entered above and click ok.

You now have a redirection from http to https!

Excluding items (Document Libraries, Lists, Items etc) from SharePoint scopes

2009-08-18T17:01:00.001+01:00

There’s a great article that can be found here listing the different types of contentclass that can be removed from SharePoint scopes. Basically adding these with exclude option will stop such things as lists appearing in search results.

Simply modify the search scopes in the SSP by clicking new rule. Note that on this demo I am using ‘all sites’ scope (I’m being lazy) however I would advise for live environments creating a separate scope and editing the properties of this.

On the new rule select the following properties

and click ok!

This will now remove document library’s from appearing in search results but still display documents within – no re-crawl is required as this configuration is applied at the scope level and not at the content source level.

Further contentclass properties can be found on Jeremy Jameson’s blog.

Cannot login to SharePoint Central Administration Event Code: 4007 - URL authorization failed for the request – Overwriting the SharePoint 12 Hive Problem!

2009-08-18T15:28:00.002+01:00

I recently had an issue where users who were added to the Farm administrators group could not log into SharePoint Central Administration.
If the below does not resolve your issue please see my other blog which has the same symptoms (Do read this linked entry before discarding).
After lots of digging around I found that this was due to the web.config in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN.
The web.config shown below shows the issue:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<configuration>
<system.web>
    <compilation batch="false" />
    <customErrors mode="On" />
    <httpRuntime executionTimeout="1200" />
    <authorization>
      <allow roles="BUILTIN\Administrators" />
      <allow roles="EXTRANET\WSS_ADMIN_WPG" />
      <deny users="*" />
    </authorization>
</system.web>
<location path="vsgeneralsettings.aspx">
    <system.web>
      <httpRuntime executionTimeout="3600" />
    </system.web>
</location>
<location path="targetwebapplication.aspx">
    <system.web>
      <httpRuntime executionTimeout="3600" />
    </system.web>
</location>
<location path="configureupgradedatabases.aspx">
    <system.web>
      <httpRuntime executionTimeout="3600" />
    </system.web>
</location>
</configuration>
I noticed that ‘EXTRANET’ was the name of the old server and the new server was called for example ‘SERVER1’ (noting that this is the name of the local server and not the domain name so this will differ on each server in the farm).
I updated the line with the following:
      <allow roles="SERVER1\WSS_ADMIN_WPG" />
I carried out an IISRESET and farm administrators could now log onto SharePoint Central Administration.
Credit to MVP Andreas Stenhall’s blog which helped me track down this issue.

Errors after installing Infrastructure update for MOSS 2007

2009-08-18T14:58:00.001+01:00

I've ran into this issue a couple of time when installing service pack updates and on both occasions found Akifs blog below so felt it was worth a mention, details of the specific issue can be seen below:

Quote

Errors after installing Infrastructure update for MOSS 2007

During last month, I applied Infrastructure udate of SharePoint 2007 in my development envrionment and everything was working like a charm. So I decided to apply the same fix in my production environment this week.

Here I will like to mention one thing. I started this project as migration one where we were supposed to migrate MOSS 2007 + Windows 2003 environment to MOSS 2007 SP1 + Windows 2008 environment. So it was basically a restored farm.

After applying the Infrastructure upgrade, I started facing the issues:

"The resource object with key 'S2SearchAdminDashboard_Title' was not found" for Search Administration site

and

"The resource object with key 'S2LeftNav_Administration' was not found" for other search links.

After searching a while on Google, I was able to find the solution. Solution is quite simple. Sort all files within App_GlobalResources folder based on the date in the development environment where everything was working fine. Copy files which were modified on 3/25/2008. These will be the most new ones. Copy them over to the SSP virtual directory of your troubling farm within the same App_GlobalResources folder. These files are:

searchadmin.en-us.resx
SearchAdmin.resx
sps.en-US.resx
and sps.resx

Then if you will try, you will get the following error:

Could not find the sitemap node with URL '/SearchAdministration.aspx'.

Now this time, copy layouts.sitemap file which will be the most latest modified file within _app_bin folder from the development environment to production environment. As soon as that was copied over, the search administration page appeared fine.

Cannot Edit Content Source Schedule in SharePoint receiving error ‘Access is denied’ KB926959

2009-08-18T14:21:00.002+01:00

I have experienced this issue on a few occasions now so thought it was worth a mention.

Following best practices and creating accounts with least privileges in SharePoint may lead to an issue when you attempt to edit the SharePoint content source and my have an error displayed stating access is denied.

This is because the SharePoint Worker Process Group account (WSS_WPG) does not have permissions to the c:\windows\tasks folder.

To resolve this issue follow the article KB926959. The article does not state which server to apply this to so I would suggest applying this to all SharePoint servers in the farm – If anyone would like to feedback please comment. Also worth noting the WSS_WPG account is a local account and not a domain account.

Please note that on step 3 the command below may not work.

attrib –s %windir%\tasks

So before entering this command enter:

attrib +s %windir%\tasks

Then enter the first command again and that should work!

I’m not sure why this doesn’t work but I reported this to MS sometime ago.

Saving PDF files to SharePoint

2009-08-18T11:18:00.002+01:00

When attempting to save PDF files directly into SharePoint via using web folders you will not be able to browse the SharePoint document libraries.

The reason for this is Adobe does not support saving to web dav directly and the suggested workaround is to save the file to the local pc then upload to SharePoint see article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/265867

I have managed to find an add on to Adobe which enable you to select document libraries to save to. The product is called PDF SharePoint Save and can be located here http://www.macroviewwisdom.com/Products/Pages/PDFSharePointSave.aspx

Calculated date does not trigger workflow when created using SharePoint Designer

2009-08-14T01:12:00.001+01:00

I was recently creating an improved content review workflow using SharePoint Designer.

The scenario was that I wanted to send the author of the document an email 2 weeks before the review deadline and then another once the review date had arrived.

I setup 3 site columns:

AuthoredBy – People / Group
ReviewDate – Date and Time (Date Only)
ReviewDateWarning – Calculated Field of Review Date – 14 (14 days / 2 weeks) (See below)

Once the 3 columns were created I then opened up SharePoint Designer to start creating the workflow.

At first I thought my workflow was failing (and rightly so) because my condition was set to ‘to equal’ when it should have been set to ‘to equal (ignoring time). I changed this hoping that this was the problem so now my workflow looks like this:

Still no joy! When the workflow was triggered it just stated ‘waiting for DateReviewWarning’ even though the date was set to today's date. The picture below shows that the calculation of the date review working as expected but for some reason SharePoint does not see the calculated date as a native date field. When I replaced the field with the actual DateReview field and set this to today's date the workflow worked like a dream.

Unlike most of my blogs I didn’t find a fix to this but thought it was worth sharing the frustration I had when recently trying to implement this.

I’d be interested to hear from the SharePoint community on if other have managed to work round this (and I’m sure they have!).