Immediately I thought this form must be corrupted. I saved it to my local desktop and was able to open the file without any issues. Bizarre – I click the File menu (I am running Office 2010 but problem exists on both 2007/2010) and all of a sudden Word froze and I received the “Not Responding” message in the title bar. I finally had to kill the process; tried it again, same issue.

I extracted the contents of the DOCX file and started investigating the content.  I noticed that the document had metadata columns from SharePoint with some values in them. One metadata column stood out from the rest because it had about 20 blank spaces at the end of it.

I deleted all the blank spaces, re-compiled the DOCX file, and tested it and the problem was gone.

I thought to myself there had to be something special about this document. So I decided to create a brand new SharePoint library with a couple metadata columns and then created a brand new Word document. When I edited the Word document, I immediately went into the Document Properties panel, keyed in some text, and then added about 20 blank spaces. When I clicked the save button, word hung again with a “Not Responding” message.

Decided to do a few more iterations; I added 1 trailing space, worked fine, 2, worked fine, 3, worked fine. I started to notice that the more spaces I added the slower the “Save” dialog got until I eventually hit about 13 spaces and it no longer returned and Word completely froze.

Under normal circumstances, you should never have this many spaces trailing your metadata but I think this user cut and paste the text from another location and selected too much.

In the past, I have had numerous issues that involved Word freezing when saving or opening but never knew the root cause. We generally fixed it by re-creating the document. I at least now have another location to check before we resort to re-creating a document.

Check it for yourself – you will no doubt have the same issue.

2012 is going to have some new challenges and learning experiences for me. My organization has shifted my focus and I’ll be living and breathing PeopleSoft for the next year or so. This change will undoubtedly limit my interaction with SharePoint yet again.

I have high hopes to return to the SharePoint platform in the future and I will do my best to remain intact with the community and the happenings around SharePoint.

You will more than likely see a shift in my posts from SharePoint to PeopleSoft related content over the next few months (if I feel I have something to contribute).

Thank you for the continued support – SharePoint definitely has one of the best communities out there.

Anyone else in the community have PeopleSoft experience?  Any pro tips?

My younger brother has been dealt a pretty shit hand in life but has always risen above it and has always had the love and support of his family. Frankly, I do not think he realizes how much respect I have for him — this letter is to address that and is written for him.

To my youngest brother,

I see the heart and passion you put into everything you do. As a self taught music producer, artist, and video producer, you continue to grow with every new project. You refuse to believe that you have reached some ceiling and continue to strive.

During your recent stay, we had this silly idea to record a video of me playing all the instruments in Rock Band and then you would edit it all together and create an epic music video. There were some moments during that experience that you couldn’t script and made us laugh so hard. This is totally something we would have done as kids. Having that very specific moment with you brought back that childhood feeling — it is a moment in time that I will remember forever.

While driving home the other day, I was listening to your latest album you produced with Nonsense and I felt an immense sense of pride overcome me. "This is my brother’s creation I hear coming out of my speakers" I thought to myself — I just couldn’t believe it. This new album is definitely a high point in your music career and you should be proud of what you have created.

I had no problem laying down my $8.99 for this album — the feeling of passion and creativeness speaks for itself. I have always supported your work but I have never purchased your work. That ended with this album and it was worth every penny!

You have had many struggles and challenges in your life but I know you will achieve great things.

Standing at this fork in your life journey looking back at the broken road you have travelled; remember that it has built a solid foundation and life experience that is invaluable. The journey forward will be smooth sailing. Never look back but always remember where you came from.

With much love and respect,

Your brother,

Paul

Related Links:

Better Late Than never – Nonsense

Limp Bizkit – Re-arranged by Darkside Productionz and Poogle
Five Finger Death Punch – Hard To See by Darkside Productionz and Poogle

With the release of 1.0.2, you can now customize the short name before it gets created.  If you do not specify a name then one will be generated for you.

The following screenshots show the process:

If you decide not to customize the name, you simply click “Ok” and one is generated for you:

You can download this solution from my CodePlex site at http://spurlshortener.codeplex.com.

Future plans for this solution include:

• Removing the dependency on Central Admin
• Allowing users to update shortened URLs
• Provide a list of shortened URLs assigned to an item

[Updated]

SharePoint URL Shortener 1.0.3 was released that added initial SharePoint 2010 support.

If you do not already know this, each time you click on the Open or Save menus within an Office product it looks for a special registry key under the user profile. This registry key tells Office what SharePoint farm your user is connected to and will retrieve their SharePoint site membership information. Once this information has been retrieved, it will hydrate the “SharePoint Sites” (or “My SharePoint Sites” on Office 2007) folder.

NOTE: If it successfully finds this location in the registry it will not check it again for up to 24 hours.

I have other posts that explains how this membership works in SharePoint and how to effectively use it with Office.

On to the issue – you will notice that if you visit your My Site with Office 2010 installed you may see the “Set as default My Site” display momentarily and the disappear.

If we look closely at the HTML source of the My Site page, you can see that Microsoft is attempting create a new ActiveX object:

objPersonalSite = new ActiveXObject("PortalConnect12.PersonalSite.1");

If you use the developer toolbar and attempt to evaluate objPersonalSite it will return null.

Searching through the registry, I found no mention of PortalConnect12.PersonalSite.1 – I did however find a mention of PortalConnect14.PersonalSite.1. No wonder the ActiveX control is not working – there is no reference to it on the system.

I took the PortalConnect14 keys and duplicated them and changed the values from 14 to 12 using a registry file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PortalConnect12.PersonalSite]
@="PersonalSite Class"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PortalConnect12.PersonalSite\CLSID]
@="{E7339A62-0E31-4A5E-BA3D-F2FEDFBF8BE5}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PortalConnect12.PersonalSite\CurVer]
@="PortalConnect12.PersonalSite.1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PortalConnect12.PersonalSite.1]
@="PersonalSite Class"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PortalConnect12.PersonalSite.1\CLSID]
@="{E7339A62-0E31-4A5E-BA3D-F2FEDFBF8BE5}"

I went back to my My Site and the automatic dialog box popped up asking if I want to set this site as my default My Site:

I clicked Yes and went to the registry location I was aware of (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common) but did not see the Portal key I was expecting.  Come to find out, on Windows 7, this is written to another location:

HKCU\Software\AppDataLow\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Portal

At this point, if you fire up any of the core Office applications and click on Open or Save As and wait a few minutes, you should see a “SharePoint Sites” option appear and start hydrating it with all your SharePoint membership sites.

I have seen people battle with this problem for hours!  In the end, all this headache could have been avoided with about 1 minute worth of effort up front. Most people will rely on Word’s automatic numbering system to figure things out – it’s not worth the hassle… trust me!

In a new Word document, do the following:

• Click the Heading 1 style and type “Heading 1”
• Click the Heading 2 style and type “Heading 2”
• Click the Heading 3 style and type “Heading 3” (and so on)
• Click on the Define New Multilevel List button

• On the Define New Multilevel List dialog box, click the More button in the lower left corner. Select 1 on the left-top and then on the right select Heading 1 as the style to use for the level. Repeat this for all the levels you have defined (in my example, 3) and then click Ok.

Magically your document will be transformed! You will never have to mess with it again!  If you do then it means you messed something up.

Pro Tip

The default behavior when pressing Enter will change the style back to Normal.  If you want to continue the heading styles instead you can solve this easily by modifying the styles of the headings you want this behavior on.

For example, if I select the Heading 2 style and type “Heading 2” and hit enter and I want it to keep the Heading 2 style, so I can type Heading 3, etc. then simply right-click on the Heading 2 style in the styles box and select Modify. Then change the Style for following paragraph to Heading 2.

Now when I press enter, the style will stay.

If at any point, you want to adjust the settings of the multilevel list, simply right click on one of the numbers and click Adjust List Indent and you will be taken back to the multilevel list dialog box.

I don’t think this is rocket science – if it is, then I guess I am a rocket scientist!

If you attempt to customize a web analytic report in SharePoint 2010 and it comes up blank, make sure you have done the following:

• Started the Claims to Windows Token Service via Central Admin > Application Management > Manage services on server
• Verify the User Defined Function Assemblies via Excel Service Application has a reference to Microsoft.Office.Server.WebAnalytics.UI, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c (Assembly Location is Global Assembly Cache).

If any one of these is not setup correctly, your reports will show up blank when you view them via Excel in browser or in client. Once you have these two things configured correctly, reports display perfect!

In early 2010, a project was kicked off with a small core team, which I was not part of at the time, to redesign and rebrand the company Intranet. SharePoint 2010 was chosen as the new platform and the team began its journey. An outside firm was hired to help get the ball rolling by analyzing content, providing best practices, and some initial wireframes.

In late 2010, the project team started on the branding phase with the outside firm but they were having some challenges with turnaround time and visions/ideas not being understood. A co-worker on the core team knew I had the skillset to fill this gap and threw out the idea of bringing the branding in-house. Bringing it in would put it in the hands of a team who knew what they wanted and understood our company culture.

After being approached by my management to join the team I was soon underway working on bringing their vision and ideas to life. This was my first time doing a massive branding effort on any SharePoint platform so it was an exciting challenge for me.

After a number of iterations on the original design we finally came up with a design we all agreed upon. I sliced up the Photoshop mocks, created the master page and CSS to support the mock and presented a rough working proof of the design. Having a running site (vs. a Photoshop mock) highlighted some issues with our design, so after a few more tweaks and iterations we landed up with something that worked for all of us.

After months of hard work by the whole team, more than 1200+ pages migrated from ColdFusion and a new fresh look, we launched on July 15^th to a well-received Intranet.

I was able to get some approved screenshots of the new Intranet to demonstrate the work we did and I’ll provide a little background, specifically on the branding, for each one. There was some custom developed web parts and solutions used throughout the Intranet also. I might write up future articles on the technical side of things in the future (or get my co-worker to co-author it).

Home Page

Key features include:

• Featured article which automatically rotates every 10 seconds.
• Employee phonebook search
• Weather
• Market Summary

Sub Pages

Points of interest:

• Navigating to another section reveals a sub menu to allow users to drill into bigger content buckets
• Related links allows content owners to relate the content to other locations.
• We have about 10 different page layouts depending on the site you are on.

Manual Rollup Pages

These types of pages allow content owners to manually create a rollup of logical content.

Automatic Rollup Pages

These types of pages allow content owners to flag specific content they want to rollup into specific sections on this landing page.

Points of interest:

• I created about 60-70 icons (the yellow graphic you see below) from scratch that were used throughout the Intranet based on ideas I got from the core project team.

Company Bulletin Board

The old Intranet had a bulletin board but it was a very manual process. When I finished with the man branding components, I was also asked to build a new bulletin board system that semi-automated the process. Employees can now submit a new item, upload up to 3 images, and it gets routed to a team to approve them before it gets published.

Because we did not want to train every single employee on how the SharePoint 2010 content editing experience – we built a custom form that just asked the questions and a page layout was created on their behalf (see result in next screenshot).

Bulletin Board Item

Some random page layouts

I am sure that ever person that has used the Windows Explorer view has attempted to move a file from one location to another and received the following error message:

Cannot move <filename>: Cannot read from the source file or disk.

I am sure you have seen that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and caught yourself wondering why. Copying the file from one location to another works 100% of time. The obvious solution to this problem then be to simply copy the file to its new location and then delete it from the old location. Depending on the situation, this might be easier said than done.

For instance, copying a file from one location to another does not bring over the metadata but moving the file does (as long as the destination library has the same metadata fields).

There are many posts on the Internet that refer to the WebDAV 50 MB file limit as being the root cause of this problem and a solution to solve this (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/900900). However, this will not solve it completely.

Although this post does not have a permanent solution to this problem; it is more to bring awareness to it. Here are the scenarios in which a move will work 100% of the time and where it will not work at all.

Working Scenario

• Moving files between libraries within the same site. For example:

http://portal.company.com/library1 (source)
http://portal.company.com/library2 (destination)

• Moving files between libraries across different sites as long as they are directly below the root site. For example:

http://portal.company.com/site1/library1 (source)
http://portal.company.com/site2/library1 (destination)

Non-working Scenario

• Moving files between libraries in sub-sites that are more than 1 level below the root site. For example:

http://portal.company.com/site1/siteA/library1 (source)
http://portal.company.com/site1/siteB/library1 (destination)

In any other scenarios outline above, a copy will work every single time but a move will fail. Does not matter if you running Windows XP, Windows 7, SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010.

Microsoft’s response…

I have been working with Microsoft support on this issue and as of right now they claim this is by design because they do not recommend moving files this way. HOGWASH!!!

My gut tells me that this used to work and something has changed which has now broken this functionality. Whether it be a SharePoint fix or a Windows fix – I don’t know.

What do you guys think? Agree, disagree? Have you seen the same thing? Perhaps some of you other there in the community can conduct your own tests around this and let me know what you see.

Update – 6/29

Microsoft today acknowledge this issue and said they will push it through escalations to determine if it can be fixed in a future release of a product.  Don’t hold your breath … if we ever see a fix for this, it will not be for a couple years.

In the meantime, Microsoft suggested using copy / paste (instead of cut/paste) if you do not care about metadata, or activate publishing features and use the content structure feature to move stuff between libraries.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010setup/thread/70df46de-6dc3-4b2c-8cc6-70b3ff3eb3f4

Other people are definitely having this problem and there are no solutions on how to solve this problem.

I reviewed the Database Types and Descriptions (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc678868.aspx) article on TechNet and it states the following for general size and growth factors:

“Medium to large. Growth factors include the number of users and groups, and the ratio of users to groups.”

Nowhere in this article does it state the database will grow forever with no cleanup process so plan accordingly.

I opened a support ticket with Microsoft on this issue and after a few weeks of troubleshooting I got the following response:

“…The growing of the Sync DB after each sync is expected behavior in SharePoint. My recommendation would be to once a month, delete your UPA (keeping the Social and Profile DB) and recreate the UPA with a new Sync DB thus not allowing the sync DB to grow too large…”

I am sorry – this is not good enough.  I have escalated the issue to the SharePoint product team to get some better clarity or even a possible solution. There appears to be an oversight on the product teams part on this issue.  There has to be a clean up process or something that cleans up the InstanceData table (this is the main culprit).

Have you noticed the growth of this database in your organization?

I’ll report back the results of the escalation once I have something new to report!

</rant>

Update – 6/9/2011

In working Microsoft, they have confirmed that the way the UPA currently works is by design and there is absolutely no process that will clean up the UPA database.  One workaround that was recommended was to simply delete and re-create the UPA services once a month.  Of course, this is asinine – I pushed the issue further to the SharePoint product team and ask them to provide either a hot fix or a supported method to purge these large tables.

Once I hear back from the product team, I’ll post another update.

Update – 7/12/2011

I received word from Microsoft that this issue is now with the escalation team – no more information than that.

One thing I wanted to point out is that in the environments where we saw extreme growth, we deleted the UPA and re-created it, reconfigured it, etc. and the database seems to be growing at a more reasonable rate. These steps were performed in more than one of our environments where we saw huge databases and it settled down. Something you might want to consider trying until Microsoft releases a better solution and/or workaround.

Update – 8/30/2011

I finally have a solution, well – “workaround”, to this problem.  Microsoft provided me with the stored procedure that is missing from SharePoint 2010’s version of Identity Management.

DISCLAIMER: Microsoft has told me that this script cannot be altered in anyway or I run the risk of being unsupported. Please use this at your own discretion.

Before running the script, you need to create a new schema in your SYNC database called FIM (I wonder where this stored procedure came from? haha).

Before running the script, please insure you change the database name to match that of your SYNC DB.

USE [Sync DB]
GO

CREATE SCHEMA FIM

GO

/****** Object:  StoredProcedure [fim].[TruncateInstanceData]    Script Date: 08/10/2011 14:09:11 *****/

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
CREATE PROCEDURE [fim].[TruncateInstanceData]
AS
BEGIN

--************************************************************
--*                                                          *                                                         *
--*   Copyright (C) Microsoft. All rights reserved.          *
--*                                                          *
--************************************************************
SET NOCOUNT ON;
DECLARE @truncationTime datetime;
SET @truncationTime = DATEADD(day, -1, GETUTCDATE());
DELETE FROM [dbo].[InstanceData]
WHERE ([created] < @truncationTime)
END

After your have created this script, you can create a SQL scheduled job to execute it once a week, once a month, whatever.

Update – 12/29/2011

Depending on how the recovery mode of your database, you might notice that your TEMPDB will increase because of all the transactions that took place during the truncate.  Set your DB to SIMPLE recovery mode prior to running the initial stored procedure, or let your normal maintenance plans run and your databases should return to normal size.