SharePointSupport

* A solution package is a distribution package that delivers your custom SharePoint Server 2010 development work to the Web servers or the application servers in your server farm. Use solutions to package and deploy custom Features, site definitions, templates, layout pages, Web Parts, cascading style sheets, and assemblies. *  You can deploy a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 solution directly onto your SharePoint Server farm, or you can deploy the solution into a sandbox. A sandbox is a restricted execution environment that enables programs to access only certain resources, and that keeps problems that occur in the sandbox from affecting the rest of the server environment. A solution package is a  CAB   file with a . wsp   file name extension and a  manifest file . * It is recommended that you use Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint 2010 to develop and package SharePoint solutions. You can also create solution packages manually by using a tool such as  Makecab.exe . Compo

What is the search schema? The search schema is a mechanism in SharePoint search that controls: Which aspects (properties) of items are to be indexed How and with what indexing structures particular pieces of data are indexed Which aliases can be used when querying using property restrictions What does this mean really? It means that the search schema controls  what  can be searched for,  how  it can be searched for and  how  the results can be presented in your search sites. Main schema concepts The most important concepts in search schema are  crawled properties  and  managed properties . The typical data flow is illustrated by this figure: So a crawl component reads items from the content database (or other content sources) and sends documents and metadata to the content processing component in the form of  crawled properties . A lot of magic then happens inside the content processing component: the text of the item is extracted, language detected, spell-checkin

Windows 2008 includes a Network Load Balancing feature and I’ll be utilising this in my SharePoint environment.  I currently have two web front end servers but there is no reason why I can’t add more, and include them in the NLB cluster, at a later date. Unfortunately, NLB isn’t application aware so it won’t know if SharePoint fails.  As long as the server is up NLB will continue to forward requests to the failed server and any users hitting that server will just get an error of some kind if SharePoint is not running. So, the first thing to do is install the NLB feature in Windows.  This can be done using the Server Manager.  See the screenshot below: Once installed I need to create an NLB cluster on the first server.  This is quite easy to do – just follow these steps: Start the  Network Load Balancing Manager From the  Cluster  menu choose  New Enter the server name or IP address and select the desired interface from the list.  Click  Next Select the dedicated IP addre

I have just configured and enabled RBS for my SharePoint 2013 environment and now when I try to access the site I get the following error message: Sorry, something went wrong Cannot complete this action. Please try again. Yet another fine example of unhelpful error messages from Microsoft!  Well, a quick check of the Event Log revealed nothing so I moved on to the ULS log.  Just before the error was generated the following lines were recorded in the log: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0×80131904): The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘rbs_fn_get_blob_reference’, database ‘WEBBWORLD_Content_Portal’, schema ‘mssqlrbs’. and SQL error code from last error 229 – The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘rbs_fn_get_blob_reference’, database ‘WEBBWORLD_Content_Portal’, schema ‘mssqlrbs’. Clearly the problem was down to permissions.  After a bit of trial and error I discovered that the fix was to grant the following permissi

I have built a new SharePoint 2013 environment and after provisioning a new Search Service Application the following was regularly being logged in the Application Event Log: Content Plugin cannot be initialized -  list of CSS addresses is not set After a fair amount of Googling and looking through logs I learned that this was caused by the Search Service Application not being fully provisioned.  After removing and recreating the Search Service Application these errors went away.

I have configured My Sites in SharePoint 2013.  However, when I attempt to refresh the tasks list it fails with the following message: Sorry, we’re having trouble refreshing your tasks.  Contact your administrator if you continue to have problems. The fix for this is quite simple: 1. Log in to  Central Administration 2. On the  Application Management  page, under the  Service Applications  section, click  Manage service applications 3. Highlight the  User Profile Service Application  and click the  Permissions  button in the ribbon 4. Add the service account that is configured to run the Work Management Service Application and grant  Full Control . 5. Click  OK Now the task lists refreshes without error.

Today I was asked to hide the quick launch on a SharePoint 2013 page.  The easiest way to achieve this was to use the Script Editor web part with the following CSS: <Style Type="Text/CSS"> /* — Hide the quick launch — */ #sideNavBox { Display: None; } #contentBox { Margin-Left: 10px } </Style> So this: now looks like this:

Today a user requested that I remove the link from the site logo that is displayed in the top left of the page.  I didn’t think this was possible until I had a dig through the code of the master page using SharePoint Designer.  I managed to figure it out and here’s how: 1. Run  SharePoint Designer 2013  and open the required site 2. Locate the required master file and edit it 3. Locate  SharePoint:SPSimpleSiteLink 4. Remove the two lines that open and close the  SharePoint:SPSimpleSiteLink  tag (in the default seattle.master file these are lines 360 and 362) 5. Save the master page

By default SharePoint is configured to use 3 backup threads.  This can be increased to improve performance and reduce the amount of time taken to backup large farms.  However, the log files can become more difficult to read. These are the steps required to modify the number of backup threads used by SharePoint: 1. Log in to  Central Administration 2. In the  Backup and Restore   section click  Configure Backup Settings 3. Enter a new value for the number of desired threads (between 1-10) and click  OK

By default SharePoint stores it’s usage logs in  C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS   but  if a server doesn’t have a large C: drive then it is easy to change the location to a larger drive.  Here is how: 1. Log in to  Central Administration 2. In the  Monitoring  section click on  Configure usage and health data collection 3. Change the path for the logs and the maximum size and then click  OK The change takes immediate effect, no services need to be restarted. Note: the specified location must exist on all servers in the farm

I have just created a new web application and site collection in SharePoint 2013.  With a large number of documents to place into a Document Library I thought it would be easier to copy and paste them using Windows Explorer, so I opened the document library and click Open with Explorer. The filename you’ve specified is either invalid or too long. Specify a different filename. As a test I tried to upload a single file using the browser but this generated the following error: Sorry, something went wrong. The URL ‘Shared documents/Project budget.xlsx’ is invalid. The filename isn’t very long at all, including the full path, so I found this quite strange.  I immediately started looking through the ULS logs and the following entry caught my eye, which was logged at the same time I tried to upload the files: Exception thrown storing stream in new SqlRemoteBlob: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. —> Mi

Today I tried to add an Exchange calendar overlay to an existing calendar in SharePoint 2010 but encountered the following error: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority ‘<mailserver>’. I have already added the trust relationship using our OWA certificate within Central Administration (Central Administration -> Security -> Manage Trust) so figured something else was wrong.  As the error helpfully provided the correlation ID I turned to the ULS Viewer and located the following entry in the logs: An operation failed because the following certificate has validation errors <certificate details>.  The root of the certificate chain is not a trusted root authority. I felt this was self explanatory so to resolve the problem I also added a trust for the Root CA of our certificate issuer: 1. Open  Central Administration 2. On the  Security  page click  Manage Trust 3. Click  New 4. Enter the name for the Root

I have just spent hours trying to get to the bottom of an issue with search in SharePoint 2010.  No results were being returned and the following error was reoccurring in the Application Event Log: The start address http://wprintranet cannot be crawled. Context: Application ‘Search_Service_Application’, Catalog ‘Portal_Content’ Details: Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has "Full Read" permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled.   (0×80041205) After spending hours checking the permissions, resetting passwords, removing and adding managed accounts, I was struggling to figure it out.  Each time I initiated a full crawl it would stop after 01:40 with the same error reported in the Application log.  As far as I could tell the permissions

Today I have been dealing with lots of errors being logged in the System event log in a SharePoint 2010 development environment.  The error is Event ID 7024: The SharePoint 2010 Timer service terminated with service-specific error %%-2147467259 I tried restarting the Timer Service and restarting the Windows 2008 server but this didn’t stop the messages being logged.  While looking around Central Administration I could see that there were no scheduled jobs: I couldn’t really see anything obvious in the ULS logs but after various troubleshooting steps I fixed this by adding the service account used by the SharePoint Timer Service to the local Administrators group and restarting the Timer Service.

Today I received a report from a user that while using Datasheet View to manage a list they were presented with the following error message: "The selected cells are read-only" I have come across this in the past and the solution was to disable content approval for the list, as Datasheet view does not support content approval, but in this case the list was not set to require content approval.  After a bit of playing around with the column settings I determined that changing the type of text to allow from Rich text to Plan text solved the problem.