Sharepoint Applied blog has now been officially discontinued.
Please visit my new site: Sharepoint Resource Center. It’s a brand new site based on a slightly different concept (compared to a blog) – see for yourself:
...Your gateway to all things Sharepoint...
See you there 🙂
Greg
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This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
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Ever had to parse a list’s GUID (e.g. when porting an SPD workflow) and found yourself copying the URL string from your browser and applying the decoding rules one by one?
Take your decoded GUID (%7B52CC32C3%2D977A%2D405C%2DBD45%2D71F1D60CCC2F%7D), replace %7B with “ { “ , replace A%2D with “ – “
, replace %7D with “ } “   and so on… Slow, painful and really not the best way to spend your time.
Is there an easier way, sure there is – Google Chrome to the rescue!! Fire up the super-fast browser, navigate to your list/library, click on the View drop down box and choose “Modify this view”
The address bar will now display your nicely-formatted GUID. As an added bonus you’ll get the current view’s GUID as well. Nice.
URL in Chrome
URL in IE
Note:
Alternatively, you can use one of the few URL decoders available such as http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ or http://www.albionresearch.com/misc/urlencode.php
Filed under: Customisations, Sharepoint Designer | Leave a comment »
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This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
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Now that SharePoint 2010 Beta has been released I figured it’s a good time to get back to blogging. I’m not sure if I can commit to writing regular longer posts so, for the time being, I will try to post short notes and, hopefully, build on that.
I installed SharePoint 2010 yesterday and I’ve just had a brief 30-mins play with it.
One thing that immediately got me excited is the ability to customise list item forms using InfoPath. What a relief!! I use customised forms all the time – however, customising forms in SPD can be very cumbersome and time consuming.
No more so with SharePoint 2010.
1) Navigate to your list, click on the Custom Commands tab
2) Click Customize form. This launches InfoPath 2010 and loads the content type for the list
3) The standard task form looks quite nice (notice the new “Predecessors” field). However, I wanted to spice it up a bit. Using the familiar InfoPath controls I added a few icons, move fields around (drag and drop – so much easier than using SPD), and added 2 links.
4) I published the form by switching to the File tab and choosing the “Publish your form” option.
5) I now navigate to my list, click “New Task” and – Voila! my new customised form appears. How cool is that! All done in around 10 minutes!!
I’ve noticed a few issues with the looks of the published form (one of my links is not underlined, the red asterisk in the Description field is misplaced) but, given the advantages of the new approach to editing item forms, I can’t really complain.
Filed under: Customisations, Sharepoint 2010 | Tagged: cusomisations, Infopath 2010, Sharepoint 2010 | Leave a comment »
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This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
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Summary: How to copy even a large elaborate workflow in a few minutes without having to update each workflow lookup manually.
Copying basic workflows:
Quite often I need to copy a workflow to another site or site collection (e.g. when provisioning an intranet portal for another client). I usually use the method described here. It basically boils down to a few simple steps:
1) Open the target list/library in SPD, click New>Workflow.
Note: Obviously, all columns used in the source list or library must be present in the target one, also internal column names must match.
2) In the new workflow create 1 step that includes 1 condition and 1 action (e.g. If [field] equals 1, “Set field in current item” to 2). This step creates the .xoml and .xoml.rules files needed to migrate our source workflow.
3) Open the original source workflow in SPD, open the .xoml file as XML (Right-click > Open as .XML) and copy its contents.
4) Open the target workflow in SPD, open the target .xoml file as XML, replace the content with the content copied in step 3.
5) Do the same for the .xoml.rules file.
Problem:
Normally after saving the files and opening the target workflow you will notice your workflow lookups display GUIDs rather than, as you would expect. fields, columns and parameters (see screenshot below). This is down to the fact that your .xoml and .rules files reference columns and lists used in the source workflow – if your target workflow is in a different site or site collection these will, obviously, not be recognized and, therefore, are displayed as GUIDs.
Old Solution:
Luckily, SPD is smart enough to re-map the workflow to the lists and columns in the current site. All you need to do is click on the GUID and press the “Add Lookup button” – you will see that SPD automatically finds the right list and field:
Pressing OK will update the field.
Now, this is all fine for a simple workflow – you just click and fix a few lookups and off you go. What if your workflow is a longer more elaborate one – containing many steps and even more lookups, especially ones looking up values in other lists? Suddenly, the above approach becomes quite a cumbersome one.
New Solution:
What I’ve been doing when dealing with longer workflows:
1) Follow the steps outline in the beginning of the post so you end up with .xoml and .xoml.rules files copied from your source workflow.
2) Make note of all the lists used in your source workflow, note their GUIDs. Do the same for the lists used in the target workflow.
TIP: You can use Sharepoint Manager 2007 to easily get the lists GUIDs
3) Open your new workflow in SPD, open the .xoml and .xoml.rules files as XML and replace the source GUIDs with the target ones.
That’s it – if you open your workflow now you’ll see all lookups display correctly and you no longer need to click through them all to have them updated.
Gotcha:
I’ve been happily using the above approach for the last year or so. However, today I ran into an issue that didn’t really make much sense.
I noticed that something funny happened if my workflow used the “Create List Item” action” (I guess the same will be true for “Update List Item” and “Copy List Item” actions).
You can see in the above screenshots that all lookups are displayed correctly. However, when I click on the “Tasks” lookup (first screen) to open the Create New List Item dialog box the List value was not populated (even though it’s shown properly in the first screen). Selecting the Tasks list from the drop-down menu had the effect of creating a new action – all the previously defined fields (Description, New Employee, Assigned to) disappeared and had to be put back in manually:
This was a major issue as I had over 20 steps using the “Create New List Item” action. I obviously didn’t like the idea of re-creating each of them manually. I opened the .xoml and .xoml.rules files and looked through the code, re-created the workflow in different sites a few times and tested all I could think of. I still couldn’t figure out what the problem is. Finally I spotted the culprit.
Solution:
Turns out the lists GUIDs I pasted into the workflow’s .xoml files were in lower case. SPD was happy with that for all lookup fields. However, lower case seems to trip up the Create New List item action (and possibly other related actions – e.g. Copy List Item).
The moment I changed my GUIDs to upper case (e.g. from fabe5a1-c8d0-4c72-8a66-46c6917abdb5 to 1FABE5A1-C8D0-4C72-8A66-46C6917ABDB5) things magically started to work fine – all field lookups and references mapped properly, no actions need updating. Bingo, I can now copy even large elaborate workflows in a few minutes!
Filed under: Sharepoint Designer, Worfkflows | Leave a comment »
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This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
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Scenario:
A list/library is saved as template. However, users with design permissions cannot see the new template when navigating to sites’ “Create” page (_layouts/create.aspx).
Cause:
Permissions to the List Templates Gallery list (_catalogs/lt/) have been changed – users no longer have Read permissions to the list.
By default members of the Intranet Members group have contribute permissions to the list. If default settings were changed make sure users have at least Read permissions if you want them to be able to create new libraries/lists based on your custom templates.
Governance tip:
The default permissions for the List Templates Gallery are probably fine in most scenarios. However, if you would like to make sure your custom templates do not get “accidently” deleted or modified (somehow there’s always a user or two who likes poking around checking what he can/cannot do) consider doing one of the following:
1) Create a custom permission level and change the permissions on the list to prevent accidental deletes.
One of the first thing I do in new SharePoint deployments is create a new permission level – “Contribute – no delete” by copying the Contribute permission level and deselecting the “Delete item” list permission.
2) Set permission to “Read” on individual templates.
The default “All Templates” view of the List Template Gallery doesn’t show items drop-down menu. Clicking on a template’s name downloads the .stp file rather than, as you would expect, taking you to the DispForm.aspx page for the template where you could access the “Manage permissions” link. Change the default view (or create a new one) and add the “Name (linked to document with edit menu) “ column – you will now be able to set permissions for individual templates
3) Notifications, version history etc.
The List Templates Gallery is a regular SharePoint list. You can, therefore, use Alerts, version history and content approval to make sure you stay in control of changes made to your list templates.
Filed under: SharePoint Administration | Tagged: governance, list templates, Security | Leave a comment »
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This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
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Scenario:
A user decides to give his colleague access to a document. He clicks the Add Users button to select his colleague, clicks the address book icon and types in John in the Select people and groups dialog box. On clicking the search icon he’s presented with a list of 50 different John’s – of which only 3 actually work for his company. The user is confused, talks to his manager, manager talks to his hosting provider – “If I can see other companies’ users they can see mine. Outrageous… and in direct violation of the Data Protection Act. “. What ensues is plenty of some embarrassing explaining to do…
Cause:
The people picker gets all users from the Active Directory where the WSS farm is deployed. By default no filters are applied when users search for people using the “Select People and Groups” dialog box. In an environment where there are multiple site collection the search box will display users from the whole Active Directory rather than, as you would expect, users from the site collection only.
This behaviour can not only be confusing for end users but can present a serious privacy issue in hosted environments where every site collection is used by a different company and employee information should not be revealed to unauthorised users (those belonging to other site collections/companies). You don’t want end users to be able to search the entire Active Directory
Solution:
Stsadm peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection parameter
“The command below will set the people picker so it displays only users that are already added to the site collection. This prevents anyone from using the People Picker to browse a different user directory” [quote from the MS article]
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection -propertyvalue yes -url http://<defualtzone.sitecollection.url>
For full syntax check the following MS article: Peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection: Stsadm property
Gotcha
Ok, so the above command is mentioned in quite a few blogs – you could be easily forgiven to just run the command, check your People Picker see results are now trimmed to users from your site collection only and forget about the whole thing. There is one significant caveat to be aware of though – a small, easy to miss, note in the MS article mentioned above says:
“Users can search Active Directory using a fully qualified logon name, regardless of this property setting.”
WTF? Turns out even though users will no longer be able to use the People Picker to search for users outside their own site collection when searching by name they will still be able to snoop around if they use a fully qualified logon name (domainname\username). See the table in this article for the full list of name formats that will still return results from outside of the site collection
Solution:
Microsoft now offers a hotfix to address the issue – described in the following MS article: The Check Names function does not honor the Peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection setting in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
The hotfix will truly lock people picker down – even searches using a fully qualified logon names will not return results from outside of the site collection.
There is a small price to pay though – you will no longer be able to add users to the site collection using the GIU (as no users from outside the site collection will be displayed) and will instead have to rely on STSADM (or code).
Other notes:
For some reason the peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection parameter would not work for me a few times – it turns out you seem to have to use the full command without abbreviations:
– this command will work:
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection -propertyvalue yes -url http://<defualtzone.sitecollection.url
– this command will sometimes not
Stsadm.exe -o setproperty –pn peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection –pv yes –url http://<defualtzone.sitecollection.url
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This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
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While playing with backup/restore scenarios I needed to remove the content database for one of my web applications. On re-attaching the database and navigating to the sites hosted in the web application I was greeted by a “Service Unavailable” error. All other web applications and sites worked continued to work fine.
I always find it interesting to follow people’s troubleshooting steps so below I’m listing the ones I took when investigating the issue. You can scroll down to the end of the article if all you’re after is the solution to the issue:)
The following steps were taken to troubleshoot the issue:
1) Checked the status of the database used by the problematic web application (Sharepoint Central Administration > “Manage content Databases” section) – the status was reported as “ready”
2) Checked event logs – found only 1 error related to the problem:
Event ID: 2436
Source WSS search
Category: Gatherer
The start address <sts3s://[site collection address]/contentdbid={84d79b68-13eb-4cd5-b421-6c44c0c69bed}> cannot be crawled.
Context: Application ‘Search index file on the search server’, Catalog ‘Search’
Details:
An unrecognized HTTP status was received. Check that the address can be accessed using Internet Explorer.  (0x80041204)
I could see the gatherer cannot connect to the website to crawl site. This didn’t however, tell me why the connection is refused/non-operational
3) Restarted the web application’s IIS website in IIS manager
– IIS reset was not an option in the middle of the day.
4) Looked through SharePoint logs – no errors found
5) Launched Sharepoint Manager 2007, navigated to the web application – confirmed I can drill down to subsites, lists etc. The sites and content, therefore, were definitely there.
6) As I couldn’t find anything obvious in event logs or sharepoint logs navigated to C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\HTTPERR folder and looked through httperr.log files.
What is httperr file? I only learned about httperr logs recently when troubleshooting some pesky IIS issue.
Httperr.log is [pasted from MS site] “a new feature in IIS 6.0. If HTTP.sys is unable to write an error to a Web site log because the request did not reach user mode, the error will be entered in Httperr.log. Errors that are written to Httperr.log include the following:
If you need some help in decoding the errors logged in the flie you can refer to the following MS article: Error logging in HTTP API which includes a nice description of the different fields and the order of the fields in httperr log files.
Looking through the files I the following two errors getting logged repeatedly
HTTP/1.1 POST /_vti_bin/sitedata.asmx 503 1790625552 Disabled SharePoint+-+90
HTTP/1.1 POST /_vti_bin/sitedata.asmx 503 1370408763 Disabled SharePoint+-+90
So basically attempts to connect to the sitedata.asmx web service resulted in 503 errors (Service Unavailable). I googled IIS 1790625552 and IIS 1370408763 hoping to get some more info but couldn’t find any articles matching the codes.
A bit of searching led me to the following MS article:
503-Service Unavailable (IIS 6.0)
The article lists the different error codes and causes of 503-Service Unavailable IIS errors.
Looking through the error table I found that the “Disabled” word maps to the following cause “The administrator has stopped the application pool.”.
So the line in my httperr log:
HTTP/1.1 POST /_vti_bin/sitedata.asmx 503 1790625552 Disabled SharePoint+-+90
was basically telling me my application pool “Sharepoint – 90” was stopped.
I opened IIS Manager, expanded the Application Pools node and noticed the application pool used for the problematic web application was indeed stopped.
(notice the little red icon next to my Sharepoint – 90 application pool)
Right clicking on the application pool and choosing “Start” resolved the issue restarted it and suddenly my sites started working fine again.
Filed under: IIS, Troubleshootin | 4 Comments »
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This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
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Like many I’ve joined Twitter. Like many I’m still trying to figure out the practical applications of the tool so many people rave about. One thing I keep hearing is how useful Twitter can be in asking questions and, more importantly, getting answers from your Twitter network. Beats google search apparently.
In an attempt to try and harness the power of Twitter I’ve just set up a new London SharePointers Twibe. Do you use Twitter? Are you based in London, UK? Why not join the Twibe and see how we can help each other?
See you there…
Filed under: Misc | Leave a comment »
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This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
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STSADM (SharePoint Team Services (STS) Administration) allows you to perform many operations not available through SharePoint GUI or carry out some operations in a much more efficient manner.
This article list a compilation of custom STSADM extensions currently available in the SharePoint blogosphere. A few useful STSADM tips are also included:
1) Run STSADM from any location in the command prompt:
Add the 12 Hive folder (usually “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN”) to the PATH statement on your SharePoint Server.
Alternatively, use this script to add the path for you or build your own STSADM shortcut
2) Can’t find the command you’re after?
STSADM can contain hundred of commands and switches – sometimes it’s difficult to find the switch you’re looking for – especially if you’ve added some STSADM extensions to your system. Solution? Use the | find pipe
For example,
Typing STSADM |find “list” will list all switches related to lists
C:\>STSADM |find “list”
blockedfilelist
forcedeletelist
gl-addlist
gl-addlistitem
gl-addlistviewwebpart
gl-copylist
gl-copylistitem
gl-copylistsecurity
gl-deletelist
gl-deletelistfield
gl-deletelistitem
gl-deletelistview
gl-enumemailenabledlists
gl-exportlist
gl-exportlistfield
gl-exportlistfolder
gl-exportlistitem
gl-exportlistitem2
gl-exportlistsecurity
gl-getlistschemaxml
gl-importlist
gl-importlistfield
gl-importlistfolder
gl-importlistitem
gl-importlistsecurity
gl-setlistcontenttypes
gl-updatelistfield
gl-updatelistview
listlogginglevels
Tip originally found here
3) Don’t like the command prompt?
Try STSADMWIN – a GUI for STSADM
4) Tired of having to connect to your Sharepoint server
Run your STSADM remotely using Remote stsadm tool
5) Want to make your desk look even more nerdy?
Download and print STSADM posters
6) Struggling with all the different switches?
Check out the complete reference of stsadm operations here and here. Alternatively, see all commands listed by area
As STSADM has been made extensible by Microsoft several unofficial non-MS extensions have been published to date.
1) Gary Lapointe’s extensions set
Incredibly impressive set of extension covering almost all areas of sharepoint from audiences, users to timer jobs, search, features, and whatever else you can think of. A must Have
2) SharePoint Upload MasterPages and PageLayouts
As the name implies the command uploads masterpages and pagelayouts to the Masterpage and Page Layouts Gallery.
3) John Bender’s Site permissions STSADM extension
“A quick STSADM extension that outputs all of site, subsite, list, and list item permissions for a given SharePoint site”
4) Andrew Connell’s web content management extensions
E.g. the publishallitems will check in all checked-out items, approve any pending approval, and publish all items
5) A set of extensions focused mainly on WCM published by Maxime Bombardier
E.g. SiteBuilder
“This extension will create a whole lot of things for a portal : sites with title/description, content pages with content (fields) values, set master pages, set available page layouts, set the content types per libraries (to fix a little bug), and set security (coming soon). It’s great when you have features for the containers/artefacts and you want to add a default”
Also, another Maxim’s extension listing all sites per variations
6) ExportCrawlLog
Allows for “exporting of crawl log messages and gathering summary information about crawls based on the information in the crawl log”
7) Stsadm extensions for search
Commands for configuring search – e.g. crawlschedule.
8) Master Page STSADM Commands
9) Joerg Brunke’s extensions
Focusing mainly on Timer Jobs administration – e.g.
SetJobSchedule will set the schedule of a specified job.
10) Daniel Brown’s mass content approval tool
Allows you to switch on/off content approval and versioning across entire sites
11) Joe Shepherd’s Site Quota updater
Allows for easy updating of site quotas (read this article for info on why you may need it)
12 ) Chakkaradeep’s createsitecolumn extension.
13) MOSS User Profile Membership URL Updater
Will repalce a value in the Membership URL with a new value.
14) Modify incorrect display names and email
Useful in use migration scenarios
15) GatWeb – Extensions for Stsadm
A set of extensions mainly for working with web applications – e.g. backupwebapp – backs up all sites collections of a specific web application
16) Migration STSADM Extensions
A set of extensions useful for site migrations – e.g. emptylist – removes all items for specified list.
17) The MS Administration toolkit
Introduces the updatealert switch to allow you to update the (URL) of a Web application used in alert e-mails after a Web application address changes.
18) Remote stsadm tool
Aallows you to remotely execute “stsadm” commands against a SharePoint environment.
1) STSADM is a very powerful tool and as such should be treated with care.
I haven’t tested all of the above-listed extensions – should you try them do it on your own risk. Hey, even Microsoft messes up sometimes (see The STSADM MergeContentDB command may cause database corruption ).
2) Help keep this list up-to-date.
I would like to keep this list updated (and, potentially, categorize it when I have some more time). Do you know of any other stsadm extensions? Let me know and I will add it to the list.
3) Develop your own extension
A post by Tony Bierman (SharePoint Solutions Team Blog) – includes a great write-up on this topic: Extending Stsadm.exe with Custom Commands using the ISPStsadmCommand Interface.
Gary Lapointe provided a Visual Studio project to be used as a starting place for creating your own stsadm extensions:
Custom SharePoint STSADM Commands Template Project
Another set of Visual Studio stsadm templates
Have fun!
Filed under: SharePoint Administration, STSADM | Leave a comment »
______________________________________________________________________________
This blog has been discontinued. Please visit my new site based on a completely different concept:
Sharepoint Resource Center
______________________________________________________________________________
I haven’t posted anything in quite a while. Spent the last 7-10 days making configuration changes to my company’s intranet and basically re-doing our hosting platform more or less from scratch so it’s finally working properly and ready for new clients.
Not having much experience in the sharepoint hosting area our infrastructure guys configured things in a way that while providing an operational hosting platform introduced quite a few issues (content crawling and search mainly) and inefficiencies (redirection from HTTP to HTTPS done through a custom .asp script ??) .
After lots of research we managed to sort out most issues. However, the configuration was still rather patchy and not exactly in line with MS guidelines. I’ve decided to re-do the whole thing from scratch.
The last few days have been full of pain, hair-pulling and banging my head against my desk. Getting web applications, host-named site collections, HTTPS, crawling, search and AAM working together is so much fun. Not!!. Add to it content migration and you end up with days of grief…
I have taken some notes of the different things I’ve gone through and some of the bits of knowledge I’ve picked up along the way (like troubleshooting Wss crawling and search by analysing entries in dbo.MSSCrawlURL and other tables in search database – never thought I’d have to look directly into Sharepoint databases).
Hopefully, I’ll find some time to post an article or two with some tips soon. There’s still plenty of things on my plate (e.g. just found that stsadm –import breaks site column lookups in my migrated site collections meaning I’ll have to go through tens of sites, recreate columns, manually update workflows etc.). Hope there’ll be some respite next week so I can get back to blogging.
Have a nice weekend!.
Recommended resource:
Creating Shared Hosteing Solutions on Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 – a must-read 120-page MS whitepaper on Wss 3.0 hosting.
Filed under: Hosting, SharePoint Administration | Leave a comment »
Sharepoint applied 