Know SharePoint

Today I updated a SharePoint Server 2010 test virtual machine with service pack 1 (SP1; Foundation and Server) and the August 2011 cumulative updates for SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server. I ran the SharePoint configuration wizard after installing all the updates.

When I rebooted the server (suggested when encountering the User Profile sync problem after applying the patches) and tried to open one of the team sites, I received a 503 Service Unavailable error (as shown in the picture below).

_{Service Unavailable – HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.}

Once I got over the “what did I do??!?” moment, I of course recognized this as an IIS error, not a SharePoint error. I opened the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager MMC and noticed that none of the SharePoint Application Pools were running. After starting all the needed Application Pools, everything is back to normal.

Microsoft’s Office 365 allows you to not only host your company’s email, files, and website outside of the restrictions of your firewall in a highly available, secure way, but it also makes it easy to share information with your customers.

One way you can share content with your customers is to use the free public site given to you when you sign-up for an Office 365 subscription or with an unbundled SharePoint Online plan. This is a great site for small to medium-sized businesses, especially if you are paying another provider to host your content. Consolidate and save! Modifiable templates are provided that get you started fast and to which you can add all your company’s website information including pictures and video.

Office 365’s SharePoint platform gives you the ability to also add external users to your “private” SharePoint sites so they can gain access to the information you have selected. For example, these external users can be customers who you want to have access to collaborate on a proposed change to their contract. If you allow, the customer would be able to make changes, upload more documents, take part in online discussions, add important dates to their site, and so on. Once you send the invite and the outside user accepts, you manage their access to your SharePoint sites like any other user by adding them to site groups, or applying permissions directly to sites, list, libraries, or individual items.

I was asked recently why you would want to give access to an external person through the “Share Site” method in SharePoint versus creating a user account either directly in Office 365, or in your Active Directory and letting it sync into Office 365. My answer was two-fold:

• First, if you add the external user by creating an Office 365 account for them, you will have to pay for their Office 365 license. If you are using SharePoint Plan 2 (without bundling with other Office 365 services), you will be paying $10.25US per month for that user to gain access to your site. That is not extremely expensive, but Microsoft gives you the ability to invite 50 external users for FREE, so in that regard, the $10.25US is very expensive. Also, if you make this your default behavior for inviting external people to collaborate, that monthly cost can soon get out of control.
• Second, once you create the user account for Office 365 for the external person, you now have to manage that account. So, when that user forgets their password, who will they call? That’s right, they will call you. Don’t you have enough to worry about with your current employees? Why add another user you have to support?! If you invite them through the Share Site feature, they use a Microsoft account (more on this in a later post) that they maintain and if they forget their password, that is between them and Microsoft.

Adding External Users

To allow external users access to your site, a SharePoint Online administrator must allow access by going to the Manage Site Collections screen within the Office 365 management site, selecting the Settings menu, and then the Manage External Users menu item (as seen in the picture below).

_{Manage Site Collections menu}

The External Users window will open – select Allow and then click Save to start allowing Site Collection Owners the right to enable external user sharing (see the picture below).

_{Allow or Deny External Users window}

At this point, site Owners will not be able to invite external people. Site Collection Owners must enable the External user invitations feature. You do this by navigating to the Site Collection Features screen and clicking the Activate button by the feature (see the picture below).

_{External user invitations SharePoint feature}

Now any SharePoint user who had been given the Manage Permissions permission level (out of the box, only Site Owners have this permission, but it can be added to any role) on any SharePoint site within the Site Collection can invite external users to join a site group. To invite the external users, select the Share Site link on the Site Actions menu (see the picture below).

_{Site Actions Menu – Share Site}

When the Share your SharePoint Site window opens, type the email address of the user you want to invite into either of the groups shown. Out of the box, the groups available are the Visitors and Members groups, but the names of the groups can be changed so yours may be different from the ones shown. Click the Share button to finish (see the picture below).

_{Share your SharePoint Site Window}

The external user will get an invite to your site and after going through the sign-in process (I will document that more at a later time), they are added to the SharePoint group you designated.

I know there are many readers of this blog that live outside of the United States, but please bear with me as I address two bills before the U.S. Congress that will have global impact.

Instead of addressing the actual bills and the general impact they would have on the internet (you can find information in various other places), I want to look at this issue from the prospective of a technology professional who implements, uses, and blogs about Microsoft technology, including SharePoint.

Imagine a scenario where Microsoft (or any other software company) releases a software product that I then begin to implement. But, as I start to use the product, I find flaws or bugs (some like to call them “features”) in the software that I want to blog about. I want others who run into the same issues to know they are not alone and possibly have a fix.

This scenario happens hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day in this country. However, if companies have the right given to them to sue anyone that they feel is infringing on their product, any technology blogger’s site can be brought down. This is how it could work: you blog about a flaw and the software provider decides they don’t like your post. Well, you used screenshots of their product and gave detailed descriptions of how their product worked, so you have used their intellectual property (supposedly). But wait, I am a blogger, so I am a member of the press and protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Not you are not.

So, you are being sued (along with your ISP and website hosting provider). Can you afford to pay an attorney to fight a large software company? What about your ISP or your website host? What if your website is being hosted by the same software company that is now suing you? Exactly, your site goes away. Oh, and don’t even think about transferring your website outside of this country to protect it, they want to block DNS requests if an IP owner feels the site has infringing content(some DNS provisions in SOPA have been taken out….for now.)

This is why any of us who work in technology every day and give helpful advice (I hope this site is helpful!) should stand up and contact our representatives in Congress and tell them SOPA and PIPA are bad for all of us!

A SharePoint document library in some ways acts similar to a folder when storing documents on your local computer. For example, you can’t have two documents with the same name within a document library (or folder, if you are using folders). If you try to rename a document and give it the same name as another document in the library, you will be given this wonderful error (in SharePoint 2007):

[Server Error in ‘/’ Application. The specified name is already in use. A document cannot have the same name as another document or folder in this library or folder. Click your browser’s Back button, and type a new name.]
This makes perfect sense, unless the “existing file” really isn’t there. I recently ran into an issue where a user tried multiple times to upload a document (PEBKAC) and finally, they received the error that they couldn’t add the document with the current name because it already existed. Somehow, the document they were uploading and checking-in was removed from the database, but SharePoint thought it was still there. So, they couldn’t upload a document or rename a document with that same name.
When I tried to upload a document to the library, I received the error below that says the document (which wasn’t really there) was checked-out to the user that was uploading the document from before.

[Error. The {filename} is checked out or locked for editing by {username}]
Again, since the document really wasn’t there, it was a bit frustrating, but this last error did give me insight into how to resolve the issue. The fix in this case was simple enough. After opening the document library’s settings, I opened the Manage checked out files page (selected from the Permissions and Management column).

Since SharePoint did believe the document was still there, I am given the wonderful opportunity to “Take Ownership” of the checked-out document.

After selecting the checkbox next to the document and clicking the Take Ownership of Selection button, the document was then checked-out to me. I then was able to upload a document with the same name (the library had versioning turned on, so I selected for it to add another version).

I recently setup yet another SharePoint farm (this time using virtual machines) and ran into a problem that happens all too often.

The scenario is this: I setup MS SQL server in preparation for getting SharePoint installed on a separate server. After setting up your service accounts in Active Directory and installing MS SQL on Server1, I set off installing SharePoint on Server2. When I got to the screen in the Specify Configuration Database Settings within the SharePoint configuration wizard, I received the following error:

Knowing the database ‘master’ did exist, I setout to solve the “current user does not have permission” issue. I opened the SQL Management Studio and checked to make sure my account had permission to connect.

I checked the permissions for the service account and everything looked good. So, what’s going on?!?

Since I don’t follow a setup script anymore (I have done this hundreds of times, so I know what I am doing, right?), I had forgotten one step. MS SQL listens for incoming traffic on port 1433. When setting up your SQL server, you have to make sure you create a firewall rule to allow that incoming port. This is elementary and I should have remembered this step, but no one is perfect, right?

So, I opened Windows Firewall (if you are using a different firewall product, the steps should be similar).

I selected Inbound Rules in the left window and then chose New Rule… from the Actions menu on the right.

Select Port for the type of rule you want to create, click Next, and then type in 1433 in the port field.

Click Next and then select to Allow the connection. Go through the rest of the wizard by clicking Next and filling in the appropriate content.

Data Views can be a very powerful tool when using SharePoint Designer 2007 in designing pages in your WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 environments (the same is true for SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint 2010).
One of the requirements for my project is to display documents from two different SharePoint Document Libraries in one view and have the documents displayed in a specific way. The content is to be displayed in the table view as follows:

• The Document Icon must display the file-specific icon, but the hyperlink must point to the file. [Go here to find out how I accomplished displaying the icon]
• The Name field should display the document’s name, but without the file extension [Go here to find out how I accomplished displaying the name without the extension]
• Only the last 30 days of modified files should be displayed.

To filter the list of items in the Data View, first I setup the Data View to display the content like I wanted. Then, selecting the Common Data View Tasks drop-down (as shown below), I selected the Filter: option.

The expression is pretty involved, but I cheated a little by using the Filter Criteria option. The expression I started off with was Modified Is Greater or Equal To [Current Date], as shown below.

I then selected the Advanced button (shown on the picture above) and I was presented with the advanced expression being used by the builder. I added “- 30” without the quotes to the expression.

The whole expression ended up being the one shown below:
[number(translate(substring-before(@Modified,'T'),'-','')) >= number(translate(substring-before($Today,'T'),'-','')) -30]

Data Views can be a very powerful tool when using SharePoint Designer 2007 in designing pages in your WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 environments (the same is true for SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint 2010).
One of the requirements for my project is to display documents from two different SharePoint Document Libraries in one view and have the documents displayed in a specific way. The content is to be displayed in the table view as follows:

• The Document Icon must display the file-specific icon, but the hyperlink must point to the file. [Go here to find out how I accomplished displaying the icon]
• The Name field should display the document’s name, but without the file extension
• Only the last 30 days of modified files should be displayed. [Go here to find out how I accomplished the filter]

To show the name without the file extension, I added the Name field to the table, then converted the value to a Hyperlink. I then made the hyperlink value point to the file using @FileRef.

To remove the extension from the display, I built the display value using two different expressions, as shown below:
substring-before(string(@FileLeafRef), ‘.’)

Working from the inside out, ‘string’ converts the filename variable into a string so the next expression can work with the value. ‘Substring-before’ accepts two variables: the data value and what character to look at for stopping (which is the period ‘.’).

So, the full URL looks like: <a href=”{@FileRef}”><xsl:value-of select=”substring-before(string(@FileLeafRef), ‘.’)” /></a>

Data Views can be a very powerful tool when using SharePoint Designer 2007 in designing pages in your WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 environments (the same is true for SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint 2010).
One of the requirements for my project is to display documents from two different SharePoint Document Libraries in one view and have the documents displayed in a specific way. The content is to be displayed in the table view as follows:

• The Document Icon must display the file-specific icon, but the hyperlink must point to the file.
• The Name field should display the document’s name, but without the file extension [Go here to find out how I accomplished displaying the name without the extension]
• Only the last 30 days of modified files should be displayed. [Go here to find out how I accomplished the filter]

To show the Document Icon, I added the DocIcon field to the table, then converted the value to a Hyperlink. I then made the hyperlink value point to the file using @FileRef.
To point the DocIcon (which has a value of ‘PDF’, since all my documents were PDFs) link to the correct picture, I pointed to a pdf picture (pdf.gif) on my site. You could do this several ways, but I just put a PDF icon in a ‘system’ document library on my site. I also wanted to make my solution work if it was later decided to add documents to the displayed libraries that were a different type other than PDF.

So, in the hyperlink, I used the @DocIcon field in the src value:
src=”/site/system/{@DocIcon}.gif width =”17” height=”17”

A couple things to note about the link above: 1) it assumes all the images will be gifs and will reside in the same document library and 2) the images are all shown with 17 pixel width and height.

So, the full URL looks like: <a href=”{@FileRef}”><img border=”0” src=”/site/system/{@DocIcon}.gif width =”17” height=”17” /></a>

If you have installed the 64-bit new version of Microsoft Office, Office 2010, then you will most likely see the following message when trying to edit a SharePoint list using the Edit in datasheet function:

The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons:

- A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed.

- Your Web browser does not support ActiveX controls

- Support for AxtiveX controls is disabled

The issue revolves around the fact that 64-bit versions of Office 2010 do not ship with the 32-bit Activex control that would make the datasheet option work with Internet Explorer.

There are ways to make this work, and the usual suggestion is to find a copy of an Office 2007 product and either install it (such as SharePoint Designer 2007) or just choose to install the Windows SharePoint Services components of the product. This works, but I don’t really want to go to that much trouble.

Another solution, and the one that I employed, is to install the 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components. After installing the Components, go back to the menu and the datasheet option will work great.

After applying a new master page and related theme components, we have been receiving reports that users were being presented with 403 ‘forbidden’ errors when trying to load our intranet site. After refreshing the screen four (4) times, the page would finally load.

I checked the web server’s Application log and found that every time a user received a 403 error, there was an “Information” Web Event message logged with a source of ASP.NET and an ID of ID 1314. The body of the event included, among other information:

Event code: 4011
Event message: An unhandled access exception has occurred.

After doing research and knowing this was most likely a security issue, I came around to fixing permissions on the Bin and _app_bin folders for the IIS virtual server that was hosting my SharePoint Web Application. I added the server’s local group “users” (which includes the domain group users) to both folders with READ permissions.

After an application pool restart, there have been no more reports of 403 errors and not a single 1314 report has been shown in the Application log.