SharePoint Expert's Blog for Noobs

2011 in review

Laura — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:56:38 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Save site as a template in MOSS 2007

Laura — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:32:35 +0000

If you’re using MOSS 2007 you’ve probably noticed in the site settings there isn’t anywhere to save your site as a template. This issue should be resolved in SharePoint 2010 but if you’re using 2007 here is your solution:

Navigate to the site you want to save as a template. Click Site Actions, Site Settings, Modify all Site Settings. Once you’re on that screen your URL will look similar to the following:

http://testportal.com/sites/_layouts/settings.aspx

Take out the “settings.aspx” portion and enter in “savetmpl.aspx” so it looks like the following:

http://testportal.com/sites/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx and hit enter.

You should see the following screen:

If you want to go in and delete a saved template you go to the top level site settings and click on Site Templates and you can delete them from there.

Hope this helps!!

Workflow failed (Retrying) – MOSS 2007

Laura — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:24:00 +0000

We’re running MOSS 2007 on Server 2003 Enterprise R2 but I’m not sure a lot of that matters in this case. We have several workflows set up and one day they just stopped working. Not just on one site collection but all site collections. When ran it would simply say the workflow failed to start or failed to run.

Here are the event viewer errors we were getting:

Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3

Event ID: 5289

Description: Registry error reading Perfmon configuration.

Source: W3CTRS

Event ID: 2002

Description: Setting up Web Service counters failed, please make sure your Web Service counters are registered correctly.

Source: Perflib

Event ID: 1023

Description: Windows cannot load extensible counter DLL TermService, the first DWORD in data section is the Windows error code.

Source: IISInfoCtrs

Event ID: 1001

Description: Unable to read the first counter index value from the registry. The error code returned by registry is data DWORD 0.

The first thing you should check is to see if the SharePoint and Windows Workflow Foundation performance counters are available in perfmon. To do this simply open a run prompt and type in perfmon. Then drop down “Performance Logs and Alerts” and click on “Counter Logs”. Right Click on “System Overview” and go to Properties. (see image below)

Once you’ve got that screen open click on the “Add Counters” button and drop down the “Performance Object” list. Your list should resemble the list below, having SharePoint objects as well as the last one, Windows Workflow Foundation.

If they are not there it could be several things. I would try reloading the performance counters first by doing the following:

1. Open a command prompt and navigate to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Workflow Foundation

2. type in lodctr perfcounters.ini and press enter (you can also try lodctr /r)

If you get any messages like “Unable to open driver SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\w3ctrs.ini. Status: 2 then we’ll have to try the next step. This usually means .NET Framework could possibly be corrupted. Next I would try the .NET hotfix located here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6096ce0f-d21e-47ac-afe2-d4e1c2fce670&displaylang=en

Download the appropriate one for your system and try it out. You will have to reboot when finished.

If this doesn’t fix it you will most likely have to reinstall .NET Framework. I personally didn’t want to do that so I reverted my web front end server to an earlier image of the machine. This will work fine if you have a complete image and the SQL installation is on a separate machine. You will not lose any data since everything except newly created site collections are stored in SQL. If SQL is on the same box you will lose any data from the date of the image.

If you decide to reinstall .NET then once you have it reinstalled you should be able to do an iisreset and see if your sites are back up. Once you have reinstalled .NET install the same hotfix referenced above:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6096ce0f-d21e-47ac-afe2-d4e1c2fce670&displaylang=en

Next you’ll want to perform the lodctr from the directory mentioned above (C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Workflow Foundation) and run lodctr perfcounters.ini.

Go back into perfmon and make sure your counters are there and your workflows are functioning properly.

Hope this helps!

2010 in review

Laura — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:43:33 +0000

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,200 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 24 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 406kb.

The busiest day of the year was October 20th with 52 views. The most popular post that day was Event ID: 6482 Source: Office SharePoint Server.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were google.com, google.co.in, social.msdn.microsoft.com, yandex.ru, and google.co.uk.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Event ID: 6482 Source: Office SharePoint Server July 2010

An unexpected error has occurred – SharePoint June 2009
1 comment

Unable to Load Workbook – MOSS 2007 October 2009

Explorer View requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater and Web Folders or Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer. February 2010

Resource Cannot Be Found or File Not Found Error in MOSS May 2009
4 comments

Can not add the user because a user with that name already exists – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 WSS 2.0

Laura — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:49:54 +0000

If you receive this message it’s usually because a user in your organization is deleted, and re-created using the same domain and same account name. This may have been because of a user was deleted by accident, or a previous employee who left your organization and was then rehired.

For example, my account in the ”NA” domain with the same account name of john.smith (NA\john.smith). The account was deleted and re-created with the same account name (NA\john.smith).

Because SharePoint stores SID information with the user in it’s tables, the account will no longer work until you either

1) Remove the user completely and re-add, or

2) Use the STSADM -o migrateuser command

You can try removing the user from the Site Settings, Site Administration, Manage Users section but it they are not listed you need to use this migrate user command from the BIN directory of your SharePoint server:

STSADM -o migrateuser -oldlogin na\john.smith -newlogin na\john.smith -ignoresidhistory

You should get an “Operation completed successfully” message and then be able to add them to your Site.

Event ID: 1059 Source: W3SVC

Laura — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:17:16 +0000

We were receiving this error in our Event Viewer after trying to start the Central Administration application pool:

Source: W3SVC

Event ID: 1059

A failure was encountered while launching the process serving application pool ‘SharePoint Central Administration v3′. The application pool has been disabled.

What I figured out was that the service account I had running was not a member of the IIS_WPG group. Once I added it to the group the application pool started right up.

Windows SharePoint Services Search – Required on Farm, not running

Laura — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:13:40 +0000

We had this problem using MOSS 2007 SP2 when we first installed SharePoint. We tried starting it with an administrators account as well as changing the Indexing schedule with no luck. What we ended up doing was detaching the WSS_Search_ database and taking it offline in SQL, then when we went back in to Central Administration – Operations – Services on Server and selected Start next to that service, we put in a new database since it will give you an Unknown Error if you try to use the same name, and it started fine.

Configuration Failed on MOSS 2007 SP2

Laura — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:22:02 +0000

We were trying to apply Service Pack 2 to our MOSS 2007 installation. Once we installed the service pack we tried to run the config wizard and it would get to task 5 and the configuration would fail. Then we would get the following events in the Event Viewer:

Event ID: 100

Source: SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard

Description:

Configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies failed. Configuration must be performed in order for this product to operate properly. To diagnose the problem, review the extended error information located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS\PSCDiagnostics_7_20_2010_8_9_2_615_239088506.log, fix the problem, and run this configuration wizard again.

Event ID: 104

Source: SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard

Description:

Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ServicesTask.InstallServiceInstanceInConfigDB(Boolean provisionTheServiceInstanceToo, String serviceInstanceRegistryKeyName, Object sharepointServiceObject)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ServicesTask.InstallServiceInstances(Boolean provisionTheServiceInstancesToo, String serviceRegistryKeyName, Object sharepointServiceObject)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ServicesTask.InstallServices(Boolean provisionTheServicesToo)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ServicesTask.Run()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()

Event ID: 2426

Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search

Description:

Advise Status Change failed. The system is probably low on resources. Free up resources and restart the service.

Context: Application ‘Search’, Catalog ‘index file on the search server Search’

Details:

(0×80041812)

Event ID: 10029

Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search

Description:

Error backing up registry hive to the configuration database.

Context: Application ‘Search index file on the search server’

Details:

Access is denied. (0×80070005)

Event ID: 10030

Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search

Description:

Error importing registry hive from the configuration database and into the registry.

Context: Application ‘e1daee80-85f6-4538-9358-59e286d2c897′

Details:

Access is denied. (0×80070005)

Event ID: 6066

Source: Office SharePoint Server

Description:

Couldn’t Register with Load Balancer: Unable to connect to the remote server

Event ID: 6102

Source: Office SharePoint Server

Description:

LoadBalancer.RegisterLauncher failed: Unable to connect to the remote server

All of these were caused by one registry key:

HK_local_machine\software\microsoft\shared tools\web server extensions\12.0\wss\services\

Under that key, find the service that it was failing on and delete that key. In our case it was Windows SharePoint Services Search. We backed up that registry key and then deleted it. We reran the configuration wizard and it worked.

I hope this helps!!

Event ID: 6482 Source: Office SharePoint Server

Laura — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:05:41 +0000

We were getting this error every minute on our MOSS 2007 server:

Here are the error details:

Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance (6e8fd438-2b7f-4672-a1fc-f206f342dc4a).

Reason: Object c46d04b6-690e-4ced-a1fd-18bbf492e421 not found.

Techinal Support Details:

System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException: Object c46d04b6-690e-4ced-a1fd-18bbf492e421 not found.

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchApi.get_App()

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchApi.SetUsersPermittedToQuery(String[] userNames, Boolean force)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.Synchronize()

at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerJob.ProvisionLocalSharedServiceInstances(Boolean isAdministrationServiceJob)

Here’s how I fixed this on our server:

I went to the Services on Server page from Central Administration and clicked on the Office SharePoint Server Search link that opened the Configure Office SharePoint Server Search Service Settings on server page.

I entered the password for my search service and clicked OK. Then I stopped and started the Search service in the Services mmc.

That ended up giving me an Application Log entry that said Successfully imported the application configuration snapshot into the registry.

Now, I search the registry and I find the application under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Applications\

I restart IIS and now, I’m getting search results.

Explorer View requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater and Web Folders or Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer.

Laura — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:11:42 +0000

If you receive this message in SharePoint when attempting to use the Explorer View option you should try enabling the WebClient service (see below image):

If you’re unsure of how to get to your Services list simply go to Start, Settings, Control Panel and open your Administrative Tools then click on Services. This may vary depending on whether you’re using XP, Vista or Windows 7 but it should be enough to get you going in the right direction.

If you’re using MOSS 2007 you may receive this message:

“Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer”

If enabling the WebClient service alone doesn’t fix the issue check the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters

Double click the AuthForwardServerList value and type in your servers URL and click OK, If you do not have that value then right-click and go to New – Multi-String Value and type in AuthForwardServerList. Then you can add your URL.

Then restart the WebClient service and retry the Explorer View

Hope this helps!