My IT Experiences

Here is a comparison between SharePoint 2010 farm solution and Sandbox solution Feature Farm Solution Sandbox Solution Deploying the solution The farm solution is added directly to the SharePoint server and then deployed to the farm. It is deployed by the farm administrator. The Sandbox solution is uploaded using the Solution Gallery interface of the site collection and then activated. And the solution is deployed by the site collection administrator or a user with full privilege. Running the solution The farm solution uses an IIS worker process with unrestricted rights. The Sandbox solution uses a separate worker process to access and execute the data. Accessing the data A farm solution has complete access to all the content at the farm level. A Sandbox solution uses a separate worker process to access and execute the data. This restricts

Excellent one from Todd Klindt: http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=261

I was working on configuring a SharePoint 2010 farm and I received this error while trying to create an Enterprise Search Center on the root site collection.: Detected use of SPRequest for previously closed SPWeb object. Please close SPWeb objects when you are done with all objects obtained from them, but not before. Stack trace: at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.ScriptLink.SharePointClientJs_Register(Page page) at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.ScriptLink.InitJs_Register(Page page) at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.ScriptLink.RegisterForControl(Control ctrl, Page page, String name, Boolean localizable, Boolean defer, Boolean loadAfterUI, String language) at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.ScriptLink.Register(Page page, String name, Boolean localizable, Boolean defer, Boolean loadAfterUI, String language, String uiVersion) at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.ScriptLink.RegisterOnDemand(Page page, String strKey, String I tried creating a blank site and a basi

This is a very common that we get authentication dialoge box while trying to edit an Office document on a SharePoint library from Internet. This happens even if you are logged in to your site using browser. It is frustrating for end user because he/she has provided credentials once before loggin in to the site and now when tried to open/edit a document (Word, Excel etc) again the credntial window pops up. Quoting Microsoft: "When Internet Explorer opens an Office document, the appropriate Office application is started with the path of the document. The Office application then tries to access the document directly from the server. This differs from other browsers and other file types. Most browsers download the file and call the application to open the file from the local cache. However, when this occurs, if the opened file is changed and saved, the changes are only made to the local copy and not to the server copy. To establish the richest experience possible, the first thing that

PerformancePoint Service (PPS) is used to create content rich dashboards that aggregate data and content throwing light in to how business is performing. PPS was not part of MOSS 2007 but with SharePoint 2010 Microsoft has integrated PPS as a service within. Dashboard Designer is the tool using which we can author KPIs, Scorecards, reports, etc. Lets take a look at the steps involved in configuring PPS on a SharePoint 2010 Server farm. 1. Select Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products -> SharePoint 2010 Central Administration. Click "Manage Service Applications" under Application Management. On the ribbon, Click on the Arrow below "New" and select "PerformancePoint Service Application". 2. Enter a name for this service application, select/create an application pool, and associate a managed account. 3. We get a confirmation screen on the service application successfully created. I had used the name "Performance_App" f

I cleared the SharePoint 070-668 exam today, now I'm an MCITP in SharePoint 2010 :)

I'm not a fan of re-posting content but I'm doing it so that the possibility of somebody finding a solution for this error increases. I received the following error while trying to schedule a crawl on our SharePoint farm: I was able to start a full or incremental crawl and it would complete successfully and this led to the possibility of some issue with scheduling mechanism. Now SharePoint would leverage Windows tasks scheduler to schedule events from SharePoint and so it makes sense that this error disappears when we explicitly provide the local server group "WSS_WPG" read and write permission on the "Tasks" folder within Windows folder on the Index server. Here are the steps (Close all explorer windows before performing these steps): 1. Start - Run - type "Cmd" and execute the following command: attrib -s %windir%\tasks This is done so that the "Security" tab appears in the Tasks properties window. 2. Right click Windows\Tasks folder an

I was trying out Excel 2010 for the first time and working with Excel services. I created an Excel workbook with OOB sales template and wanted to check the Excel service features offered by SharePoint 2010. While trying to publish the workbook to a document library from Excel - Save & Send - Save to SharePoint - Browse for a location - Save As I received an error which said “Path does not exist. Check the path and try again” I initially thought this would be an issue with the copy of Excel 2010 I had. But after doing some research it seemed the issue was related to the OS environment I was in because I could publish the same file from Windows 7 machine using similar Excel 2010 version. To get this working from Windows Server 2008 we need to enable a feature “Desktop Experience” from Server Manager Once I enabled this feature I could successfully publish the workbook.

SharePoint 2010 has some new features and components, which help to overcome difficulties such as redundancy and service-sharing that we faced while using SharePoint 2007.  Services in MOSS 2007 were implemented with the help of Shared Service Providers or SSPs. But we cannot use the services of one SSP for another SSP. So each SSP has to have its own set of services and applications, which increases redundant data in the farm.  For example, different managers in the same organization use a SharePoint site to maintain official data associated with an SSP. This SSP is associated with different services, such as Search service, BDC service, and a user profile service. A project manager in this organization requests an exclusive user profile service to maintain project data security. To provide this, we first need to create a separate SSP for the project manager and then a separate service called user profile service - project name. Next, we need to associate the SSP with the servi

We have a SQL Server 2005 cluster with two nodes, one active and the other passive. We had to remove an 1 TB storage volume from the cluster and release it to the storage pool. Before removing any cluster resource we need to remove the dependencies. To remove this drive we have to remove the dependency of this drive from SQL Server service. Here are the steps: 1. Open cluster administrator 2. Right click SQL Service and select Properties 3. Click Modify and remove the resource from Modify Dependencies window 4. Now we can go back to Cluster Administrator and delete the resource/drive volume. If we delete the drive or resource without removing the dependency, the SQL Service might fail to start. The following errors might occur: TDSSNIClient initialization failed with error 0x103, status code 0x1. Could not start the network library because of an internal error in the network library. To determine the cause, review the errors immediately preceding this one in the error l

I cleared the SharePoint 2010 configuration exam 70 - 667 the other day. I got 91% of the questions correct this time. There were some questions that were confusing but the test was not very difficult. I believe the set of questions around search and Powershell is what wrong for me. I plan to do 70 - 668 next!

I cleared the Microsoft certification exam for SharePoint 2007, the MCTS for MOSS 2007 configuring 70-630 on Monday this week. The score was 1000 out of 1000 :) There were 76 questions and I had to go for the best answer for around 15 of them because it was bit tough, but I made it through.

I got some inspiration reading the Technet article Deploy by using DBA-created databases (SharePoint Server 2010) the other day. We can deploy SharePoint 2010 without the central administration (CA) database having the annoying GUID. If we run the SharePoint configuration Wizard after installation it will create content database with GUID. However, if we create CA content database using PowerShell we can have the database name of our choice. I have also referred to the SPModule PowerShell Scripts available from Microsoft. Here are the steps: 1. Run Setup on each server computer in the farm. You must run Setup on at least one of these computers by using the Complete installation option. 2. Do not run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard after Setup finishes. From the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, use the New-SPConfigurationDatabase command to create a new configuration database,,for example: New-SPConfigurationDatabase -DatabaseName "SharePoint_Config" -Database

We used to receive this error while deploying "wsp" files on our MOSS farm. This happened only on one WFE and not on the other. I was sure there was some process blocking the file deployment because this was happening only on one WFE. After hours of head banging we figured out that we had a SharePoint backup third-party application configured on this WFE. This application was installed on this WFE. We had our production deployment window normally in the afternoon on weekedays and weekends. This error would not normally happen on the weekends. Combining all these we figured out that backup application was not running on weekend afternoons. We checked with the storage management team here to pause or kill all backup jobs on a weekday that we had a scheduled "wsp" deployment. Amazingly we did not receive this error. Then we rescheduled the backup jobs accordingly so that it does not conflict with our code deployment window and the issue was solved.

I was receiving this error on the "Report Server Web Service URL" on our SharePoint farm: Report Server has encountered a SharePoint error. ( rsSharePointError) Access to this Web Site has been blocked. Please contact the administrator to resolve this problem. This site URL is configured via Central Administration > Configure Reporting Services Integration > Reporting Services Integration if Reporting Server feature/Add-in is installed on the farm. After doing some research I found out that this page somehow enumerates through entire site collections before it throws this error. As part of troubleshooting step I checked if the domain user configured for reporting service is has sufficient privileges in the farm and also as local admin of the sql box, but this did not solve the issue. We raised this issue with the vendor and they made us update our SQL Server 2005 to latest SP and CU; still we had the error. The reason was nobody was sure if this er