My IT Experiences - Microsoft 365, SharePoint & Azure

I was working on a List workflow the other day in SharePoint Designer 2010. This list already had a workflow which was working perfectly fine and I needed another manual workflow in it. No matter what I tried the workflow would fail and would log a message in the history list that Workflow failed to start and it was cancelled by System Account . I observed that the same happened with new workflows in that list, new workflows in other lists and I even tried creating new subsites and workflows were behaving the same way. I googled for a while and there were many suggestions to clear SPD cache which did not help me. I played with SPD 2010 for a while and observed that the workflow xml and xoml files were checked out. I read in some blogs that this could cause this issue as well. I tried to check those files in but then I was greeted with a new error! " Cannot perform this operation. The file is no longer checked out or has been deleted ." I had no clue what was happening...

While installing the April 2013 CU for SharePoint 2010 Server a colleague came across this error. He checked with me and I remembered that I had come across the same issue while deploying a CU sometime back. The installer does a version check and there is a command line switch to bypass this check which is: PACKAGE.BYPASS.DETECTION.CHECK=1 To get this to work, navigate to the folder where you have the foundation or the server CU and type the name of the CU package, give a space and copy paste the above text and press Enter. This may not be the most elegant way to get rid of this error but at least it does the job because you don't get much information from the error that the installer throws at you!

To add a custom CSS file in the Style Library to a customer master in SharePoint 2010, add the following line on the Master Page just before the closing head tag: <SharePoint:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~SiteCollection/Style Library/YourStyleSheet.css %>" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/> This would load the custom style sheet after the SharePoint 2010 core style sheets.

Setting up Reporting Services for a SharePoint 2010 in integrated mode can be done in less than 30 minutes if you have the infrastructure ready. However there are a few things to take care of if we are in a SharePoint farm environment with different servers handling different roles. To get Reporting Services to work in SharePoint Integrated mode requires SharePoint object model. Either we install SharePoint object model on our database server running Reporting Service or install SQL Server Reporting Service on a SharePoint application server. Here are a few things to take care of: 1. Use a domain account in the Reporting Services Configuration Manager 2. In the Reporting Services Configuration Manager wizard, click on Apply in different screens before navigating away. 3. Reporting Services Add-in is required on SharePoint Servers; it is part of the SharePoint 2010 pre-requisite installer. It can also be downloaded and installed separately on SharePoint Servers. ...

Here is an excellant blog post from Kirk Evans, an MSFT Engineer on Host named site collections in SharePoint 2010. This post really blow away the fear people had on recommending and implementing site collections with host headers. What Every SharePoint Admin Needs to Know About Host Named Site Collections

Here is a web based PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint 2010 Server, SharePoint Foundation, and SharePoint 365: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/TechNet/en-us/Office/media/WindowsPowerShell/WindowsPowerShellCommandBuilder.html

Downloading and installing Google Chrome is so easy but every time we google for Chrome we get an online installer link. This will install Chrome browser for current user but if you want an offline installer or Chrome as a single executable file you need to check out the following link: http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=126299 This took me a couple to minutes to figure out, I hope it helps somebody out there.