SharePoint Illegal Characters
Today we started to bring in the documents for our new department and found lot of errors trying to move the folders and the documents to SharePoint. This is due to the Illegal characters in the naming conventions.
Characters that can't or shouldn't be used in File, folder and site names.
~ # % & * { } \ : < > ? / + | " . _
Notes:
- Period can't be used consecutively in the middle of a name or at the end
- Underscore shouldn't be used at the start of any name
- Spaces are encoded as %20 (3 characters) and count to the 240 character Web-DAV file length limit
SharePoint 2010: Missing Links in Central Administration
Today 03/14, I came across this scenario, and wanted to post something up as it will make you second guess your SharePoint configuration [and sanity]. I have SharePoint 2010 hosted on my Windows 7 laptop. In my Favorites Bar in IE, I created a SP2010 folder, and in that folder, I add a favorite for Central Admin, and my SharePoint sites. Gives me an easy way to hit the sites I’m after while working on my laptop.
When I open IE and click my Favorite for Central Admin, I find that some links are missing. Clicking on some of the links that actually show up throw Access Denied messages, though others will work. The main link that is missing that I associate with this scenario is “Manage Services on Server” under System Settings. The “Configure incoming e-mail Settings” link will also be missing on that page.
You get: Servers> Manage Servers in this Farm
Expect this: Servers > Manage Servers in this farm | Manage Services on Server
Also, most of the Farm Backup and Restore links will be missing. Check out this screenshot. The following links are missing:
- Perform a Backup
- Restore from a backup
- Configure backup settings
You get: Farm Backup and Restore View Backup and Restore History | Check backup and restore job status
Expect this: Farm Backup and Restore Perform a backup | Restore from a backup | Configure Backup Settings | View Backup and Restore History | Check backup and restore job status
To make matters worse, you likely set this up a few weeks ago, and can’t quite remember if those links were there to begin with 
If you’re like me, you think, “I must have messed something up. Let me run the configuration wizard, and see if that gets things going.” If you do that, IE will launch after the wizard, and Central Admin will appear with all the links. You go on your merry way, and do whatever you were planning on doing. You come back a couple days later and the links are missing again. This is where questioning your sanity comes into play
I asked around, and found that the cause is a combination of the following:
- Browsing from the server hosting Central Administration
- UAC Enabled on the machine
- Opening the browser without elevation
- If you are browsing from a Windows Server hosting Central Admin, you also have IE Enhanced Security Configuration (ESC) to deal with as well.
The fix is to either:
- Launch Internet Explorer as Administrator (Right-click Internet Explorer, select “Run as Administrator”)
- Browse Central Admin, by clicking the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration link in the Start menu. This runs “psconfigui.exe –cmd showcentraladmin” which will force elevation.
I would think the majority of people that are going to hit this are developers working with SharePoint locally as most administrators will not be browsing directly from the server hosting Central Admin. From looking around, it appears the same behavior is seen with SharePoint 2007:
Catch 22 for Approval Workflow in SharePoint Designer
Today 02/09 I began blogging on this, and found someone else's blogpost from Dec 2010 who also blogged on this exact topic. Though I never saw his blog post prior to writing this, credit to Lars Nielson.
I ran into an interesting dilemma while working on my most recent project. The project involved a number of document libraries that required content approval as well as versioning.
The scope of work greatly limited the amount of customizations that could be made to SharePoint (i.e. building workflows in Visual Studio).
This introduced an interesting problem based on our initial game plan. The workflow is basically a document goes through a change process and committee approvals before it is published. End Users cannot see changes until an approved document is published.
The change process was the complicated piece to this because the organization had a number of variables within the process, so the only solution was to require each step in the workflow to be manually kicked off.
When I made it to the approval stage, we initially had content approval on in the libraries. And here is where the catch 22 comes in, trying to set content approval status to Approved in a document library that requires a document to be checked out and content approval is on.
To set the content approval status from Designer, ok easy enough, there is an action for that....uh oh, the document must first be checked out. ok, check out document, set approval status....uh oh, I get an error that says content approval status cannot be set while a document is checked out.
Catch 22. Basically to set content approval status in designer, the document must be checked out, but content approval status cannot be changed while a document is checked out.
Possible work-around - We did not go this route, we basically turned off content approval, and used a workflow to notify approvals, and once approval was granted, a user would publish a major version of the document. This was acceptable for this engagement.
I was going to explain the workaround here, but I ran across a blog post while getting my info together of someone who already documented it. So in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, Lars gets credit for this solution. Lars Nielson blogged on this exact topic in late 2010. http://discoverlars.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/update-the-approval-status-in-a-sharepoint-designer-workflow/
The bottom line in this is that for highly complex workflows, you really need Visual Studio.
How to Install a software update for SharePoint Foundation 2010
Recently we encountered some issues with the SharePoint updates. Even though the previous update procedures may be quite successful you may somehow find new or additional issues after the updates. Please see the below link from Technet explains the procedures for various SharePoint Server 2010 updates.
Click Here to see the Procedure for Updates
Event ID 3351-Login failed for user ‘NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON’
Today 01/04/2011, as part of my monthly checks, I noticed a whole bunch of 3351 errors in the event log on the SharePoint front end web server.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3
Event Category: Database
Event ID: 3351
Date: 1/4/2011
Time: 12:44:45 AM
User: N/A
Computer: MOSSSERVER
Description:
SQL database login failed. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.
Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON'.
Resolution: First I started to check the application pool account of the portal site and found they were all set as defined. After a thorough investigation found that the Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer account is running as local system account. Changed the account to the AD Farm Account and found that the issue is resolved.
Event ID 107:Report Server Windows Service cannot connect to the Report Server Database
Today 11/01/2010, when I was doing the routine event log checks for errors as a scheduled task on the first of every month. One of My SQL server had a whole bunch of Report Server Windows errors with event ID 107.
Please see the error below:
Report Server
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Report Server Windows Service (MSSQLSERVER)
Event Category: Management
Event ID: 107
Date: 11/1/2010
Time: 9:12:49 AM
User: N/A
Computer: MOSSSQLSERVER
Description:
Report Server Windows Service (MSSQLSERVER) cannot connect to the report server database.
Resolution: Go to Services. msc and Make sure all the services for SQL Server Database engine and Reporting Services were in the running state. Then Open the Report Services Configuration Wizard, Connect to the specified SQL Server Database Server and then I found that the connection to the Report Server Database was set to some other database. Modified the settings doe the Database setup and connected the Report Server Database and save the settings.
Unable to start Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service
Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service- Unable to start the Timer Service- Showed error -Pathto the executable not found.
Well while the summer is coming to end and getting ready for the much awaited winter, today I suddenly noticed that the Notifications and alerts in SharePoint were not working.
As usual, first thing I checked was whether the SMTP service is running-(Started and running) and then I checked the outgoing and incoming email settings.Looks OK as per the defined values. Then I created an alert to check the receipt of an email about the alert created. No luck. This is clearly a problem and something is wrong with the environment. Also I ran the SP Config Wizard to check if there is any other problem in the environment.
SharePoint 2010:Taxonomy Picker.ascx Failed Error
SharePoint 2010:Taxonomy Picker.ascx Failed Error
Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-SharePoint Products-SharePoint Foundation
Date: 9/27/2010 12:08:41 PM
Event ID: 7043
Task Category: Web Controls
Level: Error
Keywords:
User: MOSS\SPFARM
Computer: MOSSSERVER
Description:
Load control template file /_controltemplates/TaxonomyPicker.ascx failed: Could not load type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.TaxonomyPicker' from assembly 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c'.
Cause of the Problem:
The file drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\TaxonomyPicker.ascx is badly formed and doesn't compile.
Solution:
You can change the bad syntax of the file. To Fix:
Find the character string , and replace with a comma ‘,’ (without quotes).
Or, you can rename it TaxonomyPicker.ascx_broken. It is badly formed, but the file is never actually used. Thank you to this post for the answer:
http://todd-carter.com/post/2010/05/03/Help-Wanted-Taxonomy-Picker.aspx
True Errors in SharePoint (and other .NET web applications)
Uncovering True Errors in SharePoint (and other .NET web applications)
Recently this week on 08/12/2010, I came across these errors in SharePoint and was successfully able to resolve the problem.
Have you ever come across an error like this?
Or perhaps one similar to this?
Unfortunately, these types of “unexpected error” messages do not provide any level of detail as to the actual problem, but instead, only inform you, the admin, there was some type of error that prevented the expected page from coming up properly.
When this happens, there are two changes I make in the application’s web.config file, which have always helped uncover the true problem.
To show the call stack:
Change
<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="false"
DirectFileDependencies="10" TotalFileDependencies="50"
AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
to
<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="true"
DirectFileDependencies="10" TotalFileDependencies="50"
AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
To turn custom errors off, so the error and the call stack can be shown:
Change
<customErrors mode="On" />
to
<customErrors mode="Off" />
I’ve seen others mentioning the need to change AllowPageLevelTrace="false" toAllowPageLevelTrace="true", however, I have not had to do this with SharePoint thus far.
One you’ve saved your web.config, the appdomain will be torn down and reloaded on the next incoming request (this happens automatically upon any change to the web.config, by design) and you should be ready to find out your true error
SharePoint Search Errors-Event ID-3083
Today when I tried to install the .NET Framework 3.5 security updates, I got the following errors in the event log:
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Office Server Search
Event Category: Gatherer
Event ID: 2436
Date: 8/2/2010
Time: 1:59:12 AM
User: N/A
Computer: MOSSSERVER
Description:
The start address http://MOSSSERVER cannot be crawled.
Context: Application 'SharedServices1', Catalog 'Portal_Content'
Details:
Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. (0x80041205)
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
When you start to analyse these errors you will find a Knowledge base article on the Microsoft homepageKB887993. Within this article they describe authentication issues to access web pages.
Use the second method to apply following registry key
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa]
“DisableLoopbackCheck”=dword:00000001
When you applied above registry value you get a second error within your event log:
Event ID-10036-Gatherer-Office Server Search
I have been noticing the below error in my application log. We have installed the Foxit pdf ifilter. May be the issue is related to the pdf filetype added to SharePoint Server.
Event ID-10036 -Gatherer
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Office Server Search
Event Category: Gatherer
Event ID: 10036
Date: 7/19/2010
Time: 10:05:13 PM
User: N/A,
Computer: MOSSSERVER
Description: A database error occurred.
Source: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server
Code: 8134 occurred 1 time(s)
Description: Divide by zero error encountered.