The art of simplicity

Before decommissioning a Sharepoint server, I needed a list of all users on the different team sites. Time for some Powershell magic! On the Technet site I found a script that promised to do exactly what I needed: This script enumerates SharePoint 2010 or 2013 permissions across the entire farm down to the site (SPWeb) level. It also recursively expands the membership of any AD group and lists the assignment role binding on the permission. The output is an XML format . So I copied the script over, logged in on the Sharepoint server and opened up a Powershell command prompt. However when I tried to execute the script it failed with the following error message: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], TargetInvocationExcept + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException So I opened up the script to find the root cause of the error and saw that it failed on the call to AllWebs : On...

After installing the Application Insights Monitoring Agent on one of our Application Servers, users started to complain that the Sharepoint environment running on the same machine became very slow. When looking inside the Event Log on the server, we found a lot of errors similar to the following: Faulting application name: w3wp.exe , version: 7.5.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7afa2 Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.18247, time stamp: 0x521eaf24 Exception code: 0xc0000374 Fault offset: 0x00000000000c4102 Faulting process id: 0x10e8 Faulting application start time: 0x01cf4838c2e39a9a Faulting application path: c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\w3wp.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll Report Id: 5fce3de2-b42c-11e3-9d78-005056924d03 The MSDN forums and the Connect site brought some answers to this issue and linked the issue to our recently installed Monitoring Agent. And indeed after removing the Monitoring Agent, th...

With the release of Visual Studio 2012 and the improved Sharepoint integration, building, packaging and deploying your Sharepoint solutions became a lot easier. Still if you want to get everything running on your build server, you’ve got some work to do. On your TFS 2012 Build server, the following components need to be installed: If Visual Studio 2012 Professional (or above) is installed, install the following component Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 If Visual Studio 2012 Professional (or above) is NOT installed, you will need to collect build dependencies from a machine with the following product installed: Visual Studio 2012 Professional (or above) Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint Server 2013 Run the following PowerShell command to make sure your PowerShell execution policy i...

Last week I deployed a sample application to my test IIS environment. But when I tried to browse to the site I got a 503 Service Unavailable Error . When I looked inside IIS, I noticed that the application pool had a problem starting up. The event log brings more inside into the issue: The Module DLL 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\isapi\spnativerequestmodule.dll' could not be loaded due to a configuration problem. The current configuration only supports loading images built for a x86 processor architecture. The data field contains the error number. To learn more about this issue, including how to troubleshooting this kind of processor architecture mismatch error, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=29349 . ‘Web Server Extensions’? This rings a bell, I have a Sharepoint 2013 installation on the same server. But why does IIS tries to load a Sharepoint DLL inside my own site? The website I deployed has to run as a 32bit pr...

While converting and merging some SharePoint sites, I created some PowerShell scripts to speed up the process. In case I’ll ever need them again, I post them here: Script 1: Mount a Content database using PowerShell Script 2: Generate a sub site using PowerShell Script 3: Generate a Document Library using PowerShell Script 4: Remove a site collection(without asking for confirmation) using PowerShell

When I tried to open a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 site, not much happened. Instead I got the following error message: “You may be trying to access this site from a secured browser on the server. Please enable scripts and reload this page.” To resolve this problem, enable the JavaScript feature in Internet Explorer. To do this, follow these steps: Open Internet Explorer, go to the SharePoint Server 2013 site, press Alt to reveal the Menu bar, click Tools , and then click Internet Options . On the Security tab, click Custom level . Scroll down to the Active scripting section, and then select Enable . More details at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2752584

After migrating our TFS SharePoint Portal to SharePoint 2013, our users started to complain that they couldn’t login. However when I took a look at the different site permissions, everything looked fine. All users were there as expected… Why can’t users login? This is caused by the new Claims based model in SharePoint 2013. In SharePoint 2010 you still had the choice between claims and the classic security model. in SharePoint 2013 this is no longer the case and therefore  you have to upgrade your users to their claims alternative. As long as you don’t do this, users will not be able to access your sites. To fix this, open the SharePoint PowerShell command line and execute the following script:

After upgrading a Sharepoint environment from Sharepoint 2010 to Sharepoint 2013, users started to panic. Why? Because some strange characters were added to their account names. To give you an example: “Lastname Firstname ( i:0#.w |domain\accountname)” Did something strange happened during the migration that changed all the accounts? No, this is actually a feature. What you see is the claim information about this user. How do you need to decode this claim information? i an identity claim # user logon name . of type string w windows account More information can be found here: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/How-Claims-encoding-works-in-SharePoint-2010.aspx

Configuring your MOSS environment to enable Team Foundation Server integration can be a daunting task . Microsoft tried to simplify this task by releasing the TFS 2010 MOSS Configuration Tool . Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 MOSS Configuration Tool You can use this tool to configure an existing installation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for use with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. The tool automates the configuration of the following features with certain default values, which are explained in the configuration instructions that are included with the tool. The tool will skip configuring a feature if it is already enabled and configured. The configuration tool is designed to configure relatively simple deployments of Office SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint Server 2010. The tool uses default settings to configure the features. You should not use this tool if any of the following is true: ...

When I tried to open the Sharepoint portal for a Team Foundation server 2010 Team project, I received the following 403 error:   I had all the necessary rights and was connected to our domain, so I didn’t understand why this message was shown. It took me some time to find out that someone had changed the IIS server settings and changed the use of HTTPS and SSL to Required . Therefore I got an error when I connected to the website over HTTP. A more meaningful error message would have saved me a lot of time…

When I tried to create a new Team Project on TFS 2010, the creation failed when I arrived at the Sharepoint part with the following error: Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.WssSiteCreator.HandleSiteCreation(WssCreationContextWrapper contextWrapper, XmlNode taskNode)    at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.WssSiteCreator.Execute(ProjectCreationContext context, XmlNode taskXml) Inner Exception Details: Exception Message: TF249033: The site template is not available for the locale identifier (LCID). The site template name is: VSTS_CMMI_2 . The LCID is: 1033. (type SoapException)SoapException Details: <detail exceptionType="TeamFoundationServerException" /> Exception Stack Trace: --- end Exception entry --- The reason was caused by a missing Sharepoint template with the name VSTS_CMMI_2 which wasn’t installed automatically after upgrading our TFS server to the 2010 version. To solve the issue, execute the followi...

Getting MOSS configured properly to work with TFS 2010 is not easy.  Even after a few times, I still forget some of the steps you need to take(and there are a lot!). To simplify this task, Microsoft built a tool that can be used to configure MOSS for use with TFS.  It doesn’t work in all situations, but it’s a really good starting point. The tool configures the following features in Office SharePoint Server 2007: Shared Service Provider (SSP) Excel Services Single Sign-on Service The tool configures the following features in SharePoint Server 2010: Excel Services Secure Store Service You’ll find an installer for the tool here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/db469790-5e3e-42f3-906e-411a73795a1b

If you need to increase the maximum file upload size on your SharePoint site the first place you'll probably check is Central Administration. There's a Maximum Upload Size setting right there. The problem is that it doesn't seem to do anything. You still get an error whenever any file over 28MB's is uploaded even if you changed this setting in the web app settings all the way up to 2GB's.  The security built into Windows Server 2008 is at fault here.  When you make the changes in the web app settings they do not get transferred to the web.config file automatically.  So you must manually update the web.config file for all web apps needing this change and update the web.config file in the 12 hive as well. You have to increase the file size limit as well as the time out settings to accommodate for the larger file sizes. To solve the time out issue open up the web.config and change the executionTimeout of the httpRuntime. Do this for all web apps that need the larger fi...

So you have installed Team Foundation Server 2010, but now you want to integrate with your existing Sharepoint 2010 infrastructure. You can start reading the correct section in the TFS Installation guide , or if you want to make your life a little bit easier, just read this great post by Martin Hinshelwood where he helps you with a lot of screenshots and short steps to get everything configured.

With little knowledge of Sharepoint I always have to look up the exact STSADM command I need to get the job done. So here are the required steps to install a Sharepoint solution(.wsp) on a server: Copy the template you want to install to the server. Open a command prompt in Administrator mode(!). At the command prompt, type stsadm -o addsolution -filename <file_path>\<template_name>.wsp , where <file_path> is the location you extracted the template files to and <template_name>.wsp is the .wsp file for your template, and then press ENTER. Type stsadm -o deploysolution -name <template_name>.wsp -allowgacdeployment , and then press ENTER. To check the deployment status, open the Central Administration site for the server. Click the Operations tab, and then, in the Global Configuration section, click Solution management , and then check the status of your solutions. After all the solutions are marked Globally Deployed , from the comma...