The art of simplicity

After upgrading to WSS 3.0 I noticed that I no longer could exclude managed paths for directories that you don't want 'managed' by SharePoint. So how do you do this then? The answer is simple, you don’t have to do anything. Just create your virtual directory in IIS and that's it. WSS will just ignore it. One extra thing to remember: don’t forget to perform an IISRESET, otherwise SharePoint isn't yet aware of the new mapping.

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…

Last week I had to create a new Team Project in Team Foundation Server. Easy job of course, until the project creation failed while adding a new Sharepoint site. In the error log, I found the following information: The transaction log for database 'WSS_Content' is full. To find out why space in the log cannot be reused, see the log_reuse_wait_desc column in sys.databases" Query text (if available): "{?=call proc_CreateWeb(?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?)} Aha, that’s a meaningful error message. I just had to shrink the transaction logs. I looked at one of my previous posts( Truncate your SQL Server Transaction Logs ) and tried to execute the following statement inside SQL Server Management Studio: 1: USE WSS_Content_Log 2: GO 3:   4: BACKUP LOG 'WSS_Content_Log' WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY 5:   6: DBCC SHRINKFILE( 'WSS_Content_Log' , 1) But strangely enough this command failed. Instead the following error message was returned: ...

If you are using Team Foundation Server together with it’s Sharepoint and Reporting Services integration, you probably have noticed that it’s using a special aspx page TfsRedirect.aspx to link to other resources. So what is this TfsRedirect and what does it do? When you  create a  TFS dashboard site in SharePoint, there are several items on this dashboard that point to other locations that are potentially on other servers: Team Web Access Process Guidance Reports shown on the dashboard pages TFS itself know where to find these assets. And the locations can change if, for example, the TFS administrator moves the reports to a different server. Rather than hard-code the locations of these assets into the dashboard, the TFS team created a web page called TfsRedirect.aspx that knows where these different assets are located, and will redirect to that page. This is what the URL looks like on the Agile dashboard that shows the Burndown graph: /sites/Default...

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...

After a server failure I discovered that Windows Sharepoint Services was creating gigabytes of log files where after our server died with a ‘no more disk space’ error. WSS V3 out of the box has extensive logging activity, Logs can be usually found in this directory  C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS If you are running WSS V3, you can disable logging activity by doing the following: Go to WSS V3 Central Administration -> Operations -> Logging and Reporting Click on Diagnostic Logging Customer Experience Improvement Program : select No, I don't wish to participate Error Reports : select Ignore errors and don't collect information. Trace log : clear the entire Path . Click OK Click on Usage Analysis Processing Uncheck Enable logging Click OK ...