My Sharepoint Musings

So i have been slacking lately on updating this blog and well, i decided to resolve that now! So today i had an error with an application template on my micrsoft sharepoint moss 2007 server. This came up when i tried to resolve an issue in the bug tracking site template provided by microsoft. Every time i clicked on the yellow button, i got the following error: The resource object with key 'ResolveBugPageTitle' was not found." After some looking around the community, i found this resolution worked perfectly for me: Just type stsadm -o copyappbincontent You do not even need to retract and rebuild sites effected by the problem, after typing the copy command everything starts to work again! Hope this helps other sharepointers!

Been waiting on it all day, service pack 2 download for sharepoint office servers: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970358/ Direct download page link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082&displaylang=en I have a test farm set up for this already, it's a mirror of my current farm. Lets see what it breaks! Found the WSS 3.0 Links now as well: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953338 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=79BADA82-C13F-44C1-BDC1-D0447337051B&displaylang=en *update* Project Server: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953334 List of all 2007 Service Pack 2 updates: http://support.microsoft.com/smarterror/default.aspx?spid=global&query=kb%20968170

Why sharepoint, why. Ok so it turns out that the navigation inside of sharepoint, which uses ASP:Menu to generate it's code, makes a ton of tables and is generally a mess to deal with. But it is nice to try to keep things as much out of the box as possible so i left it alone and used the menu. Untill i tried to add divs to the page. The sharepoint menu, for the life of me, i could not force to go above my divs on my webpages. I encased it in a div, set it to 5, 9999, 255, 13 nothing! Changed the css code so it was all over 10, still nothing. Then google chrome came to the rescue, it told me that the div that holds the flyout menu's z-index was set to 1, inline. Inline?! i check the code, nope, i do not see that it is set, there isn't even any style="" tag at all. Then i realized, it was the javascript. I never did bother to fully trace it but in sharepoint's javascript, it changes the div's z-index to be 1. No matter what you do, it will be changed to 1, a...

Heart attack. Our old sharepoint server, i randomly visited a page that is in the proccess of being migrated over and i got this error on all of the webparts: Web Part Error: One of the properties of the Web Part has an incorrect format. Windows SharePoint Services cannot deserialize the Web Part. Check the format of the properties and try again. Quick google searches gave me a ms fix, that didn't work, then it hit me. I can actually just do a iisreset on it and be fine. So i did, reloaded the webpage, and everything worked fine again. Whew

So up till now at my new job, i have been by far more concerned with making sure my sharepoint farm has 100% uptime, is stable, and well working. Now that things are actually configured correctly (for the most part) and are stable i am looking at how much the sever is being used, and how fast it is. What i have found actually shocked me a little, and i have found a few bumps along the road. I know you thinking, "hey doesn't sharepoint have built in usage logs?" Yes, it does. Does it provide alot of information? No. Does it always work the way it is suppose to? Nooooooo. My most recent experience has been with our new landing page push out. Avg hit was in the multiple 1,000 loads perday for the first week. When i noticed this pattern i started to look into "hey, can i cache the page more" and yes, you can. So i turned on page caching for the whole site collection and then the following week, looked at my usage logs and saw something disturbing. My avg hits for th...

Because of various factors, i was forced to make my sharepoint site use basic authentication instead of NTLM, Kerbrose, or any other auth system. This had to do with our novel environment, and a number of user problems, mostly people forgetting to use our domain/username format to log into sharepoint. After reconfiguring everything to use the basic authentication method, i ran into a problem with sharepoint search and it's Default content access account. Namely, you can not tell sharepoint search to not try to log in using the default access account with out the domain infront of it's name. The solution i found on the web was to create a crawl rule for your site, (ex: http://intranet/*) and specify a different content access account for it, and then uncheck "Do not allow Basic Authentication". Problem with this is that in order for sharepoint to search the sites at all, it forced me to check (set) "Crawl SharePoint content as Http pages." That is a problem b...

Here's the situation: I deployed a demo version of a sharepoint webpart as a solution to my webserver before i deployed the full version. So i deploy it, added it to a webpage and tried it out. Afterwards i removed it from the webpage, and deactivated the solution, then retracted the solution. Now is where the trouble came in at: I went to go deploy the full version of it and i got a "dll is in use error". All attempts to remove this dll i got errors, and crashed the server a few times during the proccess as well. Fun stuff. The solution: The solution is remarkably simple that most people will look right over it: Go to the webpart galery for the site(s) you used the webpart on, and remove it from the gallery. After doing this (and making sure it wasn't on any of the other pages on the site) deploying the package went through with out a problem. Wish this was documented better (and the solution providor knew about it more).