Ablog

My blog has been moved to http://scothillier.spaces.live.com/

Recently, I received the following error when trying to perform a search using the Search Center in MOSS.

The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service

This occurred after I moved the SharePoint database from one server to another. It certainly seemed like it was a permissions error, so I investigated along that path and discovered that the Office Server Web Services application was running under the NETWORK SERVICE account.

I changed the application pool account for the OfficeServerApplicationPool   (more...)

I have been a fan of the SPSiteDataQuery object for a while because it makes data aggregation simple. Now we are being told that it has issues when more than 10 lists are involved in the aggregation. There are some workarounds, but this is definitely a planning point for web parts that are built to aggregate information from other sites.

Migrating documents into SharePoint has always been a challenge. Most documents in a mapped network drive have terrible metadata, lots of duplicates, and are poorly organized. For a while now, I have been a big believer in the Tzunami Deployer for SharePoint migration. The Deployer makes it easy to group large numbers of documents, apply metadata, assign security, and migrate them into SharePoint libraries. Well, the next version (2.2) of   (more...)

Several times now, I have experienced site provisioning errors that are related to the Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service. The symptoms can be:

- You create a new Web Application, but it does not get provisioned to every web front end, or
- You create a new Site and it seems to take forever to complete.

Both of these problems were cured for me by restarting the timer service on all servers.

The timer service has a known memory leak. Most of the information I have found says it’s   (more...)

Over the last couple of years, I was a big fan and evangelist for the Information Bridge Framework (IBF). IBF integrated Office 2003 applications with back-end line-of-business (LOB) systems. It combined Smart Tags for recognizing key terms in a document (things like customer name, customer number, order number, or anything else you could think of…) with web services for presenting the corresponding LOB data. The data could then be inserted into the document through the task pane. Extremely powerful stuff.

Much   (more...)

After creating a new SSP, I could not get the search service to crawl content. I found the following error in the event log:

Could not create a database session.
Context: Application ‘3bcf6f54-3ab8-4e39-908f-e6251f094a55′
Details:
The database connection string is not available. (0xc0041228

I tried several things, but ultimately resetting the index did the trick.

Recently while creating new web applications, I received the following error:

System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0×80070094): The path specified cannot be used at this time. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070094)
at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.CommitChanges()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPMetabaseObject.Provision()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPProvisioningAssistant.ProvisionApplicationPool(String applicationPoolId, Int32 identityType,   (more...)

When accessing the profile information in a Shared Service provider recently, I received the following error:

An error has occurred while accessing the SQL Server database or the Office SharePoint Server Search service. If this is the first time you have seen this message, try again later. If this problem persists, contact your administrator.

When I tried to access the Search properties of the SSP to see what was wrong, I received:

An indexer is not assigned to the Shared Services Provider.

I   (more...)

A lot of the clients I work with want to start out small with SharePoint 2007 and then grow into a farm. Because of this, several of the installations combine the application server and web front ends on a single box. later, when they want to move to a medium farm, we often have to move the Central Administration site to a new application server.

In order to do this, simply run the Configuration Wizard on the existing application server and remove the Central Administration site. Then run the Configuration Wizard   (more...)

Whenever you make a SharePoint customization project (web parts, features, workflows, etc) they should always be deployed using a solution (WSP) file. However, anyone who has ever made a solution file knows that they are painful to create. You must create an XML manifest file by hand to specify the file deployment locations. You must also make a DDF file by hand to specify how to pack the files into a solution. This process can be made a lot easier by utilizing the Visual   (more...)

Last week I finally took the time to create a new links list for SharePoint 2007 that allows opening links in new windows. The list provides columns that give you complete control over the rendering of the window - essentially anything you can specify through window.open(). You can download the solution file from my CodePlex project at www.codeplex.com/features.

The PeopleEditor is a control that you will use many times in SharePoint 2007 solutions. Unfortunately, the SDK documentation is somewhat lacking. This recently caused me some frustration as I was creating an association form for a custom WSS workflow. I needed to let the user select from the set of available SharePoint groups during the workflow association so that the selected group could be assigned a task in the workflow. After examining the SDK, it was pretty obvious that the SelectionSet property was the key to my problem;   (more...)

Recently, I have been working on a Disaster Recovery solution for a medium-sized organization. I looked at some products, but wasn’t happy with the features of some and the price of some others. So, I went to work in my lab to see if I could get SQL 2005 Database Mirroring to solve the problem.

The approach I took was to “split” the SharePoint farm across the production and DR environments. These included databases, application servers, and web front ends.

First, I did a complete install   (more...)

In my previous post, I noted that the spell check feature seems to fail when users are not members of the top-level site collection.

Well, this same issue appears to affect the delivery of alerts.

When users are members of sub sites with unique permissions, but have no membership in any group in the top-level site, their alerts do not always get delivered. We have seen some get delivered, but others not.

Everything was solved by adding the sub site members as at least “Visitors” to the   (more...)

Many people are starting to report sporadic incidents of the spell check feature failing in SharePoint with the message

“Spelling did not complete properly. If this problem persists, notify your system administrator.”

I saw this same problem recently in a project and was able to link it to membership in private sites (ones with unique permissions).

Users that were members of the unique-permission sites could not run spell check, while users who were members of the public site had no problem.

The   (more...)

Many assemblies we create for SharePoint solutions require a strong name and installation in the GAC. In this process, we often need to get the value of the PublicKeyToken for inclusion in the web.config file, feature files, or ACTIONS file. Of cource, you can use the Strong Name Tool to get this information with the syntax sn.exe -T assembly.dll. However, you usually have to open a command line window and navigate around to get to your assembly. Here’s a little trick to make the process easier in Visual Studio:

1.   (more...)

The GOTDOTNET site is closing down. Therefore, my SharePoint 2007 Features project has been migrated to CodePlex. To access the SharePoint features I have created, visit www.codeplex.com/features.

Recently, I was reviewing a workflow chapter for Ted Pattison’s new book Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Version 3 when I noticed that he had coded some ASPX workflow forms using a code-behind technique. This was the first time I had seen such a technique with SharePoint 2007, so I dug in and created my own feature based on this technique.   (more...)

A common need is to change the theme (and the alternate style sheet) of a site when it is created. In order to do this in SharePoint 2007, you must create a feature that makes the changes and then either “staple” the feature to a site or reference the feature within the site definition.

I have created a feature that you can use to make these changes. It can be found at http://codegallery.gotdotnet.com/features. Follow the directions on the ReadMe   (more...)