When Software Attacks!

Avviso: A Content Publishing Framework for SharePoint 2010

words and pictures logo Last week was really exciting for me and my colleagues here at Black Marble as the work we’ve been doing with a partner came to fruition. Words and Pictures are a communications agency based not far from us, and we’ve been working together on a great product that builds upon SharePoint 2010 to greatly improve content publishing. I’ll come to the product in a little while, but I’d like to talk about how we created it first, as it’s a great example of how working together within the Microsoft space can help companies build upon their strengths and overcome their weaknesses.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Fixing SharePoint 2007 IIS WAMREG DCOM 10016 activation errors on Server 2008 R2

Anybody who works will SharePoint will grumble if you mention DCOM activation permissions. No matter how hard we try, how many patches we install (or how hard we try to ignore it), granting activation and launch permissions to the SharePoint service accounts is like plugging a dike with water-soluble filler. On Server 2008 R2 our job is made that much harder by the fact that, by default, even administrators can’t edit the security settings for the IIS WAMREG service (GUID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}, for when you see it in your application event log).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 8, 2010

Reassigning the correct SSL certificate to SharePoint 2010 Web Services IIS Site

Prologue This post is about assigning an SSL certificate to an IIS 7.5-hosted website which is not located in the Personal Certificate store. The steps shown are not SharePoint-specific, however. Hopefully this post will save you the large amount of time I spent hunting down the information on how to do this. The usual background I’ve been installing and configuring a SharePoint 2010 system that we can use here at Black Marble for our demo sessions.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, January 7, 2010

SharePoint Search Gatherer Error 10032

We encountered a problem recently with a two server farm. One server was configured as index and query server. Both servers were delivering pages to users. If a user executed a search on the server which did not run the search services, the Search page returned an error, and we saw the following in the application log and SharePoint logs: Event Type: Error Event Source: Office Server Search Event Category: Gatherer Event ID: 10032 Description: Could not create a database session.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, September 25, 2009

Kerberos for SharePoint on Server 2008 with IIS 7

UPDATE: Spence posted a great comment pointing out some issues with this post. Richard then restored our Community Server DB to a point in time before the post, so it’s been wiped. Post again, Spence, please, as I didn’t get chance to copy the text of the comment, I’m afraid. I’ve not been doing so well with blog posts lately. I have more than one currently in process but unposted, and I just can’t seem to get the time to finish them – so apologies, CSW, for not getting the article I promised up yet, but I am working on it.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, July 6, 2009

Configuring IIS Bindings to include host headers with https on Windows Server 2008 (for SharePoint)

NOTE: We use a wildcard SSL certificate which makes our life much easier when dealing with multiple hostnames. I have not tested this approach with multiple SSL certificates for specific sites. We’ve been reconfiguring our SharePoint 2007 farm over the past couple of days and it’s now hosted on Windows Server 2008 and using NLB (network load balancing). The load balancer has been configured with a single public IP address and all our previous DNS CNAME registrations have been replaced with hostname A registrations pointing at the address.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Incoming Email with SharePoint on Windows Server 2008

I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while, simply because it’s not quite as straightforward as with Server 2005. To configure incoming email on SharePoint when running on Server 2008 you’ll need to run through the following steps: Install the SMTP feature Open Server Manager. Click on Features in the left hand column then click add features in the right hand pane. Tick the SMTP Server check box and click install.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

SharePoint Service Pack 2 Pains

I finally bit the bullet and decided to upgrade our SharePoint farm yesterday. I’d been holding off for a while because of time constraints and because of a known issue with Project Server, also part of our farm. I took careful steps to increment the farm from the SP1+Infrastructure update all the way through each CU up until the service pack. That all worked fine. It was when I tried SP2 I hit problems.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

SharePoint 2007: Following Adobe Instructions Can Cause Problems

Having just spent a long time examining the state of a new farm we’ve been working on for demonstrations, I would like to issue a warning… The Problem: None of the ‘New…’ menu items in our document libraries would work – we were seeing the error message: ‘Edit Document’ requires a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater. The Solution: Correcting an error in the docicon.xml file which lives in c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 6, 2009

Workflow and SQL Error: Part 3

As you may remember from my earlier post and subsequent follow-up, we have been seeing an issue related to workflows and the Workflow History list in SharePoint 2007. As I’ve already mentioned, the case is with Microsoft and I also said that I would post updates as new information arrived. Today, more detail has emerged and, as promised, I am sharing. Whilst replicating the fault today we were having trouble - one of us had a SharePoint install that failed every time and the other had one which would not fail at all.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, August 28, 2008