SharePoint on When Software Attacks!

SharePoint 2013: Creating Managed Metadata Columns that allow Fill-In Choices

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a relatively quick post. There’s a fair bunch of stuff written about creating columns in SharePoint 2013 that use Managed Metadata termsets. However, some of it is a pain to find and then some. I have had to deal with two frustrating issues lately, both of which boil down to poor sharepoint documentation.

Safely modify SharePoint 2013 Web.Config files using PowerShell

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things we learn early in our SharePoint careers was not to manually edit the web.config files of a web application. SharePoint involves multiple servers and has its own mechanisms for managing web.config updates.

Declaratively create Composed Looks in SharePoint 2013 with elements.xml

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is really a follow-up to my earlier post about tips with SharePoint publishing customisations. Composed looks have been a part of a couple of projects recently. In the first, a solution for on-premise, we used code in a feature receiver to add a number of items to the Composed Looks list. In the second, for Office 365, a bit of research offered an alternative approach with no code.

Speaking at NEBytes on February 19th

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to have been asked to speak at NEBytes again – a great user group that meets in Newcastle. I’ll be speaking about customising SharePoint 2013 using master pages, themes and search templates, along the same lines as my recent blog post.

Six tips when deploying SharePoint 2013 masterpages, page layouts and display templates

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been hat-swapping again since just before christmas (which explains the lack of Azure IaaS posts I’m afraid). I’ve been working on a large SharePoint 2013 project, most lately on customising a number of elements around publishing. Getting those custom elements into SharePoint from my solution raised a number of little snags, most of which were solved by the great internet hive mind. It took me a long time to find some of those fixes, however, so I thought I’d collect them here and reference the original posts where appropriate.

User profile service failures caused by Distributed Cache on SharePoint 2013

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is a relatively quick post, largely because I was not able to record the details of the error messages we saw in the farm before we fixed them.

On a recent engagement we were investigating problems with a SharePoint 2013 farm that had been installed for our customer by a third party. There were a number of issues that we worked through but I wanted to record this one for the community.

Displaying a SharePoint 2010 library on a page in a different site within the same site collection

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

One of our customers contacted us the other day with a problem. They wanted to put a view of a document library that was located in the top level site of a site collection onto the landing pages of all the second level sites in that collection. The customer had consulted the internet hive mind and found a blog post with instructions which had been diligently followed and yet whenever a user clicked ‘New’ on the ribbon bar an error occurred.

Fundaments of planning your beautiful SharePoint web site

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This article is all about preparation. It’s about the thinking and planning you need to do if you’re going to successfully build your wonderful, unique and striking website on the SharePoint platform.

Making SharePoint 2010 search pages work with a proper master page

Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you talk to those who know me about my pet hates in SharePoint, the search pages will come up every time. It’s not that I hate search itself – that’s great, but the minimal.master is just plain annoying. It makes the search centre a black hole into which you can fall but not navigate out of – there’s no navigation and the portal site connection doesn’t work.

Content type replication not working on imported or migrated site collections

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I posted about a hidden feature that was needed if you want to use Managed Metadata columns in your SharePoint 2010 sites. We were doing some 2007-2010 migration work for a client recently that also involved exporting and importing sites and site collections to rework the content structure. Once we’d got the new structure sorted we discovered that content type replication was not occurring on the site collections we had imported. Some comparison of working and non-working SPSite properties with PowerShell later, we discovered that the culprit was the same hidden TaxonomyFieldAdded (ID 73ef14b1-13a9-416b-a9b5-ececa2b0604c) feature as I noted earlier. See my earlier post for instructions on enabling the feature.

Content Types programmatically added to SharePoint libraries not appearing on New menu

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This one caused some consternation, I can tell you. As usual, the solution could be found on the great wide web, but it took some digging, so as usual I am repeating it here.

Avviso Page Templates and Editing Video

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve just put a video of the page templates and editing process up on the AvvisoSharePoint YouTube channel. Our plan is to add more videos over time to show the different things Avviso can do. Enjoy!

Demonstrating Avviso at NEBytes on 23rd February 2011

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

avvisohead

I am really chuffed to have been invited back to NEBytes for a follow-up to my last session on content publishing with SharePoint 2010. This time I’ll be demonstrating Avviso and talking about the thought processes that lead to its development, the problems we are trying to solve and where we’d like to go next.

Avviso: A Content Publishing Framework for SharePoint 2010

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Powershell to find missing features in SharePoint 2010

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

When migrating from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, no matter how hard you try there’s always the chance the the content database upgrade process will throw out errors about features being referenced that are not present in the farm. We have used Stefan Goßner’s WssAnalyzeFeatures and WSSRemoveFeatureFromSite (see his original article) to track down the references and exterminate them. It’s not the fastest thing on two legs though, and I have a fondness for having my SharePoint 2010 tooling in PowerShell because of the flexibility it gives me.

Enabling the TaxonomyFieldAdded feature to fix ManagedMetadata Column errors

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We’re working on a solution at the moment that uses a custom site definition. For various reasons we stated with the Blank Site definition and worked from there. Our customisations include content types using custom columns that link to managed metadata term sets. We create all those through features – great! The tricky bit came when after deployment our managed metadata columns were greyed out. Examining the column we say an error telling us that the feature supporting the functionality was not activated.

Powershell script to rename files for use as SharePoint 2010 User Profile thumbnails

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

User profile photos have changed in SharePoint 2010 in that they are now stored in a single image library in the MySite Host root site collection. They have also changed in that when you change the profile photo, SharePoint takes the file and creates three new images at specific sizes, then discards the file you gave it. These files have specific names to link them to the user account and come in small, medium and large flavours.

Unable to remote control Hyper-V VM after installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

True to form, you only discover something isn’t working when you’re in a desperate hurry. We use lots of Hyper-V VMs here at Black Marble and they are mostly running on our four node cluster. I use Failover Cluster Manager and this morning I couldn’t connect remotely to any of the Hyper-V VMs. I kept getting an error:

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

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Prologue
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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.

SharePoint Search Gatherer Error 10032

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Kerberos for SharePoint on Server 2008 with IIS 7

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Incoming Email with SharePoint on Windows Server 2008

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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:

SharePoint Service Pack 2 Pains

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

SharePoint 2007: Following Adobe Instructions Can Cause Problems

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Workflow and SQL Error: Part 3

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

SharePoint Website Schematic

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I find myself drawing the same diagram over and over again in meetings to explain how SharePoint sites relate to IIS web sites, how managed paths and alternate access mappings fit and why you need to extend the SharePoint web application if you want more than one authentication provider.

Unable to access My Tasks in Project Web Access

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Sometime ago we noticed an issue with My Tasks in Project Server. Certain users were unable to access My Tasks at all - they simply got a SharePoint error page.

Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint: Update

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My apologies to Craig, who posted a comment to my earlier post about our FBA problems and I didn’t notice until today.

To update you all on the situation, the fault is still with Microsoft and I have not yet received a hotfix.

Workflow and SQL Error: Update

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I posted last week about a couple of issues we were experiencing with SharePoint. I made some traction on the Workflow History issue at the end of last week and the revelation was pretty far-reaching, so I’m posting again.

Problems with Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint 2007

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

If you are using Forms Based Authentication and try to access Site Policies you may well find that you get an Access Denied response. If you do, this post will help you!

Workflow History and SQL Error

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When trying to view an item in a list which has workflows run against it, you get an error:

Some part of your SQL statement is nested too deeply. Rewrite the query or break it up into smaller queries

A great article on handy SharePoint controls

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I always mean to gather various bits of knowledge into one place, but just like tidying my filing at home, I never quite get around to it. Fortunately for me, Chris O’Brien is a bit more organised and in my ever expanding blogroll today I saw a great article about really useful SharePoint controls to use in custom pages for that handy bit of functionality.

EMEA Project Conference - Madrid

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, after all the excitement that Richard and Robert had in Seattle and Barcelona, I find myself in the Auditorium Hotel, Madrid for the EMEA Project Conference.

According to the multilingual sales blurb in my room, the hotel is the largest in Europe, and I must say it’s very nice. We flew in yesterday and today is an MS Partner-only day before the conference itself kicks off tomorrow.

Project Partner Day

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it’s the end of day zero, the partner-only day here at the Madrid Project Conference. It’s been an interesting day. I’m not sure what I am allowed to say, but service pack 1 for Office 2007, which covers the desktop products, sharepoint, project server et al is very close to being available now. That was an interesting announcement, as we are looking at installing Project Server in Black Marble. I’d like to wait for SP1 - it makes sense - but because SharePoint will be patched at the same time I need to do some testing of our customisations first.

SharePoint problems with access rights

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I spent a while knocking my head against a problem with a SharePoint server farm that’s worth posting about. It’s also worth a big hats-off to our Technical Support Coordinator at Microsoft Partner Support who dredged up the article that finally pointed us in the right direction.

SharePoint 2007 on x64 - don't try to run 32-bit web apps!

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We’re slowly migrating services onto our new servers here at Black Marble. This morning we had one of those moments where significant amounts of wall kicking and teeth gnashing ensue.

SharePoint on When Software Attacks!

SharePoint 2013: Creating Managed Metadata Columns that allow Fill-In Choices

Safely modify SharePoint 2013 Web.Config files using PowerShell

Declaratively create Composed Looks in SharePoint 2013 with elements.xml

Speaking at NEBytes on February 19th

Six tips when deploying SharePoint 2013 masterpages, page layouts and display templates

User profile service failures caused by Distributed Cache on SharePoint 2013

Displaying a SharePoint 2010 library on a page in a different site within the same site collection

Fundaments of planning your beautiful SharePoint web site

Making SharePoint 2010 search pages work with a proper master page

Content type replication not working on imported or migrated site collections

Content Types programmatically added to SharePoint libraries not appearing on New menu

Avviso Page Templates and Editing Video

Demonstrating Avviso at NEBytes on 23rd February 2011

Avviso: A Content Publishing Framework for SharePoint 2010

Powershell to find missing features in SharePoint 2010

Enabling the TaxonomyFieldAdded feature to fix ManagedMetadata Column errors

Powershell script to rename files for use as SharePoint 2010 User Profile thumbnails

Unable to remote control Hyper-V VM after installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

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

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

Prologue #

SharePoint Search Gatherer Error 10032

Kerberos for SharePoint on Server 2008 with IIS 7

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

Incoming Email with SharePoint on Windows Server 2008

SharePoint Service Pack 2 Pains

SharePoint 2007: Following Adobe Instructions Can Cause Problems

Workflow and SQL Error: Part 3

SharePoint Website Schematic

Unable to access My Tasks in Project Web Access

Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint: Update

Workflow and SQL Error: Update

Problems with Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint 2007

Workflow History and SQL Error

A great article on handy SharePoint controls

EMEA Project Conference - Madrid

Project Partner Day

SharePoint problems with access rights

SharePoint 2007 on x64 - don't try to run 32-bit web apps!

Prologue
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