When Software Attacks!

SharePoint Website Schematic

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. After some of my colleagues pestered me to draw it again, I decided to create an electronic version, and since everybody seems to find it so useful I thought I’d post it here as well.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

Unable to access My Tasks in Project Web Access

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. A little jiggery-pokery with callstack and custom errors later, we saw that the error referenced a GUID for a task. I then searched the Project Server Publishing DB for the task GUID and subsequently located the project to which it belonged.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint: Update

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. However, for anybody considering FBA in their deployment, I would not let this issue stop you. There are two reasons I say that: Normally with FBA you would extend the web application in question, having both FBA and Windows authentication available on the same content via different URLs.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Workflow and SQL Error: Update

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. It turns out that the stuff I said about systemupdate was wrong… up to a point. There is a bug with systemupdate and triggering events, but it’s not the one we thought it was!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, July 14, 2008

Problems with Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint 2007

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! I’ve been meaning to post this for a while because I’m sure it may help somebody. As usual, it’s been pushed back and back until now I finally have some time. I also have another, workflow-related post on another problem which will follow shortly.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

Workflow History and SQL Error

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 Problem Background Trying to explain the exact nature of our configuration in this case would break many people’s heads. This, therefore, is a bit of a simplification. We have a custom webpart which allows users to log an enquiry.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

A great article on handy SharePoint controls

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, March 17, 2008

EMEA Project Conference - Madrid

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 Server is something we’re very interested in using ourselves, and it’s integration with SharePoint (MOSS/WSS) makes it an attractive solution to anybody who has already deployed MOSS for their corporate intranet, as we have.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, December 3, 2007

Project Partner Day

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, December 3, 2007

SharePoint problems with access rights

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. The problem I’ll post later about our approach to SharePoint installations, but I’ll summarise thus: We create multiple user accounts to the SharePoint services - a db access account, an installation account etc etc.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 18, 2007