Thursday, November 4, 2010

SharePoint 2010 not crawling some sites

I recently came across an issue where SharePoint was not indexing some Site Collections and the crawl logs were showing the following with reference to the problematic Site Collection:

"The SharePoint item being crawled returned an error when attempting to download the item"

It turns out the start page of the root site contained a search result webpart which was causing the crawler to abort the rest of the crawl.

This issue has since been fixed in a hotfix. Install the latest CU to solve the issue.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Central Management of Content Types with SharePoint 2010

A new feature of SharePoint 2010 allows you to publish your content types from one central hub to Site Collections that choose to subscribe to them.

The first thing you need to do is to to define the location of your hub. You will find this in the properties of the managed metadata service at the bottom:

image

Then in the properties of the managed metadata service connection you need to tell it to “consume content types from the content type gallery”:

image

The site collections that are then supposed to use the content type hub will need to activate the site collection feature “Content Type Syndication Hub”.

In order for content types to be published you need to change the setting under “Manage Publishing for this Content Type”

Friday, October 22, 2010

IE9 Jumplists with SharePoint

I installed the new Beta of Internet Explorer 9 and really liked the idea of pinning an IE tab to the taskbar. To test it I pinned the Facebook homepage to the taskbar and noticed when I right-clicked it, I also had four “Tasks” in the jumplist.

I thought it would be cool to have something similar in a SharePoint portal where I could add links to a Document Center or a Search Center. It turns out it’s actually quite simple to do - add a Content Editor webpart to the site, open the HTML editor and add this to it:

<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Documents;action-uri=http://intranet/docs/;icon-uri=/_layouts/images/favicon.ico"/>

In the above example, the name that shows up in the jumplist is “Documents” and it links to “http://intranet/docs”. I used the standard SharePoint “favourite” icon but you can link to any you like.

Pretty cool!

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Profile Pictures in your SharePoint MySite

After migrating MySites from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 it is possible that the profile pictures no longer display correctly. The picture is either cropped showing only the top corner (for example, in the Organisation Browser) or the aspect ratio is wrong, making it look very tall and narrow (for example, under the “In Common Between Us” section).

To solve this problem simply upload your picture again - go to your profile, click “Edit My Profile” and select “Choose Picture”. You can even use the same picture which should be stored under “Shared Pictures/Profile Pictures”.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Force replication of AD partitions after tombstone lifetime exceeded / emails issues

If a server has exceed the tombstone lifetime (180 days on WS2008 by default), it will cause issues when brought back on the network.
New users, groups… are not synchronized anymore on this server, and it can cause issues with emails sent to these new users.
If the email server can check for the user in the AD against the bad server, emails won’t be delivered.

Run the following on a good dc :

Repadmin /showrepl

Get the GUI of a good DC :

DC=mydomain,DC=intra
Default-First-Site-Name\GOOD-DC1 via RPC
DSA object GUID: de7429ee-7637-45cb-bbf0-43d17b17831b
Last attempt @ 2010-07-15 12:17:30 was successful.

Then remove objects on the bad DC that not longer exist in the current AD (good DC) :

repadmin /removelingeringobjects bad-dc.mydomain.intra de7429ee-7637-45cb-bbf0-43d17b17831b "dc=mydomain, dc=intra"


Then :

repadmin /replicate bad-dc.mydomain.intra good-dc.mydomain.intra DC=mydomain,DC=intra /force

repadmin /replicate bad-dc.mydomain.intra good-dc.mydomain.intra CN=configuration,DC=mydomain,DC=intra /force

repadmin /replicate bad-dc.mydomain.intra good-dc.mydomain.intra CN=schema,CN=configuration,DC=mydomain,DC=intra /force

This will synchronize the servers for these partitions and you won’t have issues anymore with the accounts of the new users.

But, if the bad DC is planned for a removal I recommend to use the dcpromo /forceremoval method and a metadata cleanup as explained here :
Remove_ad_from_dc
Delete_failed_DC

Monday, July 12, 2010

Forefront Security for Exchange : release blocked emails

Forefont Security for Exchange (before v. 2010) may use a lot of CPU/RAM and almost hangs your transport server.

If you stop Forefront, some emails (*.eml) can remain blocked in the following folders (incoming and outgoing emails) :

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Forefront Security\Exchange Server\Data\Archive\in
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Forefront Security\Exchange Server\Data\Archive\out

In order to release them, just move them to the following folder and let Exchange process them :

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Forefront Security\Exchange Server\Pickup

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Routing Sendmail SMTP messages to Exchange 2007 distribution lists

Relaying emails from an internal sendmail server to an Exchange 2007 transport server will work for AD users recipients, but not for AD distribution lists.
The error given by the Exchange server is :
550 5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.AuthRequired; authentication required

In order to allow emails coming from an internal sendmail server, you can disable the authentication on this distribution list :

Edit the distribution list property in the Exchange Management Console, mail flow settings tab, Message Delivery restriction and then uncheck "Require that all senders are authenticated.


Send text messages (SMS) from Outlook/Exchange 2010

A cool new feature of Exchange 2010 allows you to send text messages from your OWA or Outlook 2010 client.

You will also need a Windows Mobile phone connected to your Exchange 2010 mailbox. WM 6.1 should download an update from the Exchange Server to enable this functionality (I haven’t tested this) whereas WM 6.5 can do this out of the box.

It basically works by syncing the SMS to your phone and your phone then sends it out.

When setting up the partnership between your Windows Mobile phone and Exchange you should see the option to also sync your text messages. Once you select this you will need to restart Outlook 2010 after which it will show you an additional item under “New Items” called “Test Message (SMS)”.

Incoming texts will also land in your Exchange mailbox.

It is worth noting that I wasn’t able to add the SMS syncing after I had created the partnership with Exchange – I had to remove the partnership and recreate it.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Add Traffic Light indicators to a Yes/No column in a custom SharePoint list

I needed to create a list which would show a Yes/No column as traffic lights. Since SharePoint already has the necessary images from KPI lists I decided to use them.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an option OOTB so I decided to generate the URL to the KPI gifs using a calculated column. The name of the Yes/No column was “Approved” so I created the following calculated column:

="<div><img src='/_layouts/images/KPIDefault-"&IF([Approved]=TRUE,0,2)&".gif'/></div>"

For those of you using various regional versions of SharePoint, be careful with the commas after “TRUE”. You might need to change them to semi-colons.

 

The problem with the result from the above calculated column is that it is simply displayed as text. While trying to get it to display as an image, I stumbled across this site, and in particular a script which does exactly that. The script can be downloaded from here. I have added it below for the sake of simplicity.

This script needs to be added to the bottom of the page using the Content Editor WebPart (add it by using the source editor not the Rich Text editor).

 

<script type="text/javascript">
/*
Text to HTML Lite - version 2.1.1
Questions and comments: Christophe@PathToSharePoint.com
*/

function TextToHTML(NodeSet, HTMLregexp) {
var CellContent = "";
var i=0;
while (i < NodeSet.length){
try {
CellContent = NodeSet[i].innerText || NodeSet[i].textContent;
if (HTMLregexp.test(CellContent)) {NodeSet[i].innerHTML = CellContent;}
}
catch(err){}
i=i+1;
}
}

// Calendar views
var regexpA = new RegExp("\\s*<([a-zA-Z]*)(.|\\s)*/\\1?>\\s*");
TextToHTML(document.getElementsByTagName("a"),regexpA);

// List views
var regexpTD = new RegExp("^\\s*<([a-zA-Z]*)(.|\\s)*/\\1?>\\s*$");
TextToHTML(document.getElementsByTagName("TD"),regexpTD);

</script>

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Map a drive letter to SkyDrive

Office 2010 has a very cool option to save files to the Windows Live SkyDrive. By choosing “Save and Send” from the File menu you can connect to your Windows Live SkyDrive as shown in the screenshot below.

 

image

 

After you click “Save As” you will get a normal Windows Explorer Save As dialog with the address in the address bar such as this one:

image

 

Copy this address, open the Windows Explorer, click on Computer and choose “Map network drive”

image

 

Now paste in the address you copied from above and choose the drive you would like to map it to

image

 

Done! ;)