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24/10/2011

After upgrading to SharePoint 2010 Excel Services errors with "Workbook Cannot be Opened"

This issue seems to be quite prevalent for anyone who has upgraded their SharePoint 2007 content databases to SharePoint 2010.

After a successful upgrade, when you browse to a site using Excel Services, you may be greeted by an error informing you the "Workbook Cannot be Opened".

This is due to the Service Application account used by Excel Services not having access to the relevant content database of the site in question.

To fix this, simply grant the Service Application account privileges using a small bit of PowerShell:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication http://WebAppName

$webApp.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity("DOMAIN\ServiceApplicationAccount")

And that should be it.

Posted at 11:21 by cjackson | Category: SharePoint 2010 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

04/10/2011

Configuring SharePoint 2010 Outgoing Email using a non-default SMTP Port

I had an unusual scenario on a recent SharePoint 2010 implementation project I was working on.

The company in question were using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for their email, but their mail servers received SMTP email on port 2525, as opposed to the standard port 25.

This, as you can imagine, caused me a slight headache when configuring outgoing email on SharePoint (for Alerts, Workflow Emails, Tasks emails, etc…), as you cannot specify the port number in the Outbound SMTP server field in Central Admin.

So, how to get around this? As it turns out, it's rather easy. Essentially what we need to do is set the Outbound SMTP Server to one of our SharePoint Application Servers, and then setup an SMTP server on this server to relay the mail to the Exchange server using port 2525. Below are the steps to achieving this.

Log onto the Application Server of your choice as an Administrator, and install the SMTP Feature on the server from Server Manager, and then open the IIS Management Console (6.0).
In the IIS Manager, expand the server name and right click the 'SMTP Virtual Server' and select Properties.
Go to the 'Access' tab, and select 'Relay'
On the 'Relay Restrictions' screen 'Add' the IPs of the SharePoint servers as email may originate from any server in the farm. Click OK.
Go to the 'Delivery' tab and click 'Outbound Connections'.
In the Outbound Connections window change the TCP Port value to 2525. Click OK.
Click the 'Advanced' button and set the following as shown (obviously your environment will be different). The key things to note here is the 'Masquerade domain' should be the same as the primary SMTP address specified on the exchange server for email domains (although it doesn't have to be), and the 'Smart host' should be the address by which you connect to the mail server internally (this is the same address as you'd use in Outlook when connecting to your mail profile if you're not sure).
Click OK all the way back to the IIS Manager Console, and you can now close this window.
A final thing you might want to check is to ensure that the SharePoint Servers are trusted for relay on your Exchange server; otherwise mail won't be delivered regardless of the setup above. This can be done by going into the Exchange Management Console which I'm not going to cover in this article (but maybe later).

And that's it, one SharePoint farm sending emails to itself, and relaying them onto the Exchange server via port 2525 – told you it was easy!

Posted at 12:36 by Chris Jackson | Category: SharePoint 2010 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

16/12/2010

SharePoint Governance – Individuals, Roles, and Responsibilities

Being interested in SharePoint Governance, I'm always looking for interesting articles and comments on the web about what others are doing, and I came across these excellent articles by Wael A. Kabli on the MSDN blog site.

He has written a couple of very insightful and thought-provoking articles about SharePoint Governance, which I have linked to below.

Needless to say I don't think this will be a perfect fit for everyone, as environment size, and resourcing will be factors in filling all these roles, but it is a good place to start in organising your SharePoint team structure.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wael/archive/2010/12/15/sharepoint-governance-people-teams-roles-and-responsibilities.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wael/archive/2010/12/16/sharepoint-governance-individual-roles-and-responsibilities.aspx

Nice one Wael, keep up the good work!

Posted at 12:04 by Chris Jackson | Category: SharePoint 2007 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

26/09/2010

Useful Governance Resources

Governance of SharePoint is a pretty big topic as SharePoint's freedom for customisation, and the features users can leverage right from the front-end are pretty vast and varied in nature. This is where the danger arises – "…with great power, comes great responsibility…" (or so Spider-man says).

Therefore to try and begin writing a governance document for our environment, I went in search of some resources online (from Microsoft and others), to try and get an idea of the framework involved in creating this plan. I would like to share some of these resources with you, and explain why I think they are useful, just in case someone wants to refer back to these in the future.

The first place to start our quest for knowledge has to be TechNet. The amount of information held within this library is pretty impressive, and even though many people knock Microsoft products, you cannot fault their ability to document their products and identify best practices. I will say they are not always right, and shouldn't be used as a 'be all and end all', but they do provide you with a great starting point. Below are some of the links I found useful.

SharePoint Technet Home – Excellent range for documentation ranging from product evaluation right through to design and build, security, and many additional white papers based on real world experience (most of which are written by SharePoint MVPs!!!).

Codeplex Governance Mini-site – Codeplex have an entire site devoted to governance, including many nice tools for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. They also have links to some free governance and manageability tools by other third-party vendors, as well as useful links to sites and blogs dedicated to architecture and governance.

Joel Oleson's Blog – If you have worked in SharePoint for more than five minutes, certainly from an architecture and planning perspective, you will have heard of Joel! His blog site can be found on the MSDN Blog site at http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/ however he also has a SharePoint site which can be accessed via the link above. His blog is really comprehensive, covering pretty much every area of SharePoint and a bit besides – check it out!!!

SharePointGovernance.org – This nice clean site has some good documentation and information to resource when writing your own governance plans, and as it says, where you're free to share the good, bad, and ugly of SharePoint!!!

WSS Demo – This site is a great general resources covering all the major technology and architecture areas of SharePoint, and has some great links to other content on the web.

MS SharePoint Team Blog – the Microsoft SharePoint team blog can always be counted on to deliver insightful, quality content, and covers every topic related to SharePoint, and is an excellent resource for governance material.

I think as a starting point that will do for now, and I'm sure as I delve deeper into this subject, I will be back to provide some updates, but for now I want to leave you with this link to a post by Toby Ward from Jan 2009, which I think adequately explains why governance is so important, and what can go wrong if it is ignored!!!

Posted at 11:10 by Chris Jackson | Category: SharePoint 2007 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Splinter Cell: Conviction Blank Screen on Loading

Had an annoying issue with Splinter Cell: Conviction on the PC in that when I started the game I could hear the audio playing, but my monitor came up with an 'Out of Range' message as though the resolution was set too high, or the resolution was set to an obscure setting which my monitor didn't support.

After trawling through a few posts I can safely say the best way to get this working is as follows:

Go to ATI or Nvidia web site and download the lastest drivers (in my case I have an ATI HD5770 so I wouold advise you to use driver version 10.5 if you have similar hardware as this has some performance fixes for Conviction anyway)
Ensure you have the February 2010 DirectX update for your OS, as again this has numerous fixes and performance benefits for Conviction
If the above fails and you are still having problems (and you have ATI graphics hardware) go into Catalyst Control Center > Graphics > 3D and ensure AA, and AF are using application setting
Finally if you are still having problems, go into the Splinter Cell: Conviction install directory and edit the ConvictionUserPC.ini file (if you are using Vista or Windows 7 you may have to open Program Data > Ubisoft > ConvictionUserPC.ini instead of the Program Files version). In this file you should have some options listed FullScreenViewPortX/Y – this is where you specify te resolution of your monitor (the defaults in my file where set to 1920 and 1080 – way above what my monitor would support). In my case i set mine to:

FullScreenViewPortX=1440

FullScreenViewPortY=900

After making the above changes my copy of Splinter Cell: Conviction works perfectly.

Posted at 11:09 by Chris Jackson | Category: Gaming | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Profile Details and Pictures Not Appearing in Site Membership Lists?

Quick little post which someone may find useful regarding quick profiles in sites.

In SharePoint you essentially have two versions of User Profiles, the User Profile feature as part of the My Site personalisation features, and the Quick Profile which is a snapshot of information used within Site Membership lists.

If, like me, when you create a site collection you create it in a new content database so you have one database for every site collection, you most probably set the database to Stopped (Offline) once you have created the site collection so no one accidently creates another site collection in the same DB.

This does however cause a problem, as for some reason the Quick Profile does NOT get updated in the sites within Stopped (Offline) content databases.

Basically the only way around this as far as I can see, is to leave the database as Started (Ready) and set the Site Warning Level to 0 and the Maximum Number of Site aloud in the database to 1.

This should stop site collections from being created in the wrong database, but still allow the Quick Profile to update within those sites.

'nough said

Posted at 11:06 by Chris Jackson | Category: SharePoint 2007 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

New SharePoint Web Applications Display 3 Authentication Prompts and White Screen on Server 2008 R2

Came across this really frustrating problem when using SharePoint on a 64bit Windows Server 2008 R2 machine.

Essentially when you create a new web application on a machine with Windows Server 2008 (doesn't have to be 64bit, but it does seem to be Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 related), you may come across a problem where by everything is created normally without errors, including the accompanying content database and site collection, but when you try and access this from the local machine, you are prompted for credentials three times only to be presented with a white screen and no error.

The usual fixes for this, such as ensuring the host header or alternate access mapping were present in the hosts file, lmhosts.sam, and in the DNS of your network (in my case DNS is running on the same box, which is by no means ideal but fine in my situation), did not work.

After some googling around I eventually found this little pearl of wisdom from Ishai Sagi at SharePoint-Tips.com which referenced a KB from Microsoft.

http://www.sharepoint-tips.com/2009/04/access-denied-in-win2008-with-custom.html

As Ishai explains the article does refer to Windows XP and Server 2003, but don't be put off – it worked for me!!!

I won't spoil the surprise as to why this problem occurs, but needless to say it's a 'security feature' which is supposed to help against reflection attacks on your server.

'nough said...

Posted at 11:05 by Chris Jackson | Category: SharePoint 2007 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Install SQL Server 2005 Management Studio

Just a quick post on an annoying problem I found regarding the SQL Server 2005 install process.

I simply wanted to install the SQL Server Management Studio tools to connect to a database server – easy I thought, whack in the CD or mount the ISO file in Daemon tools, select the relevant components in the installer, and away we go… So it appears to install but you don't have the shortcuts in your start menu or program files folder…?

It turns out the installer directly from the CD or ISO file is geared up for the full server installation and not just the client components (this is the case even when you use CD2 which only contains the client tools).

The way around this is to explore the contents of the CD and run the SqlRun_Tools.msi within the Setup folder. This will then allow you to select the client tools you need and away you go - shortcuts and programs all installed.

Posted at 11:03 by Chris Jackson | Category: SQL | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

How to Calculate the Month & Year from a Date in a SharePoint List

I haven't blogged in a while and I thought this subject would be a good addition to my Blog and get me started again.

A common requirement for many users is to have a column in a list or library which shows the month and year for a given date field in SharePoint. This column can be used for reporting purposes or for simply grouping items in the list (especially useful for any financial figures such as quotes, purchase orders, etc...).

To achieve this we first have to navigate to the list in question and create a new column from the 'Settings' menu. From the column options we need to give it meaningful name (in this case 'Created Month and Year' then select the type of information in this column, which in this case will be 'Calculated'.

Next we need to add the formula to the 'Formula' box to do our calculation (you will also notice an 'Insert Column' box to the right displaying all the fields available in the list for use in calculated columns). The formula looks like this:

=TEXT(Created,"yyyy - ")&TEXT(Created,"mm")&TEXT(Created," (mmmm")&TEXT(Created," yyyy)")

This formula will take the date the item was created (let's say 30/07/2010 as an example) and convert it into a text string which would look something like 2010 – 07 (July 2010).

We can now use this column to sort, filter and group the list based on this value, which as I mentioned earlier can be useful for keeping a running total of items per month, numeric of financial totals per month, or just as a way to keep things logically grouped together.

Below we can see the result of grouping a list by the calculated column.

Posted at 11:02 by Chris Jackson | Category: SharePoint 2007 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Copying Files across a Network from Vista is Very Slow & Causes High CPU Usage

I first came across this problem when trying to connect my Windows 7 32bit laptop to my Vista x64 PC running MediaPortal 1.0.2.0.

The symptoms of the problem where very strange – my MediaPortal client on the laptop refused to connect, even using the Vista machines (fixed) IP, with the windows and anti-virus firewall disabled, and PING command returning positive results. Mapping file shares from my Vista machine on my laptop worked fine, and I could browse content, if a bit slowly, however when playing back Recorded TV files (encoded in raw TS format) on my laptop using VLC Player resulted in skipping and terrible quality, and very high CPU usage on my Vista machine. This then caused TV playing on my Vista MediaPortal to jump and skip as the machine became overwhelmed trying to serve my laptop!!!

The problems even occurred when accessing my SharePoint Services web server running in VMware on the Vista machine, either through RDP or via its web address (which funnily enough serves this blog!!!) which in theory shouldn't even touch my Vista machine at all...

As you can imagine not what the doctor ordered from a home media centre!!!

Initially when googling the problem, most people pointed to this being an issue with Vista and some of its features, but most of these seemed to be pre service pack 1 issues. As my Vista machine was Service Pack 1 and updated to the most recent updates as of 10/02/2010, I assumed most of these fixes where not relevant.

In the spirit of thoroughness (and desperation to fix the problem) I thought I'd try them out and see what worked. So very briefly here's what I tried and what worked:

Turn UAC off – no effect.
Disable Aero Desktop – still the problem occurred.
Disable Indexing Options – slight improvement but don't get excited yet.
Update NIC drivers – nope.
Disable IPv6 – again slight improvement
Disable Windows Remote Differential Compression – Did help initially, but after a few seconds (no more than a minute) of streaming/copying files across the network, the problem was back.

So back to the drawing board I went...

And then I had one of those rare occasions when you actually catch a process, or service causing the problem!!! When I had checked before it was the System process which was consuming all the processor time, and therefore not much I could do about it, but on this occurrence it was the AVG Network Scanner Service which was hogging the CPU resources.

In desperation I ended the process...

BANG!!! CPU resources dropped through the floor to 1-2% per core (dual core processor), then the service restarted automatically and the problem started again!!!

GOTCHA!!!! Went on Google and searched for the process causing this very problem and it seems to be a (reasonably) common problem since AVG 8.5-9.0. So I removed AVG, and installed Avast Anti-Virus and the problem went away!!!

I can now copy files (really) quickly between laptop and Vista PC, and vice versa, connect to the MediaPortal TV Server on my Vista machine from my laptop, and stream media files without it even registering on my Vista PC!!!

So I fixed my problem, however I would urge all readers to exercise caution when reading this if you are assuming this is the be all and end all for fixing this problem, because it isn't. I had a very particular problem which occurred in a certain set of circumstances. This isn't to say nothing can be learned from this, quite the contrary in fact.

I would advise anyone having similar issues to:

Patch Vista to its latest service pack and additional updates (you do this anyway... right...?).
Make sure you have the most up to date drivers for your hardware (motherboard, network card, sound card, graphics, storage controller, etc...).
Monitor your running processes and resource utilisation when the problem occurs (both CPU and Memory) to try and pin down the offending process.
Finally if you are going to try these or any other fixes out there on the web, you investigate then thoroughly first and you are comfortable making the changes otherwise you could do more harm than good.

Happy hunting...

Posted at 11:00 by Chris Jackson | Category: Other | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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