Read Only settings in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration

If you have upgraded your browser to Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) and still administer SharePoint 2010, you may have found yourself trying to configure or edit certain data in Central Administration that appear to be read-only.

This is yet another side effect in a long list of problems caused by IE11 being unrecognized by IIS as a current web browser.

Let's say you are trying to edit user properties in the User Profile Service Application.  When you mouse over a property, you should see a drop down appear with a menu to Edit the property.

Menu working correctly

 

However in IE11 this will not appear if you do not have the Central Administration site added to the Compatibility View list.  The following shows the result of not viewing user profile properties in IE11 compatibility mode.

No menu is generated

Mouse hovering over these properties does not generate a menu, giving you no way to manage these properties.

 

To use a quick workaround, the solution is to open Compatibility View settings in IE11 and add the Central Administration site to the list.



Resolving Mapped Network Drive Issues with Administrator Privileges

In my office, we change the location of our My Documents folder to a network path so that working files are included in backup jobs automatically.  This occasionally leads to issues installing software, installing application updates, and sometimes running applications when these actions are run using the Administrator account.  In many cases running as administrator is a requirement for these actions.

The problem is that when you run as an administrator, mapped drives for the user account are not carried over to the Administrator credential.  Here are some errors I've seen:

• When running Visual Studio as Administrator - Error: Template store path is invalid: Unexpected path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\Work item Templates
• When installing new software or Adobe updates - Error 1327 - Invalid Drive
• When installing NuGet Package Manager update - Cannot find specified path

Fortunately there is a simple solution available to allow user mapped drives to be accessed by the Administrator account (who isn't much of an admin if it can't access what it needs to!).  I have only tested this in Windows 7 64bit.

Open the registry editor and navigate to the following path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/System

Add a new DWORD to the System folder called EnableLinkedConnections with the value of 1.

Restart your computer and your mapped drives will be available to the Administrator account!

See the WinAbility site for a Windows 8 workaround.

Replace Wiki homepage with Webpart page

In SharePoint 2010, creating a site using the Team Site template results in a page that looks like this:



SharePoint Home Page

This page is a wiki page called Home in a wiki page library called Site Pages.  It allows you to blend different objects such as images, text, and web parts into a workspace that you have layout control over.  The SharePoint 2007 model used a web part page for Team Sites and to mix content you had to use specific web parts such as a Content Editor or Image web part.

For experienced admins, the wiki page offers more flexibility.  But if you are in the habit of handing control of new sites over to users who need a less confusing, more stringent model you may want the web part page back rather than the wiki page.  Fortunately there is an easy way to make this switch without manually adding or dropping wiki libraries and changing home pages in SharePoint Designer.

Site Feature for Wiki Page

In Site Settings, manage the Site Features.  At the bottom of the list is an option for Wiki Page Home Page, in other places referred to as a Welcome Page.  When active, the default home page is Home.aspx in the Site Pages wiki library.  When you deactivate the feature, the home page is set to default.aspx which is a web part page at the root of the site.  The Site Pages library is not deleted or hidden from the Quick Launch, so you'll need to handle that based on your preferences.

If you currently have a web part home page, perhaps from a site that was migrated from SharePoint 2007, you can switch to a wiki home page using the same feature, only this time you activate the feature.  Activation will create a Site Pages library and wiki home page.

Remember to consider your primary users when deciding which home page type to use.

Missing Export to Excel option with SharePoint Survey

If you are working with survey data that you'd like to export to a spreadsheet, SharePoint provides a quick way to access survey answers with Microsoft Excel.

If you don't see the option Export to Spreadsheet on your Actions menu, there are two things you should check.

1. Check that the survey view is set to Overview.  The Graphical Summary and All Responses views do not have this option.
2. Go to Site Settings and click Manage Site Features.  Ensure that SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Features is Activated.

Other users have reported that the option only became available when the site collection feature SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection Features is activated, but this has not been my experience.

Intellisense and SSMS

Intellisense in the Query Editor was a wonderful addition to SQL 2008.  I find myself using it even more with SQL 2012.  But as a programmer I just hate to see squiggly red lines under my objects, especially when I'm right and Intellisense is wrong.



This is a common occurrence when working on new database objects.  If you create a new table or column and then start writing a query against it, Intellisense will underline those objects and tell you they don't exist.  This is because Intellisense has a cache of objects that just isn't updated as frequently as we need it to be.

To manually refresh the cache and make those terrible squigglies go away, press the key combination CTRL-SHIFT-R.  You can also use the menu and select Edit -> IntelliSense -> Refresh Local Cache, but I've found this doesn't always resolve the issue right away.  The key combination while the query editor window has focus seems to always do the trick for me.

Insert Content from SharePoint

After upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, whenever we edited a web part page and tried to insert content (such as an image or video) and selected "From SharePoint" as the option, we got a pop up window with the basic SharePoint error information:

 

After some digging, it turns out this is related to the same issue that causes another feature to not work.  In Site Settings, clicking the Content and Structure link under Site Administration generated the same error message.  Now you can dig into the correlation data and try to understand why this sitemanager.aspx page isn't pulling up, but the problem is that you have a corrupted list or library somewhere on the site.

 

You can identify it (the hard way) by viewing all site content and clicking each list or library, and then viewing the Settings page for that object.  When you get to one that throws an error, that is the one you need to delete (SharePoint Designer to the rescue).  You may even get the error before you can click the Settings page. Once removed, your Site Manager page and Insert Content pages should work successfully.

 

Protip: Sometimes you can even recover the deleted list or library from the recycle bin without bringing back the errors!

Deleting SharePoint Site Collections

A great post by Raymund Macaalay explains how you can re-organize your sharepoint sites and data by moving a SharePoint sub-site (SPSite) to a new site collection.  I used this method with great success to take an 80GB site collection and split some 10GB sub-sites out to their own site collections (and content databases).  During this process I had created numerous test site collections to verify the Import-SPWeb task would restore everything correctly.  Once done, I was happy to delete those site collections from the web application.

Since each of these site collections were around 10GB I was expecting a lot of free space to open up in the contentdb, which I would reclaim with a shrink operation.  However, the free space was not there.  This is because deleting a site collection from Central Administration does not permanently delete the site collection, it still exists in the second stage recycle bin which will store it for (default) 30 days.  To remove it from the contentdb immediately you need to run some PowerShell commands.

Get-SPDeletedSite will return a list of deleted sites:

You can permanently remove the sites by using the Remove-SPDeletedSite command:

Once this completes, you will still not see immediate relief in your contentdb.  This is because removing large amounts of content can be a resource intensive operation.  SharePoint has a Gradual Site Delete timer job that by default runs once daily and will gradually remove all content marked for deletion.  If you want to verify that your site is in the queue for the Gradual Site Delete job you can view the data in the dbo.SiteDeletion table of the content database.

After the site deletion job completes its work, you can use a shrink operation in SQL Server to reduce your contentdb to a desireable size.  If you have migrated sub-sites to other site collections like I did, don't forget to purge the original sub-sites from the second stage recycle bin which can be accessed from the Site Collection Administration section of the Site Settings page.