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.

STSADM MigrateUser and Move-SPUser Quirks

It's common for SharePoint administrators to get a request to update someone's name in SharePoint as a result of marriage.  The trusty STSADM migrateuser command has been around since MOSS 2007 as a method to update references from the old account to the new account.

In my experience, AD admins tend to rename existing accounts as opposed to creating new accounts and decommissioning old ones.  Once the account has been renamed, migrateuser can be used in the following fashion to update the SharePoint profile data:

stsadm.exe -o migrateuser -oldlogin domain\originaluserlogin -newlogin domain\newuserlogin

Sometimes this command will return a message "New user account does not have valid SID history.". If this is the case, you can add the -ignoresidhistory argument and cross your fingers that you get a response "Operation completed successfully."

If you do not get a successful message, you may instead see this:
Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: userProfileApplicationProxy

Many search results will point you towards verifying that you are a farm administrator, and of course you are in the farm administrator group, so you brush this off and move on.  Some results point towards a promising PowerShell command Move-SPUser:
Move-SPUser -Identity domain\originaluserlogin -NewAlias domain\newuserlogin

Unfortunately for me I recieved the error:
The parameterless Read method can only be used when this instance was initialized with an SPUser object.

Using Get-SPUser to store the user login in a $user variable to be passed into Move-SPUser returned yet another error:
You must specify a valid user object or user identity.

So the old user doesn't exist in the web anymore, yet when I view the user profile for the user in the User Profile Service in Central Administration, the old login name is still displayed next to all the updated profile information.  Somewhere the old login is still hanging around, so back to migrateuser!

The solution for me was indeed related to the account used to run the migrateuser command. Evidently being a farm administrator is not enough, you need to use the FARM Account.  To find out exactly what this account is, open up Central Administration and click on configure service accounts under the Security heading.

Select Farm Account from the drop down box, and the page will refresh and list an account name in the bottom drop down box.  This is the account you need to log in to the SharePoint server.  I tried using the Run As Another User command on the SharePoint Management Shell and that did not work, you will get a message Access Denied when you do that.  When you login to the server, right click SharePoint Management Shell and choose Run as Administrator.

Hopefully this time you will breathe a huge sigh of relief as you see the coveted Operation completed successfully message.

A quick way to bring down SharePoint 2010

Yesterday I was working through the steps to configure incoming email for my SharePoint 2010 farm.  After some testing, internal mail sent to SharePoint was being dropped into the correct document libraries, as intended.

But somewhere along the way, when configuring the SMTP service on the SharePoint machine to pick up files from the drop folder, I had hit a snag trying to change the SMTP domain from the default <servername> (which was not user friendly) to a more friendly @spmail.company.com.  The emails were being received in the default drop folder in the /mailroot and not in the custom drop folder I had configured on a data volume.

While experimenting with different solutions I had the (un)brilliant idea to add another http binding to the SharePoint Web Services IIS site for the host header spmail.company.com.  I must have been low on coffee at the time because I don't recall even making this change.  This apparently was a ticking timebomb because although SharePoint appeared to work just fine the rest of the day, I was greeted the next morning (no doubt after some nightly timer job bombed) by a nice correlation error on the SharePoint home page. Digging through log files on our WFE and App servers I found a myriad of errors:

WFE log:
system.nullreferenceexception: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.    at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_ApplicationProperties()

App log:
Request for security token failed with exception: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The requested service, 'http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc/actas' could not be activated.

Viewing User Profile Service Application in Central Admin:
This User Profile Application's connection is currently not available. The Application Pool or User Profile Service may not have been started.

Now having had NUMEROUS issues with User Profile Service App in the past, my default is always to run IISRESET on the App and WFE machines. This time I refreshed my homepage and discovered the magic bullet didn't work this time.

Troubleshooting the User Service profile app led me down the same paths as many others, checking to make sure the farm account had to proper credentials to run the timer service, FIM services, and the app pool.  Everything checked out, except the profile synchronization service was hung at 'starting'.

I turned my attention to the STS app.  App pool checked out, IIS site checked out.  Then someone suggested opening the STS web service url on the App server to look for clues.  I was presented with this very helpful message:

This collection already contains an address with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.
Checking the bindings for SharePoint Web Services site revealed the culprit. I removed the binding and checked SharePoint again and voila, immediately sites were working again.  I returned to Central Admin and the User Profile Synchronization service was no longer stuck at Starting and was not Started.

Lesson learned, don't tinker with SharePoint if your coffee level is running low, there is no telling what will happen during your caffeine blackout!

SharePoint 2010 - Sign in as a different user causes immediate 401 UNAUTHORIZED

While working among half a dozen SharePoint 2010 sites one day, spread through Internet Explorer 9 tabs, I was testing some security trimming on some new groups for a particular site. When I tried to sign in as another user, I was immediately given a blank white page that simply said 401 UNAUTHORIZED.

The only related information I could find on the web was a post referring to the error but without a suitable solution: http://www.3guysonsharepoint.com/?p=979

I fired up a session of Chrome and tried the same thing. The Login prompt was displayed and everything worked just fine. I returned to IE9 and tried to sign in as a different user on the other tabs I had open. All returned the 401 UNAUTHORIZED error.

I closed down all instances of IE9, cleared my cache, and fired it back up. This time all the sign in operations worked as expected. I'm not exactly sure which part of the IE session got out of whack, but starting fresh seemed to clear things up. Hopefully it's not a problem that will resurface.

Error with upgraded publishing site

Today I tried creating a new Welcome page on a site that has the publishing feature activated. The site was upgraded from 2007 to 2010 long ago with no hiccups. Suddenly just trying to create a new page threw a runtime error that required digging through the SharePoint Log with a correlation ID to find:

The site is not valid. The 'Pages' document library is missing.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.InvalidPublishingWebException: The site is not valid. The 'Pages' document library is missing.

The Pages library is certainly on the site. Deactivating and re-activating the publishing features from the site collection and site features lists didn't seem to have any impact on the error. SharePoint engineer to the rescue: Stefan Goßner has your fix!

http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2011/09/15/common-error-the-site-is-not-valid-the-pages-document-library-is-missing-error.aspx

Digging into ReportServer Database

I was looking for some information about my ReportServer database and ran across a great script by Scott Hebert that displays a lot of useful information:

http://sqlninja.blogspot.com/2009/01/querying-reportserver-database.html

USE ReportServer

SELECT
         CatalogParent.Name ParentName,
         Catalog.Name ReportName,
         ReportCreatedByUsers.UserName ReportCreatedByUserName,
         Catalog.CreationDate ReportCreationDate,
         ReportModifiedByUsers.UserName ReportModifiedByUserName,
         Catalog.ModifiedDate ReportModifiedDate,
         CountExecution.CountStart TotalExecutions,
         ExecutionLog.InstanceName LastExecutedInstanceName,
         ExecutionLog.UserName LastExecutedUserName,
         ExecutionLog.Format LastExecutedFormat,
         ExecutionLog.TimeStart LastExecutedTimeStart,
         ExecutionLog.TimeEnd LastExecutedTimeEnd,
         ExecutionLog.TimeDataRetrieval LastExecutedTimeDataRetrieval,
         ExecutionLog.TimeProcessing LastExecutedTimeProcessing,
         ExecutionLog.TimeRendering LastExecutedTimeRendering,
         ExecutionLog.Status LastExecutedStatus,
         ExecutionLog.ByteCount LastExecutedByteCount,
         ExecutionLog.[RowCount] LastExecutedRowCount,
         SubscriptionOwner.UserName SubscriptionOwnerUserName,
         SubscriptionModifiedByUsers.UserName SubscriptionModifiedByUserName,
         Subscriptions.ModifiedDate SubscriptionModifiedDate,
         Subscriptions.Description SubscriptionDescription,
         Subscriptions.LastStatus SubscriptionLastStatus,
         Subscriptions.LastRunTime SubscriptionLastRunTime
   FROM
         dbo.Catalog
         JOIN         dbo.Catalog CatalogParent
         ON Catalog.ParentID = CatalogParent.ItemID
         JOIN
         dbo.Users ReportCreatedByUsers
         ON Catalog.CreatedByID = ReportCreatedByUsers.UserID
         JOIN         dbo.Users ReportModifiedByUsers
         ON Catalog.ModifiedByID = ReportModifiedByUsers.UserID
         LEFT JOIN
   (
   SELECT
            ReportID,
            MAX(TimeStart) LastTimeStart
      FROM
            dbo.ExecutionLog
      GROUP BY
            ReportID
   ) LatestExecution
         ON Catalog.ItemID = LatestExecution.ReportID
         LEFT JOIN   (
   SELECT
            ReportID,
            COUNT(TimeStart) CountStart
      FROM
            dbo.ExecutionLog
      GROUP BY
            ReportID
   ) CountExecution
         ON Catalog.ItemID = CountExecution.ReportID
         LEFT JOIN         dbo.ExecutionLog
         ON LatestExecution.ReportID = ExecutionLog.ReportID
      AND LatestExecution.LastTimeStart = ExecutionLog.TimeStart
         LEFT JOIN         dbo.Subscriptions
         ON Catalog.ItemID = Subscriptions.Report_OID
         LEFT JOIN         dbo.Users SubscriptionOwner
         ON Subscriptions.OwnerID = SubscriptionOwner.UserID
         LEFT JOIN         dbo.Users SubscriptionModifiedByUsers
         ON Subscriptions.ModifiedByID = SubscriptionModifiedByUsers.UserID
   ORDER BY
         CatalogParent.Name,
         Catalog.Name

Clean up your SharePoint Features

If you noticed my previous two posts, you'll see that I've run across some feature upgrade issues when moving from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, and then again when applying service pack 1 to SharePoint 2010.

Today I ran across a really nice tool to help remove references to the missing features that may cause issues during your upgrades: http://featureadmin.codeplex.com/

This tool is extremely fast, easy to use, and effective at removing missing/faulty features from SharePoint farms, web applications, site collections, and sites.

SharePoint SP1 aftereffects

If you are running the Enterprise version of SharePoint 2010, you may notice something missing after the upgrade to Service Pack 1.

The Customize Form button may be missing from the List Ribbon's Customize List section.  This button is only available in the Enterprise version of SharePoint and not in Foundation.

To get your button back, navigate to the Top Level Site Settings. Choose Site Collection Features and scroll down to find SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features.  This feature enables InfoPath Forms Services which will enable the Customize Form button.

If you aren't at the Top Level Site Settings and instead find yourself at the Manage Site Features page for your site,  you will see a very similar feature named SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features, but this will not affect the Customize Form button.

SharePoint 2010 SP1 troubleshooting

So our upgrade from 2007 to 2010 a couple of years back wasn't without errors in the log, but most of these referenced outdated, unused features or web templates that had been decommisioned from any production site. They didn't prevent the upgrade from succeeding.

But when I applied SP1 recently, I realized some of these lingering references were again surfacing to give me trouble.  The service pack installed successfully, but the PSConfig wizard failed. Log files contained 3 errors:

• A missing site feature
• A missing web template
• A missing web.config file

The result of this service pack install and failed PSConfig was a sharepoint farm that was completely down. A request to any page generated an error and referenced a correlation ID. Tracking this error down in the log was a looong dead end because it was just referencing services that were down as a result of the failed upgrade. I cursed under my breathe about testing this install on a development system that wasn't identical to production, after all, the development system upgraded to SP1 without a hitch.  Prior to implementing the rollback strategy (yay VM snapshots!) I decided to dive in and see if the upgrade was salvageable.

Our farm consists of an App server and a WFE. Although PSConfig failed on the WFE, the upgrade status in Central Administration said it was fully up to date, so I focused on the App server.

The web template was installed on the WFE, but not the App server. So I copied over the folder from the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates folder.

Since the WFE was responsible for Central Admin and all sites, I was surprised to find a site reference in IIS on the App server. Checking the site and folder revealed it was empty, and the site status was stopped.  After ensuring this site was indeed running on the WFE, I deleted the site from IIS on the App server and removed the folder from the wss\Virtual Directories in inetpub.

I performed a powershell search for the missing site feature:
Get-SPFeature | Sort -Property Id

The feature was a FBA Management package developed by Visigo to manage FBA user accounts from the Site Settings page in SharePoint.  This had been deployed to the WFE but not the App server.

It was then time to run PSConfig again. Success. All sites functional again.

Next steps:

1. June 2011 Cumulative Update
2. Office Web Apps with SP1