Tool that was very useful in cleaning up my Sharepoint site in preparation for upgrade to 2010.
Project Description
Find faulty FeatureDefinitions and cleanly uninstall them.
Find Feature remainders in Sites, SiteCollections, WebApps and in the Farm, from e.g. forcefully uninstalled Features from farm without deactivating them before, causing errors.
Also, de-/activate Features Farm wide.
Screenshots
Feature View – remove Features
Article that highlights some of the problems with using a Group Policy Central Store along with Windows 7 and 2008 R2. Great timing, I just finally got around to changing to a central store a month ago, and now I see that I will probably need to change back.
Mike here again to help bring clarity to something we are seeing with Windows Server 2008 R2 and existing Group Policy central store. Before that discussion, let us cover some background information.
ADMX Files and the Group Policy Central Store
Microsoft introduced the ADMX file format with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. This XML-based file format replaced the token-based ADM file format used by earlier versions of Windows to define administrative templates. Group Policy uses administrative templates to represent registry-based policy settings that appear when editing Group Policy. The content included in administrative templates describes the user interface used by Group Policy editors and registry locations where Windows stores policy settings. Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 provide a new set of administrative template files in the ADMX format.
Great tip if you ave issues removing WSP solution packages and web parts from third parties and find they don’t install or uninstall properly. You may also have trouble activating or deactivating features in site settings when these invalid features crop up.
Errors that could be shown in SharePoint when installing or activating a feature "An unexpected error has occurred", "Failed to compare two elements in the array" or various other error messages may be shown while activating, deactivating, or browsing to a recently failed deployment of a WSP solution .
To check or remove invalid features on SharePoint 2007 site:
- First, run the WssAnalyzeFeatures tool and view the Problems Log for invalid feature id (guids)
- Try running STSADM -o deactivatefeature -id %featureIdFromLogFile% -force
- Run the WssAnalyzeFeatures tool and see if the problems we’re resolved.
- If feature can’t be removed or is in a subsite for a failed WSP solution uninstall…try running the WssRemoveFeatureFromSite to forcefully invalid old features.
- Remove the feature ID’s until WssAnalyzeFeatures shows no errors.
Consider the following scenario. You have an Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 web server running on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. The Microsoft update KB973917 gets installed on the server. After installing KB973917, the IIS 6.0 application pools cannot start up successfully. An inspection of the event logs show that the IIS worker processes are terminating unexpectedly, showing event messages similar to the following:
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1009
Date: 12/9/2009
Time: 10:55:01 AM
User: N/A
Computer: WEBSERVER01
Description:
A process serving application pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ terminated unexpectedly. The process id was ‘1234′.
The process exit code was ‘0xffffffff’.
Internet Information Services 6.0 may not function correctly after installing KB973917
Excerpt from another very useful post on setting up Profile Syncs in Sharepoint 2010
This is how I setup user profile sync for SharePoint Server 2010 Beta on my machine. You should not take this as an official guide. But the steps may help if you have been drive crazy.
You should also check out TechNet article and the steps on our team blog first, they are more "official". And it’s not come from "another MS guy in the wild" like me:)
[Update - we are considering to gather all information and put it back to TechNet article, could be video walkthrough, screenshots, and hope that could help. After that is done, i may remove the content here.]
The following steps in done on Windows Server 2008 R2. But it also applies to Windows Server 2008. The WCF fix for R2 and Win7 is
not currently available to public but it will be released in coming dayshere.
- Start with a fresh SharePoint Farm installation, make sure WCF fix (Please refer to my pervious post) is already applied on the machine.
- A web application is already created at port 80. A site collection is also created.
- Don’t do anything on User Profile Service Application now…If you did, you may need to rebuild the farm. (am i kidding? no… this is beta.)
Jie Li’s GeekWorld : User Profile Sync Setup in SharePoint Server 2010 Beta
An excerpt from the MS Sharepoint Team Blog on User Profile Synchronization
Before we get into the deep details, I want to share a high-level checklist to setup User Profile syncing
on Windows Server 2008.Once the WCF hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 is available, this guidance will work on R2.This checklist is for beta only – we plan to improve how this works by RTM.
- Check that your system meets minimum requirements: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.14).aspx
- Start with a clean OS install
- Check that the WCF hotfix is installed
Windows Server 2008 WCF hotfix http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkID=160770
Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 WCF hotfix http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806
- Check that you have done a "Complete" install of SharePoint Server 2010
- Check that the setup/farm admin account has "Replicating directory changes" in your test domain
- Use the farm configuration wizard to setup all the service applications and successfully create a site collection
- Check that statistics (i.e. Number of User Profiles, etc.) appear on the User Profile Service Application page
- Start the User Profile Synchronization Service and status changes to "Started" – this can take some time and this will configure and start the Forefront Identity services for you (do not try to manually set the logon credentials and start the service)
- Setup an Active Directory Connection
- Start a full Profile import
If you have been following the newsgroups, you will see that there are a lot of people having problems with setting up user profile synchronization in the Sharepoint 2010 Beta 2 release.
Since the beta release I have done two Sharepoint 2010 installs on Windows Server 2008, and one on Windows Server 2010 R2.
On all of the installations, if I followed all of the recommendations that others have posted, I was able to get the profile sync to work but I still had the error messages. To summarize, these are the errors I get, both during initial sync and on a regular schedule afterwards:
|
Event ID |
Source |
Description |
|
1004 |
MsiInstaller |
Detection of product ‘{20140000-104C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}’, feature ‘PeopleILM’, component ‘{1C12B6E6-898C-4D58-9774-AAAFBDFE273C}’ failed. The resource ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Service\Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Service.exe’ does not exist. |
|
1001 |
MsiInstaller |
Detection of product ‘{20140000-104C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}’, feature ‘PeopleILM’ failed during request for component ‘{9AE4D8E0-D3F6-47A8-8FAE-38496FE32FF5}’ |
|
1015 |
MsiInstaller |
Failed to connect to server. Error: 0×80070005 |
|
1004 |
MsiInstaller |
Detection of product ‘{20140000-104C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}’, feature ‘PeopleILM’, component ‘{1C12B6E6-898C-4D58-9774-AAAFBDFE273C}’ failed. The resource ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Service\Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Service.exe’ does not exist. |
|
1001 |
MsiInstaller |
Detection of product ‘{20140000-104C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}’, feature ‘PeopleILM’ failed during request for component ‘{1681AE41-ADA8-4B70-BC11-98A5A4EDD046}’ |
|
1015 |
MsiInstaller |
Failed to connect to server. Error: 0×80070005 |
System Log
|
Event ID |
Source |
Description |
|
10016 |
DistributedCOM |
The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} and APPID {000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} to the user NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool. |
|
10016 |
DistributedCOM |
The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} and APPID {000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} to the user NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool. |
On the first install, I granted local activation rights to Network Service for Windows Installer ({000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}) and kicked off a sync, and I got several messages about a successful install. However, soon after this, the Forefront service stopped, and would not restart. So I my third install I just ignored the errors. Everything seems to be working, and I have setup my sites successfully, and a user can edit their profile.
So the end result is that I am going to assume these are harmless errors until I hear otherwise.
Great article. I have tried to solve several of these problems before with no success.
In every business there are several different groups of report users, from chief executives, to business analysts, to operational staff, who all need access to reliable and current data in order to track overall business performance, investigate the effectiveness of individual business functions, or simply for ad-hoc day-to-day reporting.
In most organizations, at least some attempt has been made to meet these reporting needs. Historically, however, the problem has been that the available reports have not always been up-to-date, or even accurate. Furthermore, individual departments have tended to adopt a "silo" approach, using different tools/systems to create reports that are useful within their silo, but not necessarily consistent or compatible with those produced by other departments. In many cases, there doesn’t even exist a shared understanding of the business data that underpin these reports.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), when it arrived, offered a much-needed means to centralize and standardize reporting across the business, and it has largely delivered. Having used SSRS 2005 for the past 4 years, I’ve found that, with a little effort, it can satisfy most business, ad-hoc, embedded, portal integration, web, and custom reporting needs. However, I’ve also found that small "gotchas" can halt progress and cause considerable frustration, as it’s not always easy to find ways round them in the documentation.
Ten Common SQL Server Reporting Services Challenges and Solutions
Can’t wait for SPC 2009. Only 5 days till Vegas.
As the dates near, the largest SharePoint Conference of any type in history approaches. The largest vendor hall, the largest amount of attendees 6000+ and growing. This might be the largest Microsoft Conference of the year, definitely approaching the mammoth sizes of even WPC, Teched and PDC.
The unique thing about the SharePoint Conference is the sense of community. We all have something in common. SharePoint Geeks! We LOVE SharePoint. We also have a tight sense of community where we get to know each other and we get a little crazy when we get together. Attempts in the past to describe what this odd sense of community that’s special with the SharePoint people is tough to describe.
How do you prepare for this incredible global communal event???
Back in the Zone with ZoneTabs
I’m back after a long break from posting to announce the availability of a new web part that you may find helpful.
Zone Tabs 2.0 is a new version of a tab web part I previously released on GotDotNet that helps reduce clutter on a web part page by allowing you to attach the other web parts in a zone to tabs. (A web part zone is one of those rectangular areas where you can drop your web parts on a page.) For example, a web part zone might contain 10 web parts, but instead of scrolling to see them all, the user clicks different tabs to show a subset of related web parts at any one time.
As you can see in the screen shot, it’s possible to use more than one set of Zone Tabs on a page so long as they’re each in their own zone. In addition, Zone Tabs can be set up to pivot the web part zone between horizontal and vertical views, a function that is generally performed by developing a new page in Visual Studio or customizing a page in SharePoint Designer 2007. The new version of Zone Tabs requires Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 to work.
To download the web part as a WSS Solution Package as well as full source code, please visit the new MSDN Code Gallery at http://code.msdn.com/ZoneTabs. The Read Me file explains how to install and set up the web part. This posting will go into a little more information about how I wrote it, and some cool things I learned along the way.
Creating Tabs with CSS
The first thing I wanted to do was to make the tabs look better than they did previously. ZoneTabs 1.0 rendered itself as a table, and used some of the built-in WSS styles; for some reason they didn’t look as good in the new version of SharePoint products, even though the overall SharePoint UI was greatly improved. So I set out to make the tabs look better.
I found a number of blog articles on various ways to create tabs in HTML, and wanted something that was easy and attractive, while also easily adapting themselves to varying lengths of text. I decided on a technique called “sliding doors” which was described on several sites. Basically, the idea is to render the tabs as a bunch of anchor elements within unnumbered list items, such as:
<ul>
<li><a href=”#”>Tab1</a></li>
<li><a href=”#”>Tab2</a></li>
</ul>
When I first saw this I was pretty surprised that list items were being used, but it turns out that it’s possible to override the usual bulleted list using style sheets. The CSS sets the <li> tags to show most of the tab, including the top and one of the sides, and the <a> tag to show the other side. The <li>’s image is as big as a tab could ever be. This is the clever part: since the <a> tag is on top of the <li> tag, the tab edge in the <a> tab overlaps the big image in the <li> tab and thus trims it perfectly to size. For a detailed drill-down, check out David Bowman’s article at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slidingdoors/; this has one of the clearest explanations.
For ZoneTabs, I re-wrote the CSS to my own needs and generated the tab images myself from scratch. I used a vector graphics program to make these GIANT tabs, including some blended highlights for a 3-D effect, which I converted to bitmaps (.gif files) that were much smaller and anti-aliased. Then I sliced off the edge to make two images, each of which I extended until they were big enough to handle an 800×800 pixel tab. Eventually I had an HTML page with nice extensible tabs on it, in four color sets (light and dark in blue, black, gray and gold). This was pretty tedious, I have to admit.
Vantage Point – Bob German’s WebLog : Back in the Zone with ZoneTabs
