Microsoft has played a major role in the development of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS) that is currently in the hands of the OASIS working group. Committed as the team has been, they (including Microsoft) have not provided much information or examples of how CMIS will work with Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). Until now.

A new MSDN article has arrived that demonstrates how one can integrate an external document repository with MOSS (or the free version of SharePoint, WSS) — which is exactly what the CMIS spec is all about. Our interest piqued, we took a look and in the following article, we share what we found.

How To: Connecting SharePoint (MOSS) to a CMIS Repository

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:

1. First, run the WssAnalyzeFeatures tool and view the Problems Log for invalid feature id (guids)
2. Try running STSADM -o deactivatefeature -id %featureIdFromLogFile% -force
3. Run the WssAnalyzeFeatures tool and see if the problems we’re resolved.
4. 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.
5. Remove the feature ID’s until WssAnalyzeFeatures shows no errors.

Removing Invalid SharePoint 2007 Features due to a Failed, Missing, or Unsuccessful Activation SharePoint WSP – Gilham Consulting Microsoft Notepad

At Last! Finally, we have released the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) on CodePlex!! Please take a look at : http://saf.codeplex.com .

Now that I can take a minute, I just wanted to spend a bit of time detailing why we have spent the best part of 18 months (with lots of late nights building it!) Here’s a FAQ to give you some answers:

If you are developing with SharePoint, do you suffer from any of these ?

• Lots of Defects caused by differences in SharePoint Farms. – eg. “It works on Integration, but not on QA!” .
• Your Development team find it time consuming telling your Release team what to do for each release. “How hard can it be to put 5 columns in a Content Type?”
• You have release documents (notepad, word, etc) that don’t contain enough information on how to deploy, or they always miss things and are extremely time consuming to create. “By heck surely there must be a better way of telling the Operations team what I need doing ?”
• Deployments to key farms are always late and very stressful. “I hope we don’t get a release like that again, I didn’t finish till 2am”
• Developers find it hard to do daily builds as SharePoint Config is not part of the daily build process.
• Its hard to reproduce what you have on one farm to another.
• Changes to Testing and Live Farms never seem to be applied to the Development Farm.
• You have lots of Features doing "similar" things, but not many are reusable.

Marks’s Blog > SAF is released!

Here are the steps I followed to fix the problem

1. Determine what account sharepoint thinks is invalid. You need to open SQL Admin Studio, connect to the Sharepoint Configuration database and run the following query
   1. select * from dbo.objects where name like ‘SharedServices’  (Replace SharedServices with the name of the SSP you are trying to get rid of)
   2. In the results, you should see one row of data. There is a column called Properties which is xml text. Select the contents of the column and paste into notepad so you can read it more easily
   3. Scan the contents of the properties column and you will see some entries that look like this:
      1. <sFld type=”String” name=”m_SecurityXml”>&lt;security&gt;&lt;owner /&gt;&lt;rules&gt;&lt;rule&gt;&lt;role&gt;2&lt;/role&gt;&lt;identity type=”NTAccount”&gt;TESTDOMAIN\lflippo&lt;/identity&gt;&lt;/rule&gt;&lt;rule&gt;&lt;role&gt;2&lt;/role&gt;&lt;identity type=”NTAccount”&gt;TESTDOMAIN\bgbpps2$&lt;/identity&gt;&lt;/rule&gt;&lt;/rules&gt;&lt;/security&gt;</sFld>
   4. Notice that two accounts are listed as owners of this SSP, lflippo and bgbpps2$. One or both of these accounts would be the problem account.
2. Now that we have the two potential problem accounts, search for them in Active Directory and make sure they still exist and are enabled. In our case, lflippo was disabled and bgbpps2$ (a computer account) had been deleted. Recreate the computer accounts with the same name if they have been deleted and enable them if they are disabled
3. Go to Central Administration –> Application Management — Grant or configure shared services between farms and you should now be able to pick your new SSP from the drop down and make it the parent. You will then be free to delete the old ssp.

I struggled with this problem for a long time, and I had considered recreating the missing accounts, but I assumed from what I knew of MS security, this would be a useless exercise since the new accounts would have a different SID. In this case, I was overthinking the issue. Obviously, the configuration step above only checks for the existence of the accounts by name, it apparently does not care about the SIDs. Or the other possibility (impossible to test now) is that because one account was disabled and the other was deleted, there was no valid account. Then by re-enabling the account that still existed, connectivity was restored. Because I did both in the same step I have no way to verify this, but I think months ago when I first encountered the problem I actually tried enabling the account that still existed. Anyway, if you encounter this problem, hopefully this will give you some options, and if you are able to test the different scenarios, let me know. I would like to know which step actually fixed the problem

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

---

Parser Error

Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.
Parser Error Message: The enablesessionstate attribute on the page directive is not allowed in this page.
Source Error:

Line 1:  <%@ Page Language="vb"

MasterPageFile="~masterurl/default.master"

EnableSessionState="true"

 

 

The problem is that by default, Sharepoint does not allow server side code in .aspx pages by default. You need to enable this using PageParserPath. Add the PageParserPath inside of the PageParserPaths node of the web.config file, changing the virtual path to the path you want to enable.

<PageParserPaths>

  <PageParserPath VirtualPath=”/pages/test.aspx” CompilationMode=”Always” AllowServerSideScript=”true” />

</PageParserPaths>

 This is nothing new to most people, but it just popped up on one of our pages because someone had made changes to the web.config file.

Avoid those GUID database names

My installs are always done using the PSCONFIG and STSADM command line utility. Here is a quick overview of my install steps. The prerequisites for the install are that you have 5 domain accounts created in your AD. Add the "setup account" as the Local administrator to the server where you are installing SharePoint. (See my previous detailed post about accounts and setup) Essentially by using the command line tool you can create and configure the farm very easily.

1. Run the "OfficeServerwithSP1.exe" (Select Advanced and Install as "Complete")
2. Make sure that I DON’T run the "Configuration Wizard"
3. Open command prompt and set the location to "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN"
4. Run the following command. This will create your configuration DB and the Central Admin content DB
   psconfig.exe -cmd configdb -create -server KCSPRV01 -database SP_Config_KC -user KC\SPAdmin -password pAss5worD2 -admincontentdatabase SP_Central_Admin_Content_KC
5. Provision the Central Administration web site by running this script (In this case my CA web site is http://KCSPRV01:6036
   psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs -provision -port 6036 -windowsauthprovider onlyusentlm
6. Install all the required services
   psconfig.exe -cmd services install
7. Secure the resources and grant the appropriate permissions and registry entries (This is an important step to ensure that you grant the correct permissions)
   psconfig.exe -cmd secureresources
8. Start the Office Server Search Service (OSEARCH)
   stsadm.exe -o osearch -action start -role IndexQuery -farmcontactemail demo@kcue.net -farmperformancelevel PartlyReduced -farmserviceaccount KC\SPSearch -farmservicepassword pAss5worD2
9. Start the SharePoint search service (SPSEARCH) Requires a DB to be created
   stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action start -farmserviceaccount KC\SPSearch -farmservicepassword pAss5worD2 -farmcontentaccessaccount KC\SPSearch -farmcontentaccesspassword pAss5worD2 -databaseserver KC -databasename SP_Search_KC
10. Install all MOSS features by running – psconfig.exe -cmd installfeatures

Now you are done! No guid DB’s in the above install. You should be able to now navigate to Central Administration and configure your SSP and continue your farm configuration.

You can also configure My sites host and your Shared Services Provider using the command line.

If you require to build a farm then you can also use a scripted farm build as per the guidelines provided on TechNet.

Installing SharePoint today..? please consider x64 before you go ahead and hit setup – Chandima.Net Blog for SharePoint solutions

You may have been waiting anxiously for the uber packages because of your scheduled patch time window. Yeah, we heard from you.  Now here they are:

Download Information

February Cumulative Update Uber Package for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Version: 12.0.6341.5000)

http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=961755

February Cumulative Update Uber Package for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Version: 12.0.6341.5002)

http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=961756

Can’t see the version you want on download page? Check out download instruction from James Blackwell:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jb/archive/2009/03/09/downloading-hotfixes-for-multiple-platforms.aspx

Detail description

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 cumulative update package: February 24, 2009

Description of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 cumulative update package: February 24, 2009 (Link is not activated yet)

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

Symptom 1

A web part page with a dataview web part that connected to a SQL Server datasource was giving the following error message and stack trace:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application

The type is not registered as safe

Stack Trace:

 

[UnsafeControlException: The type is not registered as safe.]

   Microsoft.SharePoint.EditingPageParser.VerifyControlOnSafeList(String dscXml, RegisterDirectiveManager registerDirectiveManager, SPWeb web) +948

   Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.DataFormWebPart.get_DataSources() +186

   Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.DataFormWebPart.AddDataSourceControls() +69

   Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.DataFormWebPart.CreateChildControls() +1583

   System.Web.UI.Control.EnsureChildControls() +87

   System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +44

   System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +42

   System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +171

   System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +171

   System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +171

   System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +171

   System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +171

   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +842

The Sharepoint site had many pages with similar dataview web parts, and most of these were still working. The only clear difference with this one was that it was connected to a form web part on the page.

Symptom 2

After opening the Sharepoint site, or any of its subsites, I was unable to view data for either existing database connections or new database connections. For example, when clicking Manage Data Sources, I could see the database connection that had been defined. If I clicked the drop down box and chose ‘Show Data’, I received the following error:

“The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator.”

If I tried to define a new database connection, I could connect to the database, and I could see the schema because a list of tables was being returned. However, as soon as I clicked ‘Show Data’ I got the same error above.

Root Cause

The problem was a missing section of XML in the web.config file that defines the SQL Data Sources. The web.config file was the first place I looked, since the ‘Type is not registered as safe’ usually means there is not a safe control entry in the file. However, in this case, the control was not a custom web part, it was a default Sharepoint web part, and it looked like all of the defaults were listed in Safe Controls.

After doing some file comparisons with some older web.config files, we discovered that the following code was missing from the current web.config file.

<pages enableSessionState="false" enableViewState="true" enableViewStateMac="true" validateRequest="false" pageParserFilterType="Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SPPageParserFilter, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" asyncTimeout="30">
 <namespaces>
 <remove namespace="System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts" />
 </namespaces>
 <tagMapping>
  <add tagType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.SqlDataSource, System.Web,  Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"
mappedTagType="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SPSqlDataSource, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
 </tagMapping>
</pages>

We were able to trace the problem back to a web part installation of Lightning Tools Forum that happened a couple of weeks ago. The Lightning Tools Forum web part consisted of two features. One of them was a .Net Framework 3.5 Feature that added all of the entries needed for .Net 3.5 into the web.config file. We had some problems with this feature, and during troubleshooting, it was activated and deactivated several times. So either the deactivation removed the section, or it was accidentally removed by me in the process. (On a side note, We got the Lightning Tools Forum web part to work without the .net 3.5 feature)

Unknown Error has occurred is often found nested in a typical SharePoint page when something with your configuration has gone wrong. Could be a SQL connection, Web.Config setting, SharePoint setting, could be a UFO passing over you – could be anything right.

Here’s how to get rid of it and see an unfriendly error message (it’s been blogged many times before I’m sure, but here’s my explanation):

a) 1) Locate the web.config of your primary SharePoint application on your server file system. Can often be found at [drive]:InetpubwwwrootWSSVirtualDirectories[app name]Web.Config

b) 2) Save another copy of the Web.Config for backup purposes

c) 3) Open in Notepad or an editor of your choice and locate the following line element:

d) 4) Change the CallStack from “false” to “true”

e) 5) Then find customErrors element and change its mode from “On” to “Off”

f) 6) Save and Close

g) 7) You may need to Run IISRESET /noforce

h) Run that page again

Debugging – An unexpected error has occurred – Mirrored Blogs

Quickly check what objects within a Sharepoint site hierarchy a user has access to.
The Access Checker Web Part is a Windows Sharepoint Services Web Part, for use within Windows Sharepoint Services v3 and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007, that displays a tree view showing permissions on objects for a user scoped to a Site hierarchy. It also has a second mode which will show the permission inheritance of objects within a Site hierarchy.

Sharepoint Access Checker Web Part – Home