Strausy's O365/SharePoint KB

I recently had a user state they could not publish an InfoPath form to a SharePoint Form library that was not setup for InfoPath Forms Services. Since that required an Enterprise CAL it was not enabled until a license was purchased. During the troubleshooting I walked through their form and verified it was set to the correct Compatibility level. I went into the Form Library that was created and verified "Open in Client Application" was also selected, but each time the error was that InfoPath couldn't find the server. Having reproduced this on several sites and even different web applications and several farms, I knew it had to be either proxy or network related. I've seen numerous post about that exact error, but could not pinpoint a fix. I progressed down the path of it being a proxy issue, a LAN setting, etc., but I was wrong! A big clue came when I notice the "New Document" was active even though I had not published a Form yet. When I clicked on i...

I recently had an issue where Spell Check was not working for any site, any site collection or any web app in SharePoint 2010. It also occurred in two different SharePoint farms. The error message was "The spelling check cannot be completed because there is no dictionary installed for the current language." and occurred in any list item or page where spell check was an option. Although you can enable/disable the Spell Checker feature in Central Admin in Manage Farm Features, it was already Activated. Deactivating and re-Activating did not resolve it. A few other posts I read indicated it may be a permissions issue relating to the SharePoint permission levels, but those turned out to be a dead end as well The ultimate fix was actually file permissions on the server. I did not have the local "Users" group granted Read access on the Program Files folder where SharePoint was installed. I granted that group this right, did and IISRESET an SharePoint Spell Chec...

I've had mixed results with pausing SharePoint Designer workflows based on a duration. Inevitably it will work a few times and then stop for no apparent reason when the pause duration ended. It could be the environment, a service pack level, or even a hotfix needing to be applied. I was using the "Collect Data from User" action in a workflow and I needed to update the Title and pause for a while so that the Task List's Related Content field matched. (more detail in the Background) Pausing for any duration did not work. It simply stated "Failed to run" after pausing. I did some research and found lots of hits on this, but nothing I could actually do. I didn't have physical access to the server to apply a hotfix or run any stsadm commands. So I tried a different approach as outlined below. 1) Added a status column on the first list, the one processing the information that the Task assignment workflow ran on 2) Modified my first workflow to on...

Recently I had a request. Secure SharePoint from people casually looking through the list of our sites. Well, the site in question wasn't public facing and anonymous access is turned off, so by default, you had to be authenticated to even see it. "Oh no, this user is an authenticated user, they just shouldn't see it".... which got me off on a rant about how making Active Directory insecure makes your applications that depend on it insecure as well. If you provide a generic account with a password that doesn't expire, you opened up a hole. Even worse, it was just one user out of hundreds of users. I've seen a lot of people talk about how you can jump through hoops to remove "NT AUTHORITY\authenticated users" from sites, how you can limit exposure to people adding it to your Visitors group and so on. Yeah, it works, but it is overkill in this instance. The easiest approach is Central Administration. Central Administration > Application Manag...

Recently a project I have been working on was to convert some existing forms to be used within SharePoint Forms Services/InfoPath Forms Services. The forms needed to have the user's Full Name instead of their logon, which is a relatively easy thing to pull out of the profiles imported in the Shared Service Provider. All went well until testing when I would occasionally receive Error 5566. I spent countless hours trying to troubleshooting. The environment was load balanced so I had to edit my host file to point to one of the 3 servers that may be causing it. I finally tracked it down to one of the three, but nothing in my research really seemed to work. The most common "solution" people had was to disable the loopback check in the registry, one I see way too often and one that is really a bad idea on a production system. More research pointed to the use of load balancers and double hop authentication problems. All of these didn't really seem to help and I won't...

As of recently, SharePoint is starting to take off here at my current employer. Good and Bad. Good is that it is my responsibility and I’m happy to see the usage take off like a jet plane. Bad because everyone is starting to use it all at once and they all want to “tweak” or “change” or “customize” all the things SharePoint does. Except there is one problem. They use those terms to describe what I would consider SharePoint development. Things they want are not built-in, require custom coding of web parts, extensive use of either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio. So what is the problem with that? 1) I’m not a developer. I have done custom pages, custom workflows, etc., but not rewriting SharePoint controls like the Contact Details web part. 2) These simple “tweaks”  are not simple. Heck, they don’t even know how to upload documents to SharePoint and they want to have the Rich Text Editor work like Word. In SharePoint 2007, that is not how it works. Back to the point, to cu...

Sometimes I’m just baffled by how SharePoint makes the simplest of things so difficult. Case in point is the lack of a link back to your SharePoint portal from your My Site. Why? Well, the SharePoint structure isn’t apparent to the average end user. They don’t know that each My Site is a separate Site Collection, but why do we need to punish them (and their laziness) and make it difficult to get back the portal? This can be solved various ways. Some tedious, some simple. This is the simplest way I have seen to do it. Launch the Central Administration URL. Go to the Shared Service Provider site specific to the My Sites (if you have more than one) Under “User Profiles and My Sites” select “Personalization site links” Add a New Item For the URL enter your Portal address, including the Default.aspx page Add a “#” symbol at the end. Enter a description and owner and your set. What does the # symbol do? It tells your browser to ignore anything after it. T...