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Recently, I had a user ask me about the an error they saw in the Workflow Information for a document. The library was using an out-of-the-box approval workflow and, after all the approvers had approved the document, the Workflow Information listed an Error event by user System Account with a description of “An error has occured in Approval”.

After some investigation, it turns out the error is caused by a configuration mismatch. There is a pair of settings, one in the document library, one in the workflow that must be matched otherwise this error will occur. In this particular case, the “require content approval” option in the document library was off while the “update the approval status” activity in the workflow was on.

Thankfully, the solution to this particular problem is fairly straightforward. Either turn on “require content approval” (using Document Library Settings > Versioning Settings) or turn off the “update the approval status” activity (using Document Library Settings > Workflow Settings > [select appropriate workflow] > Next button).

Changing the settings will prevent all future workflows from having this error; however, when the error occurs, the workflow stays running and changing the options after the fact, has no effect. I tried changing both options separately to see if the workflow would respond but it appears the only solution for running workflows is to terminate them (which changes the workflow status to cancelled).

One of the projects I’m involved with is setting up an anonymous portal site. As part of the site we decided to include a “Contact Us” form which we implemented as a standard SharePoint list. To allow anonymous access to the site, we allowed users to access the Entire Web site via Permissions > Settings > Anonymous Access. It turns out that giving anonymous access to the entire web site only allows anonymous users to view items in a list. It does not give permission to add/edit/delete items in a list. In hindsight, the help text for the anonymous access setting does actually tell you this if you read it closely but it wasn’t obvious at first:

Anonymous Access
Specify what parts of your Web site (if any) anonymous users can access. If you select Entire Web site, anonymous users will be able to view all pages in your Web site and view all lists and items which inherit permissions from the Web site. If you select Lists and libraries, anonymous users will be able to view and change items only for those lists and libraries that have enabled permissions for anonymous users.

Because we do actually want anonymous users to have access to the entire site, we ended up having to break permission inheritance for the list and then explicitly allow anonymous users to Add/Edit items as well as View items (selected by default) using List Settings > Permissions for this list > Settings > Anonymous Access.

For Reference, the server environment is SharePoint 2007 Enterprise (MOSS) on Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2008 with WSS/MOSS SP2.

Stumbled across an interesting situation today. A site admin asked how to turn on security trimming for the top navigation links on a SharePoint site. She had created several subsites and didn’t want the top nav tabs displayed if the user didn’t have access. She knew it could be done because she had been on other sites where it worked.

My first thought was “It just works, there is no ‘turn it on’ option”. So I went to the site to take a look. Sure enough, two of the four tabs displayed even if the user didn’t have access to those subsites. So I did some investigating and it turns out that when manually creating top navigation headings (using the Publishing feature navigation screen), if you use the full URL to the subsite, security trimming does not occur while if you use the relative URL to the subsite, security trimming does work. That’s rather interesting behaviour and it makes me wonder what other effects can happen when using full URLs vs relative URLs.

For Reference, the server environment is SharePoint 2007 Enterprise (MOSS) on Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005 with SP2 and the August 2009 CU. The client environment is Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP with Office 2007.

Since I’ve hit this issue twice now, thought I’d drop a post for myself so I don’t have to Google yet again for it.

Problem: Unable to activate publishing and standard features in a site. This occurs whether activating the features manually or via content deployment.

Solution: Re-install Service Pack 2 and any applicable Cumulative Updates using the standalone installation packages.

Cause: If the IIS Role is added by SharePoint setup, the Service Pack is not applied correctly.

Symptoms:

• Unable to activate Publishing feature
• Unable to activate Standard feature
• File Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.dll in <12 hive>\ISAPI has the wrong version number

Environment:

• SharePoint 2007 SP2 (slipstreamed)
• Windows 2008 and 2008 R2

Links:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/8b96663a-ed87-4ab4-bd59-33c7245a76d4

- Dave

Here’s a list of default databases created in a full MOSS 2007 farm installation. I needed somewhere to keep this information so I wouldn’t have to keep figuring it out and thought others might find this useful too.

• SharePoint_Config : Configuration Database used by the farm
• SharePoint_AdminContent : Content Database used for the Central Administration web application
• WSS_Content : Content Database used for the Shared Services web application
• SharedServices1_DB : Shared Services Provider Database used for configuration settings in the SSP
• SharedServices1_Search_DB : Search Database used for the property store and crawler history
• WSS_Search : Search Database used for the search server

You also end up with a content database for the MySites web application but I don’t believe it’s different from a regular content database.

- Dave

Interestingly enough, I just noticed that my last post was on my birthday. What was I doing blogging on my birthday??? Anyway, that aside, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything and that’s because it’s been awhile since I’ve seriously done anything technical. Naturally, I can’t stop tinkering, that just doesn’t happen when you love technology. But between Christmas holidays and the birth of my third child, I’ve been otherwise occupied.

However, as exciting as all that is, it’s time to get back to into the thick of things! Once again, I’ll be looking at SharePoint 2010. I’ve been working with SharePoint 2007 WCM lately at work and, to be honest, it’s a less than delightful experience. To make matters worse, I’m not doing any of the actual development work, I’m merely responsible for configuration and troubleshooting in a somewhat consultative capacity. What that translates to is I get stuck with all the crap and none of the fun. Ah well, such is the corporate world.

My ultimate goal is to build a small farm (in my basement) that my colleagues and I can use to work on SharePoint 2010 development. As a first step towards that, I’ve decided to create a standalone SP2010 virtual image to gain some practice in installing this beast and see how performance will be when connecting to my network remotely. I have some concern that it will be sluggish as my internet connection is ADSL.

For whatever reason, I didn’t bother to find a nice step-by-step guide this time around. Instead I’m winging it. Already this has been quite interesting. My planned configuration for this dev image is:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 x64
• SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP
• SharePoint 2010 Beta
• Office 2010 Beta
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2

So far I have the OS installed, SharePoint installed but not configured and SQL Server installed. I’ll try to keep a running story going of what happens but with my time being somewhat limited these days, I tend to fire off installs and then go do something else. Since I’m currently configuring AD DS and DNS on the VM and it’s taking some time (which I’m really hoping is normal) I figured I should post an update. Stay tuned for more…

- Dave

For the last couple days, Winnipeg has been home to the last stop for the Canadian tour of the Microsoft Tech Days 2009. I spent the first day in the Purple Port track sessions on Collaboration. Since I work almost exclusively with SharePoint in my job, I thought this would be a good idea. On the second day, I attended the sessions in the Orange track on Microsoft development.

First I’ll address the SharePoint stuff. For the most part, the sessions were a complete waste of my time. Now it’s not that they weren’t any good and I did pick up some marginally useful stuff in one of the sessions on Versioning and Upgrades but overall, the content was pretty basic for me. That said, I think most of the attendees saw some value judging by the questions being asked. Maybe my perspective is skewed but I was expecting the topics to be a little more technical.

On the development side, things were much better. Although I am vaguely familiar with the topics covered (ASP.NET MVC, SOLID and REST), I am by no means well versed in these areas and I found the presentations to be much more informative. In particular, I really enjoyed David Wesst’s presentation on Building RESTful Services with WCF. Not only was the content good, Wessty was rather entertaining.

It wasn’t all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows though. Pretty much every demo had “issues”. I’m sure the problems had a variety of causes but I know when I do demos at work, I’ve been able to plan ahead enough that I can deal with most problems without resorting to fumbling around trying to get it going. At any rate, some of the presenters were better at smoothing this over than others and that helped.

Overall, the event was very well run and the event staff were both friendly and helpful. The meals were decent except for the coffee (which was pretty bad) and the rooms were suitably comfortable. One thing I found particularly impressive was the use of Twitter. For the most part, the only people tweeting were the presenters but I had tweeted about being disappointed with the first session I had attended and one of the presenters replied asking if there was anything he could do to help. How awesome is that?!? This was definitely a worthwhile event to attend and a couple days out of the office is always nice (although I dread the thought of what I’m coming back to). When this rolls around next year, I highly recommend attending.

- Dave

After all the pain I went through getting my dev image running, I was jonesing to try out the SharePoint 2010 Beta. Of course, I work during the day so I had to wait until I got home to even think about it. It didn’t help that a couple of my friends are feeling the same way but have laptops so they can tinker whenever/wherever they like. By the time I got home and through dinner and past taxi duty (it was hockey practice night for the boy) I was not in the mood for any surprises. Naturally, this didn’t stop me from firing up the install and promptly getting the “this OS not supported” error. Thankfully I was expecting that so no big deal. I hit up Google and promptly found someone who’d been here before me. I followed the advice, went to the MSDN article and heeded the warning to “read it completely”. Damn good advice there!

I ran through the article step-by-step doing everything it said. Installing everything it said. It all went pretty smoothly except for the hotfix in Step 3.5. Damn thing took nearly a half hour to download. Microsoft really should have a better connection to it’s hotfix download servers. Anyway, I started up the Configuration Wizard and let it chug for a bit then took a quick bio break only to come back to a “Configuration Failed” message. It claimed that it couldn’t do something or other to a web.config file because it was in use. I did what any self-respecting SharePoint Guy would. I ran the wizard again…

It quickly skipped to task 5 of 10 and proceeded to chug along for a bit before failing on task 8 with a different error. They say the third times a charm so I ran the wizard yet again. Alas, no charms were had this time. It failed at the same point. Back to Google I headed. First hit had a link to an answer. Unfortunately, it’s a “known issue” and a hotfix will be released to the public shortly. I decided to try the workaround anyway, just because I’m crazy like that and I really wanted to see SP 2010 in action. Naturally I saved a copy of the original file and will fix it later once the hotfix is released. Anyway, back to the wizard again and this time, finally, it completed successfully.

I still need to install Visual Studio 2010 and the SharePoint 2010 SDK but it’s nice just to get a look at the new version running. Stay tuned for more news from the SharePoint 2010 development front. There’s exciting times ahead!

- Dave

Update

The link with the workaround only talks about it vaguely so here’s the details:

• Find the client.config file at “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\SearchService\client.config” (assuming a stock install)
• Save a backup copy for when the hotfix is released
• Remove the “allowInsecureTransport” attribute on line 47 and 96 (iirc)
• Restart the config wizard

I decided to try out the new Windows 7 feature of native boot to VHD. With the public drop of the SharePoint 2010 Beta, I decided I wanted to keep my development stuff completely separate from my normal computer usage. The native boot to VHD seemed like a good fit. Somewhere down the line I’ll put together a proper set of virtual images for playing around with SharePoint 2010 but I thought it’d be nice to see how it runs on bare metal.

Anyway, from browsing around, I figured this would be a piece of cake. Boy was I wrong. I started off with Scott Hanselman’s excellent article. I booted from the Win7 install DVD, followed the bouncing code ball and created a virtual disk. This was the point I first ran into problems. Somehow, I couldn’t figure out how to “exit and go back to the setup window”. I ended up rebooting a few times and learning a bit about DISKPART via the help command. On it’s own, that’s not a bad thing but I was trying to do something else, not learn about command line disk tools. Anyway, I eventually figured out how to get the vdisk attached and recognized by setup but it just wouldn’t work. After a bit of browsing and reading, I found one line in a Windows 7 Hacker article on doing this that stated that trying to do a fresh install to the VHD just won’t work. You’d think I’d have expected this since pretty much every article went from DISKPART to using an existing image (in a variety of ways).

So now I had to come up with an image. As most people know by now, Windows Virtual PC doesn’t support 64-bit guest OSes. I already knew that and had been playing with Sun VirtualBox in preparation for my full farm simulation images. For some reason, VirtualBox disk images have a .vdi extension instead of .vhd. I haven’t had time to research why this is, but I didn’t want to take any chances so I created the vhd using Windows 7 Disk Management, then added it to the VirtualBox media manager and proceeded to install Windows 7. Easy peasy.

Now that I had an image, I needed to add it to the Boot Manager. Since I’d read all those articles on doing this, it was fairly simple. Using the Hanselman article referenced above (I’d printed it out), I followed the steps in an administrator command prompt then rebooted. Voila! I had two choices now and happily chose my new dev image.

BAM! BSOD! Crap…

In my haste to get this working, I hadn’t really thought through what I was doing and forgot to do the sysprep on the image before trying to native boot. Since the hardware was real now and radically different from the virtualized hardware, it just didn’t work. It took me awhile to figure this out though, especially since I couldn’t read the BSOD before reboot. I did manage to get a partial read of it through good timing with my BlackBerry camera but it said something about a virus which didn’t really help.

So, back to the image in VirtualBox and time to do a sysprep. Fire that up and get a fatal error. Google to the rescue again. This time I had to turn off the Windows Media Player Networking Service. Did that, set it running and soon enough I had a sysprepped image. Tried the native boot, and lo and behold it’s working! Yay me…

Unfortunately, this took an entire evening so I didn’t have time to get to the SharePoint 2010 Installation. At any rate, although I blew a lot of time on this, it was mostly my fault for trying to be different. If you’re looking to do this for yourself, there’s only a few things you really need to do:

1. create an image and sysprep it (use VirtualBox, VMWare or the Windows AIK)
2. BCDEDIT the boot menu
3. use it!

I can hardly wait to play with the SharePoint 2010 beta – news on that shortly…

- Dave

I use virtual machines for all my development work. One of the projects I was working on was based around a simple desktop application so I had setup a Windows XP image with Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1. I had used the same product key as the host machine since it would be running on the same hardware. When I moved it over to my new machine, the Genuine Advantage thing kicked in and started whining.

Rather than dealing with that, I decided to give Windows 7 XP Mode a try. So far, it seems pretty good. It appears to run faster than a discrete VM, it’s well integrated with the operating system and it automatically recognized all my drives, both internal and external. One thing I found disappointing was the number of updates required. I’ve come to expect to spend a significant amount of time patching the OS when building VMs but I didn’t anticipate doing the same with a newly downloaded VM. All in all though, a very positive experience. If you have native XP software that you need to run, this is definitely the way to go.

- Dave