Outlook 2010 Social Connector – No Items to show in this view
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems
Upgraded to Outlook 2010 a while back and was interested in the Social Connector but for some reason whenever I opened the People Pane I always got a message displayed “No Items to show in this view” rather than the email threads etc that everyone else saw. Well, yesterday I took a 10 minute break from the SharePoint 2010 upgrade and managed to get to the bottom of it.
After checking that I was using Cached Exchange Mode and that Search was working I ran pstscan and sure enough there were some errors. Deleting my .ost file and restarted Outlook and as if by magic suddenly everything worked.
Hurrah!
Tags: error, office 2010
SharePoint Designer 2010 loses my changes when using Customize XSLT
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under SharePoint, Software Development
Having created a view in SharePoint 2010 I now wanted to modify the way the groupings were displayed.
Opening the view in SharePoint 2010 I could see a ribbon option labeled Customize XSLT which enabled me to edit the way that the view was displayed by editing the XSL and in SharePoint Designer 2010 everything looked fine but the original version of the view always displayed in the web browser.
Eventually I remembered coming across the ddwrt:ghost attribute and changing it from ddwrt:ghost=”show” to ddwrt:ghost=”" resolved the issue.
Hopefully the Combined Knowledge Developer training I am doing in December will help reduce the amount of time I spend on these SharePoint oddities.
Tags: SharePoint 2010
Debugging mode in SharePoint 2010 – set customerrors mode to off in web.config
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems, SharePoint, Software Development
Whilst trying to debug a Feature Receiver in Visual Studio 2010 I kept receiving the standard application error suggesting that if I wanted to view the details of the error that I set the customErrors to Off.
That’s odd I thought I had already done that and a visit to the web.config in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80 showed that this was the case.
A can of coke and a cup of coffee later I worked out that there is also a web.config in c:\program files\common files\microsft shared\web server extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS and a quick change to that web.config and the error details were now displaying.
Tags: error, SharePoint 2010, Visual Studio 2010
SharePoint 2010 User Profile Synchronization Service unable to change account name
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems, How To, SharePoint, Software
Even though I thought I followed the instructions in the fantastic Spencer Harbar Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization I went to start the User Profile Synchronization Service but the account name was dimmed/greyed out and I could not change it from the NETWORK SERVICE account!
After lots of messing around I realised where I had gone wrong and thought I would blog about it in case anyone else made the same mistake - you might find that you have installed SharePoint 2010 as a standalone server in which case User Profile Synchronization doesn’t work. Reinstall as a farm server and you will probably find configuring the User Profile Synchronization service suddenly becomes so much easier.
Tags: sharepoint 2007
The form has been closed / The specified form cannot be found – SharePoint 2007
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems, SharePoint, Software Development
Having created my InfoPath 2007 Form, created my workflow in Visual Studio 2008 and clicked Deploy I found that my workflow went to In Progress but the Instantiation Form never displayed in SharePoint and all I got was a message “The form has been closed” on the screen. Looking in the log files I could see an error
Exception occurred during request processing. (User: MOSSDEV86\Administrator, Form Name: , IP: , Request: Form ID: , Type: InfoPathLocalizedException, Exception Message: The specified form cannot be found.)
Looking in Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Form Templates I could see my workflow, status ready and workflow enabled but I still kept getting “The form has been closed”. After a reasonable amount swearing and pulling out of hair I realised that the Form ID specified in Manage Form Templates was different to the one I used in my workflow.xml file. HOW?????
Well, I was saving my InfoPath form and look at the properties to get the URN and then publishing the file to get deployed with my code. What I hadn’t realised was that when you publish the form you then get a different URN!
REMEMBER: Use the URN from the published form and not from the saved one!!!
Tags: infopath 2007, sharepoint 2007, visual studio 2008, workflow
Windows Server 2008 disable Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under How To
Disable IE8 enhanced security on Windows Server 2008
Having managed to resolve my Win2k8 0×8007232B activation error I wanted to download some software from CodePlex to my new SharePoint development server but the download link would not work as it kept getting blocked by IE8.
In other versions of Windows you could remove the Enhanced Security through add/remove programs in the control panel but not on Win2k8.
I eventually tracked it down to the Configure IE ESC option in the Security Information section of Server Manager. Restarted IE and everything was as I needed.
Tags: internet explorer, windows server
Windows Server 2008 Activation Error 0x8007232B
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems
When I went to activate a new install of Windows Server 2008 R2 I received an error 0x8007232B. I install Win2k8 on a fairly regular basis and knew I had come across this error before but some of the Google results started talking about Vista and MAK keys and volume license agreements and I was sure that these weren’t the answer I was looking for.
In the end I just happened to enter the product key again and try activating and it worked!
Thinking about it I hadn’t used my usual ISO image so I guess that might explain why I don’t usually get the error. Apparently you might also see errors relating to DNS name does not Exist and although I experience it on Windows Server 2008 you can also get it on Vista. Of course this might not resolve your issue but it’s great to hear if it did.
Tags: error, vista, windows server
VPN Error: This connection requires an active Internet Connection – Windows Vista
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems, How To
- Windows Vista VPN Error
When I try to connect to VPN on my Vista PC I click on “Connect To” and the VPN connection has a cross next to it and an error that reads “This connection requires an active Internet Connection”. For ages I have just been using a workaround that involves going into “Manage Network Connections” and connecting from there instead but it was getting on my nerves and after about 15 minutes of trying I managed to resolve the problem for myself and I have to be honest involved some luck in finding a hidden menu bar.
Instructions:
-
Open the control panel
Hidden network menu bar and advanced settings dalog
-
Click Network and Internet, click Network and Sharing Center, and then click Manage network connections.
OR if you are using Classic View
Click Network and Sharing Center, and then click Manage network connections. -
Open the Organize menu option and select Layout and then menu bar (This was the hidden bit. Did you know there was a menu bar?).
- You should now see a menu bar with an Advanced menu item. Click on the Advanced Settings item from the Advanced menu.
- In the Adapters and Bindings tab make sure that Local Area Connection is at the top. The chances are if you have installed the Loopback Adapter or virtual machine software (Sun xVM Virtualbox in my case) then that adapter is the top one.
- Reboot PC and try again.
This post is on my blog to remind myself how I got around the problem but I would be really interested to hear if this worked for you or even if it didn’t as your experience might help others.
jZip – a free Winzip alternative/7-Zip with a nice GUI
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Software
** WARNING **
I noticed today (7th July 2009) that the jZip installer seems to have changed and it is easy to get extra items such as the Yahoo toolbar installed and your web browser default page changed when you might not want it be. I still consider the application to be good but I do not appreciate the way the installer works so have removed the download link from this post.
In the past I have offered 7-Zip as an alternative to people but the user interface seems to put them off.
7-Zip is certainly an excellent compression tool but when offered the choice I think most people just want to quickly compress the file and aren’t actuallty worried if program A provides 10% better compression over program B. People feel more comfortable with WinZip and so 7-Zip is often put to one side.
jZip GUI
Today, I installed a program called jZip which they claim is based on 7-Zip technology but it has a nicer GUI. jZip can create and extract from zip, tar, gzip and 7zip file formats and I like the ability to extract from RAR and ISO formats as well (I now don’t need to install an ISO reader). Licensing is really simple – it’s free (they have stated they would like to keep it free) and there is only one version (no jZip Pro, jZip enterprise or jZip Express versions!) so for the majority of people I deal with there is no longer any reason to use WinZip.
European SharePoint Best Practices Conference
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under SharePoint
Last week I attended the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference in London and was really impressed with the quality of the speakers, the venue and the amazing amount of organizaton that must have gone into putting the conference on. Well done Combined Knowledge and everyone else involved – I certainly hope to be back for the next one.
I plan to write some posts based on notes I took during the conference. These are mainly to help me remember things but I hope that they might be of interest to you as well. I will start with the Keynote presentation…
The keynote presentation was given by SharePoint Joel and it was a good effort involving a Monty Python “killer bunny” and some good points about how to achieve SharePoint success. Joel described SharePoint as hot plastic where you need to plan your mold because once set making changes to SharePoint isn’t going to be easy and I think it is fair to use this for describing SharePoint Infrastructure (aaargh! the frustration!!!) but I don’t think it is a good description for SharePoint itself which I would consider to be far more flexible. If I had to make a criticism of Joels keynote I would say it would be that he focused too much on a “traditional IT” view of Sharepoint rather than the benefits of SharePoint technology.
