How to Prevent Zip file Corruption in Sharepoint 2003

A lot of people have problems with zip files when they are placed in a Sharepoint Document Library. They beome corrupted when downloaded. The cause of this problem is not Sharepoint, but IIS. The following document describes the steps to be taken to reconfigure IIS in order to support zip files without corruption: http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads/How%20to%20Prevent%20Zip%20file%20Corruption%20in%20Sharepoint%202003.pdf

Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide v1.8

Back from a week snowboarding in Val Thorens and it is time for a new post!!

Microsoft has just released a new WSS Administrator's Guide. It has received version number 1.8.

"Version 1.8
This version of the Administrator's Guide includes updates about using Windows SharePoint Services with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Windows Server R2. The following topics are new:

• Installing and Configuring ASP.NET
• Migrating from WMSDE to SQL Server 2005

Updated topics include the following:

• Backing Up and Restoring Databases by Using the SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 Tools
• Backing Up and Restoring Web Sites
• Backup and Restore Options for Windows SharePoint Services
• Changing the Application Pool Identity for a Virtual Server
• Configuring Two Virtual Servers to Host the Same Content
• Hardware and Software Requirements
• Installation Considerations for Windows SharePoint Services
• Installation Points for Windows SharePoint Services
• Installing and Using Service Packs for Windows SharePoint Services
• Introducing Windows SharePoint Services
• Managing and Customizing Search
• Managing Content Databases
• Managing Sites and Subsites
• Managing the Configuration Database
• Migrating and Upgrading Web Sites
• Migrating from WMSDE to SQL Server 2000
• Preparing Front-End Web Servers for Windows SharePoint Services
• Remote SQL Server Deployment
• Security Considerations for Server and Site Configurations
• Separate Active Directory Directory Service Organization Unit Deployment
• Server Farm Scalable Hosting Mode Deployment
• Single Server Deployment
• Troubleshooting Other Issues
• Upgrade Considerations
• What's New in Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2

This download contains information about managing Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, including:

• Planning
• Deployment Scenarios
• Installation
• Security
• Configuration
• Administration
• Backup and Migration
• Maintenance
• Customization
• Troubleshooting
• Reference "

The guide can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a637eff6-8224-4b19-a6a4-3e33fa13d230&displaylang=en

Checking site usage analysis

I have recently noticed that on one of our Sharepoint environments the usage analysis processing was not running on one virtual server.To solve this issue I found the following article on the Microsoft site: Usage Analysis Tools in SharePoint Products and Technologies

To check if the usage analysis processing is running for a specific virtual server use the following command:
stsadm -o getproperty -pn job-usage-analysis -url http://<virtual server URL>

To configure the usage analysis processing use:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-usage-analysis -pv “daily between hh:mm:ss and hh:mm:ss” -url http://<servername>

After setting this property, the usage analysis processing worked fine again.

Problems with installing WSS SP2

Some months ago a customer wanted to install all missing patches on two of our Sharepoint environments. One of the missing patches was Windows Sharepoint Services Service Pack 2 (WSS SP2). Unfortunately the admin that was installing the patches wasn't aware that the SP shouldn't have been installed. During the installation of the SP something went wrong, I am not exactly sure what, causing WSS to be uninstalled instead of upgraded. This resulted in a broken Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 installation. The Sharepoint Portal Administration service wouldn't start anymore, the Central Admin virtual server was gone, the ISAPI filter in IIS was gone and the files in the "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions" folder were also gone.

The only error messages I got were:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* System log:
Source: Service Control Manager
Event ID: 7000
Description: The SharePoint Portal Administration service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Application log:
Source: .NET Runtime
Event ID: 0
Description: The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( .NET Runtime ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: .NET Runtime version 1.1.4322.2300- spsadmin.exe - Common Language Runtime Debugging Services: Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.

Process id=0x4d0 (1232), Thread id=0x1684 (5764).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The strange thing is that the eventlog indicated that the SP had been installed correctly: "Installation Successful: Windows successfully installed the following update: Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2 (KB887624)"

I have no clue if this might have been of any influence on the problem, but the problems occured when WSS SP2 was installed using Microsoft Update on a small (1 server) and a medium farm (2 servers). A large farm (3 servers) on which the WSS SP2 was installed at the same time in the same way was upgraded correctly.

The only solution to repair the environments was:

• Manually uninstall Sharepoint Portal Server (repair and uninstall failed with an error message)
• Remove the C:\Program Files\Sharepoint Portal Server folder
• Remove the SPSAdmin, SPSAlert and MSSharepointPSSearch services (e.g. via XNet - www.kixtart.org)
• Remove the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Sharepoint Portal Server registry key
• Remove the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Sharepoint Portal Server registry key
• Remove the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 item from Add/Remove Programs via the registry
• Reinstall SPS2003
• Do NOT use the old config database, but create a new one
• Restore the portals by using the existing databases
• Restore team site virtual servers by extending new ones (create new database), add the old database and then remove the newly created database
• Reinstall all webparts, styles, themes, etc

After performing these steps, one of our environments refused to index the portal and WSS sites. After consulting and troubleshooting with Microsoft, I ended up with reinstalling the entire environment.

I hope you won't encounter the same problems as I have, but in case you do, the above instructions will work to restore your environment. It has taken me about three days to fix something somebody else broke in 30 minutes.

Default values of webpart properties

When you add a webpart to a page, the "Allow Close" checkbox is automatically checked. This enables the users to close a webpart. Most users don't know how to retrieve this closed webpart and call the helpdesk, causing extra calls.

About a month ago a customer asked me if it is possible to uncheck the "Allow Close" checkbox by default. I went on a big Internet search and found the following solutions:

1. Add locklayout="true" to zone declaration
2. Change the webparts dwp file by adding tags

Add locklayout="true" to zone declaration
<WebPartPages:WebPartZone runat="server" Title="loc:TitleBar" ID="TitleBar" LockLayout="true" AllowPersonalization="false">

Specifies whether or not Web Parts within the zone can be added, deleted, resized, or moved. The LockLayout property works the same regardless of whether the Web Part Page is in personal or shared view. If set to True, the specific Web Part properties for each Web Part in the zone that are affected are: Zone (ZoneID), Part Order (PartOrder), Visible on Page (IsVisible), Height (Height), Width (Width), Allow Close (AllowRemove), and IsIncluded (the Close command on the Web Part menu). Other Web Part properties are not affected. If set to False, the Web Part properties determine whether modifications can be made (along with the appropriate site permissions). This behaviour is not desireable. I only want the Allow Close to be changed.

Change the webparts dwp file by adding tags
It is possible to add some tags to the webparts dwp file, which define a default value for a certain property. These tags are:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<WebPart xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2">
    <Title>Content Editor Web Part</Title>
    <FrameType>Default</FrameType>
    <Description>Use for formatted text and images.</Description>
    <IsIncluded>true</IsIncluded>
    <ZoneID>Left</ZoneID>
    <PartOrder>3</PartOrder>
    <FrameState>Normal</FrameState>
    <Height />
    <Width />
    <AllowRemove>false</AllowRemove>
    <AllowZoneChange>true</AllowZoneChange>
    <AllowMinimize>true</AllowMinimize>
    <IsVisible>true</IsVisible>
    <DetailLink />
    <HelpLink />
    <Dir>Default</Dir>
    <PartImageSmall />
    <MissingAssembly />
    <PartImageLarge>/_layouts/images/mscontl.gif</PartImageLarge>
    <IsIncludedFilter />
</WebPart>

When the tag "<AllowRemove>false</AllowRemove>" is added to the dwp file, the "Allow Close" checkbox is unchecked (for that webpart) by default!

Blog by the Sharepoint Development team

The Sharepoint Development team has just (like the IE Development team) created their own blog.

"SharePoint Team Blog - A blog from the SharePoint Development Team

We thought it’d be a good idea to create a broad SharePoint blog, where we can talk about topics across the SharePoint family, details on the next versions we will release later this year with Office 12 and Windows Server, insights into our decisions/process, and what we are learning from seeing customers and partners use SharePoint to help them be more effective. That’s the purpose of this blog."

The blog can be found at: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/

New beta version of SPStatus (version 1.1) released

"The SharePoint Status Report extracts hyperlinks directly from the SharePoint system and then checks the status of each hyperlink. The hyperlinks are extracted from all Portal Areas, Links Lists and Content Editor Web Parts, located in the Portal and Team Sites. The link status is then displayed in a detailed report that allows you to resolve and manage any issues that have been detected.

Displayed below is a typical SharePoint Status Report and you can see from this report that the status of the links is obvious. As you find broken links then you can use the “Area” and “Link Edit” columns to update or delete the link."


More information: http://james.milne.com/SPStatus/default.htm
Download v1.1: http://james.milne.com/SPStatus/download/

New iFilters released

JPEG IFilter 1.0 Released
(PRLEAP.COM) AimingTech Company announces the version 1.0 of JPEG IFilter for Microsoft Indexing Service. The software component is free for non-commercial use and 30-day trial for commercial use.
JPEG IFilter is a content indexing filter for JPEG (JFIF) image files. The IFilter is compatible with indexing services based on the Microsoft Search technology: Microsoft Indexing Service, Windows Desktop Search, Microsoft SharePoint Portal. JPEG IFilter extends the services capabilities to index the JPEG files (extensions JPG, JPEG, JPE, JFIF) and to perform content search for them.
http://www.prleap.com/pr/18549/

Audio Video IFilter 1.0 Released
Audio Video IFilter is a content indexing filter for WMA, WMV and MP3 files. The IFilter is compatible with all services based on the Microsoft Search technology: Microsoft Indexing Service, Windows Desktop Search, Microsoft SharePoint Portal etc.
http://press.xtvworld.com/article7900.html

Virtual Server 2005 issues

Some of the Sharepoint environments at our customer are installed on Virtual Server 2005. After installation of Virtual Server 2005 the network connection of the host system was dropped when files were copied from the host system to the guest system. The only solution to get back up and running was a reboot of the host system (and therefore also the guest systems).To resolve this issue I ran into the following solution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888750/

The resolution involves adding a registry key which disables "Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) segmentation offloading".This functionality is not fully implemented in Virtual Server 2005, which causes the connection to be dropped. By disabling the functionality on the host system, the problems were gone.


I also found an update for Virtual server 2005 which is supposed to improve the performance. Especially with Windows Server 2003 SP1.

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Updated Additions: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a963433c-193b-41ac-af6e-ab7ab2db8541&DisplayLang=en

Overview of the Updated Additions: When you upgrade a guest operating system that is running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), you may experience decreased performance in comparison with the original-release version of Windows Server 2003 as described here. This issue occurs because the Virtual Machine Additions included with Virtual Server 2005 does not have the performance optimizations that are required for Windows Server 2003 with SP1. Virtual Server 2005 was released many months before the release of Windows Server 2003 SP1.

More troubleshooting information about the Explorer View

Over the past few months I ran into several problems with the Explorer View (like http://share-point.blogspot.com/2006/01/sharepoint-explorer-view-does-not-work.html). I have gathered the following information about the Explorer View:

• A user was not able to copy documents via drag and drop from the Explorer View to another folder (desktop or other Explorer View). When he clicked the document and dragged it to another folder, normally the mouse pointer changes into a drag and drop icon. But that didn't happen. He couldn't drag and drop any document.To investigate the issue I added the site url to the Trusted Sites and tried it again. This time the drag and drop now did work. I compared the settings of both zones and changed the settings of the Local Intranet Zone to see which setting was causing the problem. It turned out that the option "Miscellaneous>Launch Programs and Files in an IFRAME" was set to "Prompt" by default in the Local Intranet Zone and set to "Enabled" in the Trusted Sites Zone. After changing this setting to "Enabled" in the Local Intranet Zone the drag and drop functionality worked again.
• Cannot open a Web folder document that is located on a Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server-based server - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329919/en-us
• Windows XP SP2, if the Internet Explorer Advanced setting 'Show Friendly HTTP Errors' is unchecked, Internet Explorer may show a pop-up error and terminate the request to fill the iFrame. Check the 'Show Friendly HTTP Errors' setting again.

Some extra info provided by Daniel McPherson (MS SPS Rapid Response Engineer)

• Issues with the Explorer ViewFQDN and not in Intranet Zone - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303650
• URL Length - Limited to 260, depends on patch level, KB892211

- What components are involved?

• WebClient Service (OS Windows 2003/XP)
• Web Folders (Office and SharePoint Client) - There is an update http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=17c36612-632e-4c04-9382-987622ed1d64%26displaylang=en%2520

Default webparts are listed as Untitled in a site based on the Meeting Workspace template

I just ran into the problem that webparts in the webpart library on a site based on the Meeting Workspace template were listed as Untitled. An article on the Microsoft site gave the solution:

SYMPTOMS
When you create a new Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Web site that uses a Workspace Meeting template, and you want to add Web Parts to the Web site, you may find that some Web parts appear "Untitled" (without the quotation marks) when you view the list of available Web parts. For example, when you click Modify This Workspace, click Add Web Parts, click Create Lists, and then click Browse, five of the Web parts that are listed under Web Part List in the Add Web Parts pane appear as "Untitled" (without the quotation marks). You cannot add these Web parts to the Web site.

CAUSE
The problem occurs because the path of the Web parts in the Onet.xml file that is used in Meeting Workspace templates is incorrect. The WebPartPopulation section of the Onet.xml file contains the following incorrect path:
..\STS\lists\wplib\dwp

The path is incorrect because the path contains two "." characters (without the quotation marks), and "." characters (without the quotation marks) are restricted characters. Therefore, the instantiation of the ghost file fails. A limitation exists in the provision process for modules where the Setup path can only refer to files that are located in subfolders of the current site template folder.

SOLUTION
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839877/en-us

Retrieve Home link in the Top Navigation

Source: http://domdeb.poon.ca/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=20

"So you've played with the homepage in your WSS site and now the Home link is gone from all your pages. You can get it back without manually editing the top navigation area of all your pages, with the help of FrontPage.

• Open your site in FrontPage 2003.


• At the bottom of the Web Site pane, click on the Navigation link. This will switch to the Navigation Pane view.


• In the Navigation Pane, right-click on SharePoint Top Navbar icon and select Add Existing Page... in the selction menu.


• In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, select the desired page, click OK to accept the selection.


• Drag the new page to the correct location in the top navigation and rename the title as appropriate.

Congratulations, you successfully saved your top navigation.

Even though I don't render the standard top navigation on this site anymore, it does still make a difference when I'm navigating through admin pages. I usually type in the url to the usage stats page, my most common admin page for viewing. I've lost the Home link on all these admin pages, making a little difficult to move around. A minor annoyance that I ignored until a collegue did the same thing to a production team site today. That prompted me to hunt around FrontPage for a solution, something simple but not entirely obvious either.

On a final note, I'm really not a fan of using FrontPage to modify SharePoint pages. I'm still unnerved by some automatic changes it makes to your markup, much less the markup itself. Even so, there's no denying the fact that FrontPage is a powerful tool for making SharePoint customizations, modifications that seem impossible without it. Managing the top navigation is just one example."

Copy Document Libraries and Lists to other sites.......use SMove

Do you want to copy document libraries or lists to other sites?? You have several options, but the easiest one is using SMove. Just select the document library/list and drag it to another site. There just drop it and SMove starts copying. Real easy!!

More info?? See http://www.triplewood.com/triplewood/html/SPUtils.aspx

How to deal with "Orphaned Sites"

I just ran into an orphaned site. The site was listed in the stsadm enumsites as "The Web site that is referenced here is not in the configuration database". Attempting to create a new site with the same name (and afterwards removing it again) failed with the message "Site with that name already exists". Deleting it with stsadm was also useless.

A little "google-ing" gave me some links to the blog of Keith Richie, a MS employee. He posted two articles about orphaned sites and how to deal with them:

Part 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/krichie/archive/2005/10/25/484889.aspx
Part 2: http://blogs.msdn.com/krichie/archive/2005/10/31/487365.aspx

Worked like a charm!!

Sharepoint tips from Andre Kieft

Andre Kieft (MS SPS Support Engineer) posted 31 tips for Sharepoint on his blog "Share-Port":

Tips from working on the SharePoint Force - http://blogs.technet.com/akieft/archive/2005/11/30/415336.aspx

Sharepoint Explorer View does not work when the Managed Path name contains a "/"

When a managed path has a slash ("/") in its name, the Explorer View in the team sites which are created in this managed path will not work.

For example a managed path "sites/department1" has a team site "test". When you try to view a document library using the Explorer View, a "Page Cannot Be Displayed" error message is displayed.

My first post

Hello all,

This is the first post at my Sharepoint "Share-Point Blog". I will try to post all kinds of usefull Sharepoint tips and tricks and at the same time build some kind of knowledge base. If you have any usefull information.....let me know!

CU!

Yorick