Error occurred in deployment step Add Solution

Unlike what I’m telling about myself on my About page (this is a no-code blog), I shall write more and more development orientated posts :-). I have tried to deploy a solution with CAS policies directly from Visual Studio 2010 to SharePoint with the new SharePoint Developer Tools.

The Deploy failed with the error “error occurred in deployment step Add Solution: Property set method not found”

Thanks to my colleague Waldek Mastykarz this is resolved. Go to his blog here to see the solution.

Tags: SP2010, VS2010

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Output cache and load balancer problem

At the moment I am troubleshooting a very slow (response times of 10+ seconds monitored with Fiddler) responding SharePoint 2007 intranet at a customer.  At first we thought that the problems where caused by network traffic from SharePoint to SQL because this was routed through the load balancer (Windows 2008 NLB). We configured the route tables on the SharePoint servers but this only caused a slight improvement in performance.

We also saw that object and output cache were both not configured on the site collections. So we also configured both the cache options. Object cache with a size of 200MB per site collection and a refresh time of 600 seconds. Output cache was switched on with the verified cache profile option set to Intranet. Almost immediately after these configurations were done, the helpdesk received lots of phone calls by users. The users reported that it seemed that they were logged on as an other user. After switching off output cache this was solved.

This Technet article also describes the limitations of NLB combined with output caching:

When used with two or more Web servers, output caching might affect consistency. You can configure a cache profile not to check for updates for each request and, for example, configure the profile to ignore changes to the version of the Web page in the output cache until 60 seconds after the original page is updated. If you have two Web servers in your topology, and depending on the load balancer used to route the user’s request, a reader might see inconsistent content if the page is rendered by one server and then a later request is routed to a second server within that 60-second window.

Tags: Infrastructure, performance

View the original article here

SharePoint backup restore and virtualization support

At the moment I have to write a SharePoint backup and restore document and planning for my clients SharePoint farms. All together, production and non-production, there are 10 SharePoint farms.

At first I thought, this is a very straightforward document about what parts of SharePoint and/or file system to backup and restore. After some search queries on the internet I read that virtualization is also very important. I knew that already off course but I did not know what is or is not supported by Microsoft.

Some quotes on the internet:

“Do not use the Hyper-V snapshot feature on virtual servers that are connected to a SharePoint Products and Technologies server farm. This is because the timer services and the search applications might become unsynchronized during the snapshot process.”

“As a best practice, we recommend that you do not use the snapshot feature on virtual machines in a production environment.”

There are all sorts of SharePoint farms at the client. Complete virtual server farms, combined virtual and physical server farms and complete physical server farms. Considering this, there should also be different recovery scenarios. Maybe I will discuss the different scenarios is another article later on, but for the moment I will give you all the information I have read about virtualization support.

SharePoint farm Backup/Restore with VMware Snapshots: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010setup/thread/e5abf633-9023-4f24-a707-2680cced28e8
Virtualizing SharePoint Server 2007 Series:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/uksharepoint/archive/2009/02/26/virtualizing-sharepoint-series-introduction.aspx
Best practices for virtualization (SharePoint Server 2010):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh295699.aspx
Virtual machine guidance (SharePoint Server 2010):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621103.aspx

Update 12/22/2011

Resource Center Virtualization for SharePoint Server 2010:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff602849.aspx
Server Virtualization Validation Program:
http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm

Tags: backup & restore, Virtualization

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Converting SharePoint license trouble

At a customer I was building a demo site to convince the management of the power of SharePoint 2010. The plan was to show some fancy stuff with Visio Graphics Services, Infopath Forms, workflows etc. For this we needed, obviously, the Enterprise license. So I opened CA, browsed to the Manage service applications part to make a new Visio Graphics Service Application… The next image indicated this was not possible. My conclusion was that a Standard license was installed (duh).

But I’m stubborn and looked to the Upgrade and Migration part of CA because I was not sure that the Standard license was used at installation. The Convert License Type page showed me this:

Hmmmm…strange, I thought that the license type should show up here.

So I also looked at Upgrade and Migration > Enable Enterprise Features (see below, first image) and Enable Features on existing sites (below, second image).

The page “Enable features on existing sites” says that the Standard features can be enabled what should indicate that a Standard license is used, but the “Enable Enterprise features” page indicates the opposite. Confused…
So I wanted to know another way to check the license type. My colleague Waldek Mastykarz (http://blog.mastykarz.nl) told me to look into the registry on the SharePoint server at this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Registration\{90140000-110D-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Clicking on the key DigitalProductID indicated the license is a MOSS FIS Enterprise license (see below).

But…this should not be a reason for all the vague licensing information SharePoint shows. So Waldek found a kb article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2143810) about FIS licenses that do not activate all product features. When I executed the PowerShell commandlet for the GUID on the SharePoint server, one of the GUIDs from the kb article showed up. So all this indicated a (more or less) valid license was used, but it was too old.
The client will take further steps and will reinstall the SharePoint Farm with another license.

Tags: license, SP2010

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Move IIS7 root script

In my previous post I indicated that the VirtualDirectory Path of the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application in a configuration file was incorrect. I have found the source of this error.

Before I started the SP2010 installation I decided to move the inetpub directory to another drive. I searched for this on the internet and found a script to do this. Unfortunately there was an error in this script which added a second backslash (”\”) to the VirtualDirectory Path.

At first I did not know what caused this error so I searched in the registry. There I found the registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\InetStp) where IIS stores the location of the WWWROOT. (see below)

The double backslashes where caused by an error in the script that I used to move the inetpub directory from C: to D:. If you also used the moveIIS7root.bat script which I found here, you can download the correct version here. I made changes in lines 46 and 47 (changed %moveto%\inetpub to %moveto%inetpub).

UPDATE August 31, 2011

Also check the Advanced Settings in IIS per website (see below).

Here you also have to change the Physical Path (see below)

Tags: IIS, Registry, SP2010

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Timer service terminated unexpectedly error 7031 7024

Errors in the System log

Log Name:      SystemSource:        Service Control ManagerDate:          8/31/2011 11:53:35 AMEvent ID:      7031Task Category: NoneLevel:         ErrorKeywords:      ClassicUser:          N/AComputer:      Description:The SharePoint 2010 Timer service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 479 time(s). The following corrective actionwill be taken in 30000 milliseconds: Restart the service.Log Name:      SystemSource:        Service Control ManagerDate:          8/31/2011 11:53:35 AMEvent ID:      7024Task Category: NoneLevel:         ErrorKeywords:      ClassicUser:          N/AComputer:      Description:The SharePoint 2010 Timer service terminated withservice-specific error 2147500037 (0x80004005).

Both errors appeared every 3 minutes.

Cause

Well in our particular case a developer asked me to change the owstimer.exe.config file (and restart the timer service) to configure a specific timer job.

Solution

In this case, obvious, I think. Replacing the owstimer.exe.config file to its originally settings, which are:

Other causes/solutions:

When I searched the internet for solutions I also found this post by Yorick here. Problem was a missing GUID named folder and the solution recreating that folder. Check his blogpost if my solution did not solve anything for you.

Tags: error, SP2010, timer service

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SharePoint 2010 Document Management - Part 6

In this last part of my document management series I want to talk about workflow. You have three options for using workflow with documents in SharePoint:

Versioning settings - content approval workflowWorkflow settings - browser workflowSharePoint Designer 2010 workflow

Let's look a bit closer at these options.

You can activate content approval in the versioning settings menu. This enables a new column:

This document is only viewable by the author of the document and users with approval permissions. You have to create a new SharePoint group, or use a default group, with approval permission for this document library. The major downside of this approach is that there is no notification for the approvers. This will result in documents being in the approval status for a long time.

The second option is to create a new workflow through the workflow settings of the document library. There is the approval workflow that has the following description:

“Routes a document for approval. Approvers can approve or reject the document, reassign the approval task, or request changes to the document.”

You have a lot more options than the first workflow option:

You can give the workflow a name, select the task and history list and define the start options. Click at Next to see more options:

You can now assign the workflow to one or more users/groups, create a custom message and determine the duration options. This gives you a lot more flexibility in creating workflows. The major downside to this approach is that you cannot work with conditions. For example: You want to create a workflow task based at the type of document for a specific group. You cannot configure this with the browser workflows. This is were the power of SharePoint Designer will help you!

The last option I will discuss is workflow in SharePoint Designer. Let’s open the site and click Workflows in the navigation bar:

There are so many options here so this can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning. This is one of the reasons why end users should not use SharePoint Designer without proper training. There are a lot of topics on the Net about workflow in SharePoint Designer, I will just focus at creating a new workflow for our document library. Click List Workflow and select the document library. Give the workflow a name and description and you can start building your workflow:

You can now start building your own workflow from scratch. The great thing is that you have a lot of Conditions and Actions to enhance your workflow. The following links are really useful in finding your way through these conditions and actions:

Actions
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/workflow-actions-in-sharepoint-designer-2010-a-quick-reference-guide-HA010376961.aspx

Conditions
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/workflow-conditions-in-sharepoint-designer-2010-a-quick-reference-guide-HA010376962.aspx

Let’s say our document library contains a field Department, you can use the condition ‘If field equals value’ to assign the approval action to different approvers. The other great thing about SharePoint Designer is that you can create your own e-mail notifications or changes existing ones. I won’t discuss this in detail in this article but I am planning to dedicate an article to this subject soon!

I hope you've enjoyed my document management series and this last article. I want to end this series with my last section of tips and tricks.

Moving documents

The workflows described in this article are bound to one site, it is not possible to move documents to other sites. You need Visual Studio or Nintex Workflow for these type of actions.

Content type

Are you using the same document template on multiple sites? Do you need the same workflow for all the sites? Create a content type workflow.

E-mail notifications

You can use SharePoint Designer to create your own e-mail notifications. This means you can personalize it.

View the original article here