Fixing SharePoint

Since this is the backbone of SharePoint 2013 based workflows, I think Microsoft needs to make this application more mature and errors should be more clear and point to the root cause. Anyhow, that was just a suggestion, who cares. :) We have came across this error while it was working fine till yesterday. We removed the bindings and when it was needed to register the workflow again, this happened. Workflow Manager Error: WARNING: Overwriting existing scope named "SharePoint" in the workflow server. If another SharePoint farm was registered using this scope, that farm may not be able to continue working with the workflow server unless re-registered under another scope name. Register-SPWorkflowService : Failed to query the OAuth S2S metadata endpoint at URI ' https://mysitename.com/_layouts/15/metadata/json/1'.  Error details: 'An error occurred while sending the request.'. HTTP headers received from the server - ActivityId: 87239463-ea78-4ccc-81cd-a1ec0b903b...

Sometime after installing SharePoint 2013 and Visual Studio 2012 on top of it, you notice that SharePoint 2013 project templates are missing and you are not able to create a SharePoint 2013 project. However, its showing you the SharePoint 2010 project templates or in some cases it do not show anything. A little googling pointed out that I need to install "Microsoft Office Developer Tools". Alright, fine. But where to download it? Tried couple of ways like manual download, through Web Platform Installer and through another version of Visual Studio 2012 but nothing worked. Checking upon my Visual Studio information, it was showing that I have already installed it on my machine. I tried various ways but nothing worked until this  came into my way. Due to changes in Microsoft's download center structure, various download links have been changed or removed. As a result, the small packages like Office Developer Tools may have been moved, deleted or been made a part of its bigge...

Since there is no major updates in Workflow Manager installation process for last couple of years, the offline installation became really difficult. Microsoft recommends to install it through WPI  tool, however sometimes the online installation also becomes a nightmare. This is what happened recently. Problem Description: For one of our client, we had to prepare environment with following. SharePoint Server Enterprise 2019 Window Server 2019 Standard Workflow Manager 2013 As usual I followed the same installation guide which ran fine few weeks ago with another different environment but here we faced the below error while installing Workflow Manager Refresh 1.0 (CU2). "The product did not install successfully. Download file failed signature verification and may have been tampered with" Tried to run the setup multiple times but nothing helped. Checked all the available discussion threads on Microsoft's and other forums but nothing helped much. However I must thanks PeterFle...

Lesson Learned: Never leave your servers to automatically download and install the updates. We had a SharePoint farm where Workflow manager is configured on one of its server and rest of them are just using WFM client to connect with the server. Everything was running smooth until some updates got installed on the servers over night and the next morning Workflows stuck and start giving errors. As initial check, I verified SharePoint services and WFM services, noticed that the Service Bus Gateway service is struck at Starting state. This was very generic thing but at least a point to start thinking... Troubleshooting: 1. Tried manual restart, but no luck. 2. Tried Leaving and Joining the WFM Farm again. But the timeout error. Error message received during rejoining:  “Starting Service bus gateway on machine <servername> failed: timeout has expired and the operation has not been completed” 3. Tried ULS check and noticed below error. "  Service cannot be started. Micr...

New year, new challenges...! I'll try to be quick and to the point for this post. For one of our clients, we have FBA implemented on their portals with custom SQL database. When we login with a user account, it works fine. The user can login, move around different pages and settings, However, when user try to Logout or Sign out, the page crashes. Exactly similar problem as with this mate. However I couldn't put a comment there due to thread locked. I checked the ULS logs and the Unexpected entry said. Unexpected: Claim identity is not from a trusted login provider. identity name #.f0.blahblahDomains\blahblachAccount Struggled around for few hours but no results. Finally something tricked in mind and I added below entry in my web application's web.config before   </system.web> <? xml version= "1.0" encoding= "UTF-8" ?> < sessionState mode = "SQLServer" timeout = "60" allowCustomSqlDatabase = "true" sqlCon...

Custom Site Templates are really useful in SharePoint when you have to create sites using same settings, objects, content and look & feel. However there are couple of functionalities that should be already implemented in SharePoint but somehow they are not. We have to code for them mostly. We generally create custom site templates in SharePoint and they show up in the Custom tab. However, working on a recent project we got a request from customer that the custom site templates are not in sort order in SharePoint 2013 which gives an ugly looks to end users for creating sites. There is no Out Of the Box solution provided by Microsoft for this so we had to write some custom code. We have created a custom Site Collection level feature which just sort the custom site templates in SharePoint 2013 create new web page. Here is how it looked Before and After the feature implementation. Before: After: Unfortunately i can't share the complete code of th...

I have noticed that some of the sites in my SharePoint 2013 farm which contains an Apostrophe ( ' ) in their name works fine except their DateTime Picker for any of the custom list. (The OOTB Calendar type list just works fine.) If you create a custom list and add a DateTime type column in that list, in the NewForm.aspx the DateTime picker won't dropdown to select dates if the site has an Apostrophe ( ' ) in its name. I have a site below in SharePoint 2013 (i have a little branding so don't get confused) where i created a simple custom list. I clicked the Calendar icon but no dropdown appeared. Change the name of the site from Site Settings and removed the Apostrophe ' character. Before After Tried to browse the site again and the clicked on Calendar icon again in the same form. It worked... :) Its Microsoft kind'a thing and till now i haven't heard that Microsoft noticed this issue and released any patch. ...

Although you can predict most of the stuff that could go wrong after a SharePoint upgrade or migration but still there are chances that you miss something. I have compiled a list of components that could break or stop working after you move to new SharePoint environment. I'll be updating this post whenever i found anything else breaking after SharePoint upgrade. I apologize for my rough formatting. :) InfoPath: Connections with external services and libraries. Connection with User Profile Service Application. When upgrading to 2013 from 2010, you need to update where fetching User Information like User Name User Friendly Name. SharePoint 2013 works on Claims Based Authentication so InfoPath 2010 Form Views may crash if you are showing view on user based. OneNote: OneNote Sync URL change OneNote not syncing Static URLs: Static URL's used in Web Pages, Always use relative URLS Connected Excel Files: Data exported in Excel files could break if URL change after mig...

Its a routine work that we have to create/configure SharePoint Service Applications and Search Service Application is one of the major service that takes time after creation for configuration. Mostly there are three tier architecture where we customize SharePoint Search Service Topology in order to make it more stable, available and quick for content processing. In SharePoint 2010 it was simple through UI but in SharePoint 2013 you can do all of this stuff using PowerShell. In my case, i have 2 APP servers, 2 WFE servers and 1 DB server. Below is the PowerShell script where you can replace your servers names only and get your Search Topology configured like my farm. Putting end result screenshot of my Search Topology. My APP01 server is the Central Administration server. Note: Make sure your Search Service Application has been started on all target servers. You can use below command for each server to start the service. $ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApp...

Hi, There are thousands of test cases and a lot of ways for testing SharePoint environment after a fresh installation or any upgrade. However, after each farm level change its necessary to smoke test your SharePoint farm to ensure availability, performance, functionality, security and look & feel. I would try to cover as much point as i can to smoke test SharePoint farm with Manual Testing. This could apply to all SharePoint environments including MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint 2016. Its possible that i could not cover all of the test scenarios at once, but i'll try to keep updating this post time to time and include new test cases. I would not explain the exact steps to perform a test case here. The purpose of this post is to only highlight the area and components from where SharePoint could be smoke tested. In current scenario i am testing my SharePoint 2013 environment with compare to SharePoint 2010 environment as i have upgrade...

This issue happened with me in SharePoint 2013 however i believe the resolution would be the same for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2016 environments. Problem: I have SharePoint 2013 environment and i need to remove all the search results under a specific URL. I created a Crawl Rule to Exclude content, in few cases it did not excluded any content and sometimes it excluded only a partial content. I ran an Incremental Crawl each time i create any rule but same results. Scenario:  I have site collection under https://webapplication/pa/b and i want to remove all the search results under this URL. This is how i created the rule. Created the above rule and press OK. Now for testing if this rules matches our query, i have provided it a sample URL and it matches one of our rule. However, when i ran incremental crawl, the target URL was still appearing in my search results which i didn't want. Solution: If it matches your rules but do not ...

Hi There, Recently i found that none of my SharePoint 2013 application services are working. Crashing and throwing unknown multiple kind of errors in event viewer. One of the famous error that i found was below with Event ID 3. [code]WebHost failed to process a request. Sender Information: System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult/47208365 Exception: System.ArgumentException: An item with the same key has already been added. at System.Runtime.AsyncResult.End[TAsyncResult](IAsyncResult result) at System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult.End(IAsyncResult result) Process Name: w3wp Process ID: 12724 [/code] While troubleshooting i noticed that none of SharePoint Web Services are browsing and crashing with below error. I knew that it isn't any SharePoint specific error so i tried to recall the changes i have done on server. Server Error in '/925bc7e108ff47198283782382a09c0d' Application. An item with th...