SharePoint 2010 Upgrade

Our organisation to upgrade our SharePoint 2007 environment to SharePoint 2010 and as the only administrator, the upgrade was to be done by me.

Some Pointers

1. If you are currently running SharePoint 2007 (32 bit), make sure you rebuild and recompile all your customisations with SharePoint 2010 url's. Yes, you need to recompile them all else they will not work.

2. If upgrading project server, make sure you have backed up your content databases.

Removing infopath forms from SharePoint showing "deleting" status

We were doing an infopath deployment recently and had to remove a form from the central admin and reupload a newer version of the form. The form somehow was showing the status as deleting forever. Initially, on checking the timer cache folder, there was no timer job created for the same.
What we discovered on call with MS was that when we upload/delete a form using central admin ( admin approved form templates), it creates a solution by default. This solution was not retracting and hence the status showed as deleting. Removing the solution got rid of the form and the publishing went on fine.

Delete an orphaned Project server database entry from the config db in sharepoint

The following query allows us to get rid of an orphaned object id for a project server database when we see errors during provisioning of PWA sites.

Run this against the config DB

SELECT OD.ID AS DepID,OD.Name AS DepName, O.ID AS ObID,O.Name AS ObName
FROM Objects AS O
INNER JOIN Dependencies AS D ON O.ID = D.ObjectID
INNER JOIN Objects AS OD ON D.DependantID = OD.ID
WHERE O.Name like '[INSERT-DB-NAME-HERE]'

Copy the DEPID that is returned and execute the following command

STSADM -o deleteconfigurationobject -ID <>

Unrecognized section in web.config file

Ran into this error while provisioning SSP. Blew away the whole SSP and all web application associated with it. Created a new web app and a new SSP but browsing the page was showing errors " an unexpected error has occured". Checking the event viewer showed an unrecognised section in the web.config at drive\program files\microsoft office servers\web services\root. Took a back up and deleted this section. The SSP came up fine after that an everything was a breeze.

"User cannot be found" while provisioning SSP

Breaking my head over this error, I tried all possible options for this including entering the service account password again for all application pools and resetting IIS countless number of times. Finally, ran into a blog post which asked to check the site collection admin on the central admin site and the SSP admin site. Apparently, the service account must be the site collection admin for the admin sites (central admin and default SSP admin if already created).

Service Unavailable message in IIS when rendering MOSS sites

This is something that I found while troubleshooting W3SVC errors. I was getting a service unavailable message for any site that I hit using in our SharePoint environment. Thought initially it is an application pool crash and set up the dcdiag tool to capture dumps, but later learnt that "service unavailable" is not picked up by this since dumps are created only if the website takes time to render and service unavailable is almost instantaneous. Tried by just reentering the service account password in all the application pools and an IISRESET later the site came up. Strange but this did work.

Hiding Views in lists within Sharepoint

Well, this is my first blog on blogspot and this I am sure would help someone address their problems of hiding views.

We have a system for logging issues and our req is to be able to hide the view control to normal users and show it only to a specified set of administrators. After googling, Binging and what not, we ran across this simple solution out of the box.

We created two groups in SharePoint and added the respective users to the groups. Next we added the same forms library web part in the allitems.aspx page and used audience targetting on both web parts with audience targetting set to two different groups. So when a user added to one group logs in, he sees the web part intended for him.

The advantage in doing this was that we got rid of the view dropdown in the second web part we added to the page and targetted that web part to the users.So, the original web part within the forms library has the views dropdown while the other web part that was added by us does not have the views dropdown.

SOAP errors in SharePoint Designer

Blogging about this for the first time but its been such a pain in the b*** for some time now.

We have been playing around with the default.aspx page quite frequently in our dev environment making changes directly to the page ( not the way Microsoft recommends)and every time that we edit the page, we get an ugly soap error stating to contact the web administrator or something like that.

After hitting our heads against the wall for about 3 days, the easiest solution to this that we found was to close web parts on the aspx page using the web parts maintainence page( just append ?contents=1 after default.asxp to get to the web parts maintainence page eg mypage/default.aspx?contents=1).

This works and the page opens up like a charm.