• Kerberos causing continuous prompting

    Problem: Customer migrated to new hardware/software, from a SharePoint 2010 NTLM authentication farm to a SharePoint 2010 Kerberos authentication farm. Upon testing the sites, they were continuously prompted for authentication. No account, not even the farm account, could get in. There was no prompt for the test URL only for a couple of Production URLs that were tied to a couple of web apps.

    Resolution: It was the bottom of the ninth inning, after lots of troubleshooting with various team members, it was decided to TURN OFF the problem. So this is not really a resolution but it allowed the customer to go live. I’ll follow-up with an update to this post once we determine what the root cause was. The steps below suppressed the authentication prompts for the time being.

    • Build a new non-Kerberos web application with a blank Content Database
    • Detach that Content Database
    • Detach Content databases from old Web App and reattach to this new Web App

    Fight Comparison:
    This was Leonard vs Duran II…No Mas!! No Mas!!

  • SP 2010: How to redirect InfoPath form to a custom Thank You page

    Problem: Although Info path gives you the ability to create a custom message after submission, lots of users have requested more than that. They haven’t been happy with the way the form just leaves you sitting there in the List, it can be confusing. So we have a way in which you can make an InfoPath form function like a traditional web form wherein you fill out the form and upon clicking the ‘Submit’ button, the user is taken to a Thank You page

    Resolution:

    1. Create a Thank You page and save it somewhere on your site. We recommend using any editor, like Notepad or SharePoint Designer to create an html page with a message of your choosing such as “Thank You for your submission”

    2. Click on that Thank You page and record the URL I.E., it will look something like this: http://mydomain.com/sites/YourSite/YourDocLibrary/ThankYou.html

    3. Now you need to figure out the URL to your InfoPath form. Either click on it and record the URL or if you have attached the InfoPath form to a SharePoint List, then you will need to alter the URL like this: http://mydomain.com/sites/YourSite/YourList/NewForm.aspx, as you can see we just added the NewForm.aspx to the end of it.

    4. Take the URL you recorded in step 3 and add the following: ?Source=http://mydomain.com/sites/YourSite/YourDocLibrary/ThankYou.html, So the URL should look like this: http://mydomain.com/sites/YourSite/YourList/NewForm.aspx?Source=http://mydomain.com/sites/YourSite/YourDocLibrary/ThankYou.html << this is the link you will send to your users in order to fill out your form. When your users click on this new link, it will tell SharePoint to automatically redirect them to your Thank You page after they submit.

    On that Thank you page you can add a link to go to another page or you can get real fancy and add a Meta refresh tag to automatically take redirect your users, for example, to the home page of your site. How do you do that? Simple. Add this line: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://mydomain.com/sites/yourSite/"> in between the <head></head> tags of your HTML page. Just to explain a little more about that line, the number 2 in this case represents 2 seconds. So you can modify that to keep the user on that page longer or shorter by replacing that number with a different one. The url would be the url of your home page or any other site you want to redirect the user to.

    Fight Comparison:

    Tyson vs. Spinks…this one was easy.

  • SP 2010: Calendar not displaying data when accessing via a formatted URL

    Problem: User clicks on a preformatted URL like this:

    http://sharepoint/sites/test/Lists/Calendar/calendar.aspx?CalendarDate=4/16/2012 in order to get to a week view of a calendar but no data appears. I verified that data for this week does indeed exist. I also verified that I could not reproduce this issue on a pre SP1 + Dec. 2011 CU environment so it appears to be a bug present before this build. This particular customer was on the Feb. 2011 CU:
    image

    Resolution:
    It was not possible for the customer to patch up to a higher patch level at this time, but thanks to my colleague Kerry Williams, he figured out that changing the date format in the URL fixed the problem and displayed data in the weekly view as the user expected: http://sharepoint/sites/test/Lists/Calendar/calendar.aspx?CalendarDate=2012-04-16. This was an easy change that the user was able to make on their links to these views

    Fight Comparison:

    No Contest

  • Tough Mudder 2012

    Problem:
    My job involves me sitting behind a computer and using my brain a lot, therefore, very little physical movement and overuse of my brain. Although I workout regularly I needed a goal to achieve in order to workout the way I used to. And I wanted to look forward to a weekend in which I did not use my brain, yet involved intense physical activity.

    Resolution:
    In March my little brother emails me details about this thing called Tough Mudder. Tough Mudder is a mud-run but from what I hear, it’s the most challenging one of all. 10-15 miles of obstacles, designed by the British Special Forces, that involve scaling 10 foot walls, climbing cargo nets, plunging into ice cold water, and of course, all the while, trudging and crawling through mud. Average time of completion is around 2.5 hours. I’m glad I found that out about its reputation only a few days ago because I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. July 7th is the big day and we’ve been training for the past 3 months for it, so hopefully, come Monday, I will have some new bragging rights. I survived my first year at Microsoft, how much more challenging can Tough Mudder be than that

  • Project Server 2010/SP 2010: Search Service Application in SharePoint does not crawl PWA data

    Problem: My customer discovered that they could not crawl any data from task list within the PWA site collection. I verified that the PWA site collection definitely was listed as a content source within the Search Service Application.

    This list here:

    image

    Could not be found when searched upon because it was not being crawled:
    image

    Resolution: According to one of my colleagues, the official resolution is that this is fixed in Project Server 2013. He does, however, have a post on a workaround. WARNING: Use extreme caution when making changes to the registry!!http://blogs.msdn.com/b/maulikr/archive/2011/06/15/project-server-2010-how-to-configure-search-for-pwa-sites.aspx