Problem:  a single user profile would not appear in the user profile store (Central admin >> Application Management >> Manage Service Applications >> user profile service>>Manage User Profiles). The user did exist in Active Directory.

Troubleshooting:

• Ran an incremental sync
• Ran a full sync
• Looked at ULS logs and found this error:

   "System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.
     at System.Net.WebClient.DownloadDataInternal(Uri address, WebRequest& request)
     at System.Net.WebClient.DownloadData(Uri address)
     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ManagementAgent.ProfileImportExportExtension.DownloadPictures(ProfileChangeData[] profiles, Boolean delayErrors)
     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ManagementAgent.ProfileImportExportExtension.Microsoft.MetadirectoryServices.IMAExtensibleFileImport.GenerateImportFile(String fileName, String connectTo, String user, String password, ConfigParameterCollection configParameters, Boolean fFullImport, TypeDescriptionCollection types, String& customData)
  Forefront Identity Manager

Cause: Customer is on October 2012 CU, this is fixed in December 2012 CU. It happens because some users added a picture to their profile and then removed it at some point.

Resolution: Upgrade to a higher patch or, until you can plan and test the patch properly, you can perform the workaround below:

1. Run the following SQL Query against the profile database to identify user accounts that may be missing and not coming over via your syncs:
    
   SELECT el.RecordId,el.ChangeType,el.ChangedPropertyId, el.EventTime,el.OldValue,el.NewValueData,upf.RecordID,upf.NTName,upf.PictureUrl,upf.PreferredName 
   FROM UserProfileEventLog as el
   JOIN Userprofile_full as upf
   On el.recordid=upf.recordid
   where ChangedPropertyId =23 and eventtime > '2013-03-13' and ChangeType = 4
2. Modify eventtime to reflect the previous day or longer as appropriate
3. ChangeType 4 reflects that the operation on the property was a delete. ChangedPropertyId =23 is the profile picture property
4. The list of users generated from the above query will then need to have their photo updated via central administration. You can then update the photo for the user with the default gif, person.gif.

Fight Comparison: Had to call for help on this one, so more like a professional wrestling tag team match

Requirement: Customer wants to add a Content Editor web part to Community Portal page 

Problem: When user clicks on the Gear icon>> 'Edit Page', then clicks 'Add a Web Part' there is no response

 Workaround: Below is an out-of-the-box workaround. 

1. Create a 'Web Part Page' (via
        SPD 2013 (SharePoint Designer 2013) or the GUI). 
             NOTE: It doesn't matter where this page lives, it will serve as
        nothing more than a place to create the Content Editor Web part and
        configure it to export to your Community Portal page.
2. Add the Content Editor Web
        part to this 'Web Part Page' and configure it as you wish. (I added some
        text and a few hyperlinks.)
   
3. Save this page.
4. Open this page in SharePoint
        Designer 2013 and choose 'edit file'. Locate the Content editor web part
        code. The easiest thing to do is locate the tag
        <WebPartPages:ContentEditorWebPart and click on it. Now look towards
        the bottom right of SharePoint Designer and you will see a highlighted tab
        that says <WebPartPages:ContentEditor…>. Click on that tab, it will
        select all the code you need.
    

6. Copy the code (crtl+c)
7. Open the Community Portal in
        SharePoint Designer 2013
8. Click on 'Edit home site page'
   
              
9. Right-click on 'default.aspx' and choose 'New from Existing Page'
   
              
10. This will create a copy of default.aspx called 'untitled.aspx'. Go to 'File>>Save As', and name
         it something like 'default2.aspx'.
11. In the code, locate the tag
         <WpNs1:ExistingCommunitiesWebPart runat="server"
         Title=""…Place your cursor in front of it and hit 'Return'. This
         will give you some space to paste in the Content Editor Web Part
         code
    
               
12. Paste the Content Editor code
         (ctrl+v)
13. Click 'Save'
14. Right-click on default2.aspx (or whatever you named this page) and choose 'Set as Home Page' (This will
         now set this new page as the default home page so that when users browse
         to your Community Portal via http://domain/sites/CommunityPortal ) it will automatically go
         to this page (in my example default2.aspx)
    
               
15. Browse to your community
         portal and you will now see the Content Editor Web part there.           
    
              Note: I also deleted/commented out the search web part because it will now throw an
         error up at the top right
    
               
16. Go back to the code for
         default2.aspx page (or whatever you named it) and look for the tag
         <spsswc:SearchBoxScriptWebPart, click on it. Just like before, a
         highlighted tab will appear on the bottom right corner of your screen.
         Click that tab to select the code you need to remove or comment out.
17. Remove or comment out, then     Save. You should be good now.
    
               

This tip came about because we came out with security patch that only affected FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 deployments that have the ‘Advanced Filter Pack’ enabled. By default, it is disabled. My customer wanted to definitively check to see if it was enabled in order to prepare to install the security patch.

How to check:

Option 1: run the command to disable it, if its already enabled or disabled it will tell you in the output

Option 2: Go to \FASTSearch\etc\config_data\DocumentProcessor\optionalprocessing.xml. In that file there is a line like this: <processor name="SearchExportConverter" active="no" />

If it is enabled, active will be set to “yes”

Problem: Customer had a site that was migrated from MOSS 2007 to SP 2010, when they would try to ‘request change’ or ‘reassign’ a workflow, it would not set original task as complete and create another task as expected.

Troubleshooting:

• tested other workflows within the site collection, this problem seemed to be specific to this list
• We found that the lists that had working workflows had a field called ‘Status’, whereas the one not working had a field called ‘Task Status’
• Created new list and new approval workflow but that workflow had a field called ‘Status’ as expected so something was definitely not right with problem workflow. ‘Task Status’ is a field we see when a Project Tasks list is created which a SharePoint workflow does not like as its Task list because of the ‘Task Status’ field
• Found this great link on the subject: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneralprevious/thread/cb3ac6b2-e610-4673-b8b5-1020bd25043b

Resolution: Since this problem only existed on this one specific list and I could not reproduce, I figured something is corrupted on this specific list. Just like the social.technet.microsoft.com link above states, I verified that a similar case was resolved by deactivating and activating the following features:

We ran the following stsadm commands on the site collection in the given order to reprovision the task content type.
stsadm -o deactivatefeature -filename "Fields\feature.xml" -force -url "http://Server/sites/siteCollection"
stsadm -o deactivatefeature -filename "CTypes\feature.xml" -force -url "http://Server/sites/siteCollection"
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename "CTypes\feature.xml" -force -url "http://Server/sites/siteCollection"
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename "Fields\feature.xml" -force -url "http://Server/sites/siteCollection"

Then we created a new task list and voila…it had the Status field as expected.

Fight Comparison:

Problem: Another case of SharePoint Technologies and Configuration wizard (PSCONFIG) failing. Customer was running it via the GUI but it would fail with this message:

Troubleshooting: Of course, with this error, the first thing to check are permissions. Is the customer launching PSCONFIG as a local admin and does that account have farm rights within SharePoint? In this case, the answer was yes. I also made sure he was launching it as ‘Run as Administrator’, he was. Next, I asked him to run PSCONFIG via the command-line so that I could see more details: psconfig -cmd upgrade -force -inplace b2b –wait AND make sure to launch the SharePoint Timer service manually (because of a previous experience I had: http://blogs.technet.com/b/sharepointwarrior/archive/2012/12/07/sp-2010-psconfig-fails-with-missing-security-updates-that-are-actually-installed.aspx) but that did not work.

Resolution: Duh, ports 443 and 80 were blocked. After asking the network team to open these, PSCFONFIG completed successfully.

Fight Comparison: Holyfield vs Tyson II…I won by DQ just like Holyfield.