Diffrent Roles in SharePoint Projects

Typically in a SharePoint project the the main roles are:

• SharePoint Architect
•  SharePoint Administrator
• SharePoint Developer
• SharePoint Designer 

 SharePoint Architect

A SharePoint Architect needs to have a thorough understanding of SharePoint (admin, developing, functions) including when and how new components/web parts should be developed. Also Microsoft Technologies in general, especially .NET 3.5, C#, Exchange, Active Directory, Office 2007/2010, IIS and infrastructure in general. Pivotal specialized role is of SharePoint architect. This is the person who can:

1.       Collect, transform, validate and map functional and non-functional requirements

2.       Plan and architect infrastructure integration

3.       Define solution

4.       Map MOST of solution requirements to existing configurable features of SharePoint

5.       Architect and POC custom code as needed.

The Architect also needs to set up the projects environments. In some cases this can be a full blown Development, Staging and Production environment. If that is the case it's very important to have all the environments match as close as possible if not be exact. The Architect also needs to understand fail over's, clustering and load balancing, for large farms. A SharePoint Architect also needs a solid understanding of alternate access mapping in MOSS, host headers, DNS entries, Kerberos configuration and multiple forms of authentication (forms auth, ntml etc).  

 

SharePoint Administrator

The role of SharePoint administrator includes setting up the SharePoint infrastructure with servers and services; SharePoint 2007/2010, Exchange Server, Active Directory, Windows 2003 and 2008 Servers, SQL Server 2005/2008, IIS 6.0 and 7.0, network infrastructure, ISA server, etc. He is responsible for maintaining and optimizing the SharePoint farm.

A SharePoint administrator requires knowledge of both SQL Server and Windows Server. Since SharePoint stores all of its data in SQL Server databases, DBA knowledge is critical. However, the Windows Server knowledge required to build and maintain a SharePoint farm is considerable. The administrator role is often split between two people who work closely together: a Windows Server administrator and a SQL Server DBA.The DBA skills required are the standard set required for any SQL Server but the features of Windows Server that a SharePoint Administrator needs to have some knowledge of include:

• Good knowledge in IIS and the architecture of it
• Windows Server Manager
• Active Directory (LDAP,ADLDS,ADAM etc)
• DNS and SMTP
• Network Load Balancing (NLB)
• Firewall (Hardware and software NLB)
• Event Viewer and Performance Monitor
• PowerShell scripting will be added advantage if looking in SharePoint 2010

But I suggest some knowledge of SharePoint development experience will add extra benefits to this role.

SharePoint Developer

The main role of a developer is developing custom web parts and component for SharePoint. They should have experience in Asp.net, C#.net, web parts, master pages, Ajax developer, detailed knowledge of the SharePoint 2007 object model / 2010 client object model, JavaScript experience etc. A SharePoint developer should be well versed on .NET frame work and windows workflow foundations (WFF). The Developer should have a solid understanding of C# and or VB.net and a solid understanding of the SharePoint API as a whole. Building workflows from a completely custom Visual studio direction as well as custom coding SQL and SQL server manipulation and maintenance also required so some knowledge in DB side also needed.  XML/XSLT knowledge will also provide some extra value in development. Since most things in SharePoint are xml based or can be converted and fed as xml/xsl, these are just another set of skills are another way that the developer can increase their value. A solid understanding of IIS and editing web config files are needed for a developer.

However, the main thing is to understand the out-of-the-box functionality and SharePoint web services well enough so that you don't program something SharePoint has Out of the box. SharePoint development involves tuning functionality that SharePoint has out of the box. So we should explain how to achieve project requirements with the least amount of programming.

SharePoint Designer

There are some wiles that a SharePoint Designer is really needed for the SharePoint project. But as per my experience it is good to have a Designer in your team so the developers can focus on programming no need to waste their time on customization. Designers are responsible for all the "non-programming" customization of the SharePoint solution. Good understanding of SharePoint and the different out of the box web parts and their functionality are needed for this role. Experience with html, style sheet, caml, xml, xslt, java script, SharePoint Designer 2007/2010 and InfoPath 2007/2010 are the main areas they have to focus.

Video Tutorial :Moving Content Between Databases in SharePoint 2010

For the sake of scalability, for ease of management and to simplify backup and recovery processes, it makes sense to separate different site collections into their own content databases. However, by default SharePoint 2010 saves content from every site collection into the same database. In this Video shows how to move content out of the default database and into custom databases, so our farm configuration is scalable and more manageable from a data perspective.

'AllowUnsafeUpdates' property on Central Administration

Sometime we got the error on Central administration >> general settings like this:

Updates are currently disallowed on GET requests.  To allow updates on a GET, set the 'AllowUnsafeUpdates' property on SPWeb.

Solution-:run this command on Microsoft sharepoint 2010 products (sharepoint 2010 management shell)

$w = get-spwebapplication http://mossapp:1000 <<your url>>
$w.HttpThrottleSettings
$w.Update()

Slow Browsing in windows explore for sharepoint library

Having lots of documents and folders in a single sharepoint library which are constantly assessing and updating is tough task to maintain. although sharepoint had provided option called "Open with Explore". but library access becomes too slow when we access with explore view.
 While using Windows 7 and browsing through various folders in SharePoint with Windows Explorer, everything was loading at a sickeningly slow pace. Super, extremely, very slow.

Solution which made explore view faster by changing some settings in Internet Explorer. You need to make sure you make these changes in IE regardless of whichever other browser you may use, as it is heavily integrated with Windows Explorer.

Open IE, go to 'Tools', and then choose 'Internet Options'. Go to the 'Connections' tab, and then click the 'LAN settings' button (it's right near the bottom). Uncheck the box next to 'Automatically detect settings'. Click 'OK' twice and you're all set.

 


















I hope that this helps out some of you out there who have been experiencing the same frustration as me!

Infopath: An error occurred querying a data source. 7893

I got below error on any of the infopath form used in any of the webapplication on sharepoint farm. Behavior of this error was quite confusing as sometime infopath form works and sometime it gives error.

Warning

An error occurred querying a data source. Click OK to resume filling out the form. You may want to check your form data for errors. Hide error details An error occurred querying a data source. An entry has been added to the Windows event log of the server. Log ID:7893 Correlation ID:473c9412-XXXX-4dd7-xxxx-1f497707bd44

 After spending hours and hours of research even i was not able to solve issue. At last i tried below steps and whola it worked. infopath 7893 error solved.

Steps:

1) I change the User profile service running application pool identity to someone who had access in the user profile service sharing.

Following are the steps..

Go to application server (in case of 3-tier architecture) or on server where userprofile service is running.
Go to IIS >> Applicaiton pools >> Sharepoint web services Root >> Advance settings

 In advance settings change Identity to domain user. Recycle the pool in order to apply change.

2) Make sure the account has accessed in user profile service sharing.
 Go to central admin >> Manage service applications >> User Profile Service Application

This will resolve issue in most of cases. if incase issue is not resolve, please check below solution:

3) Increased the Data connection Timeouts in Configure Infopath  Services

Go to Central Admin >> General Application Settings >> InfoPath Forms Services >> Configure InfoPath Forms Services.    Now increase data connection timeout.

4)  created a wakeup script to target http://rootsite/_vti_bin/UserProfileService.asmx

you can find IIS Warmup scripts here: http://spwakeup.codeplex.com

This four steps will solve the issue permanently.
Hope this helps!!

Regards,
Viral Shah

SharePoint 2010: Errors while creating AD Sync connection on User Profile Service Application

In this blog we are going to see few common errors which we encounter while creating an AD Sync Connection in User Profile Service Application (UPA) and possible fix

Errors:"Unable to process create message" and "Unable to process put message"

Possible Fix:

1. Stop UPSS (User Profile Sync Service)
2. Make the following change on the App SharePoint Server
3. Click Start --> Run --> GPEdit.msc \ Computer Configuration \ Windows \ Security Settings \ Local policies \ Security Options \ "Network security: LDAP client signing requirements", set the parameter value on "None"
        (by default it will set to 'Negotiate Signing', details can be found on 'Explain' tab)
4. Run "gpupdate /force" without quotes on command prompt
5. Restart UPSS

And now you should be able to create the AD Sync connection successfully.

Error: "MOSS MA not found"

Possible fix: There could be many reasons on why this can come and this can be tricky to fix, in most of cases I usually try the following to fix this error:

1. Stop UPSS
2. Go to 'Manage Service Applications' page, select the User Profile Service Application and click 'Permissions' in the ribbon
3. If you see the Farm Admin or the Service Account in here, remove and re-add with Full Control
4. Once saved, now select 'Administrators' in the ribbon and do the same
5. Restart UPSS, you should ideally be able to create a new AD Sync connection successfully.

This plan might sound silly, however this has helped me fix many of the cases!

Enjoy SharePointing!

"SOAP message cannot be parsed" error message in SharePoint 2010 InfoPath

Scenario:

We had a SharePoint list with 50 columns and list contains 3000+ items. The list grew over period of time, and of course list views set-up in a way that total number of items in a view does not exceed the threshold. We we tried to change the InfoPath and re-publish it, got the following error, but when I delete 3000 items from the same list and try to publish the InfoPath, the updates goes through smoothly. 

Solution:

It looks like when we re-publish the InfoPath, SharePoint trying to update each item's property behind the scene and this operations times-out for List contains larger number of Items. So override the httpruntime executionTimeout from the default value. I tried with 3000 seconds and the update went through successfully.

SharePoint EventViwer Errors and its Solutions

Error 1:

Error Text: 

Load control template file /_controltemplates/TaxonomyPicker.ascx failed: Could not load type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.TaxonomyPicker' from assembly 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c'.

Reason:

The ULS log is created in a code path where all control templates are loaded into the web application. This is a onetime process which happens just before showing any UI to the user after an IISReset. The source of the problem looks like a stale control template in the control templates folder while the control itself has been removed from the code base.

Fix:

• Navigate to /14/TEMPLATE/ControlTemplates/TaxonomyPicker.ascx user control
• Open the user control in a text editor and locate the first line
• Find the character string , and replace with a comma ‘,’ (without quotes).
• Find the character string " and replace with a single quote ‘.
• Save the user control

**If above fix does not resolve the error, then rename the TaxonomyPicker.ascx user control to TaxonomyPicker.ascx_broken as SharePoint 2010 does not use this control.

Error 2:

Error Text: 

Object Cache: The super user account utilized by the cache is not configured. This can increase the number of cache misses, which causes the page requests to consume unnecessary system resources. To configure the account use the following command 'stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname portalsuperuseraccount -propertyvalue account -url webappurl'. The account should be any account that has Full Control access to the SharePoint databases but is not an application pool account.

Additional Data:

Current default super user account: SHAREPOINT\system

Reason:

The issue occurs if we fail to configure object caching properly. Object caching helps SharePoint to efficiently retrieve cached versions of items where possible. SharePoint cannot perform optimally without this being done.

Fix:

• create 2 domain users – superreader (Read permissions) and superuser (account that has Full Control access to the SharePoint databases but is not an application pool account)
• Then run a small power shell command to add these super reader and super user to the desired web applications.

$wa = Get-SPWebApplication http://< server >/

$wa.Properties["portalsuperuseraccount"] = “domain\superuser”

$wa.Properties["portalsuperreaderaccount"] = “domain\superreader”

$wa.Update()

 

Error 3:

Error Text: 

The SharePoint Health Analyzer detected an error.  Drives are running out of free space.
Available drive space is less than twice the value of physical memory. This is dangerous because it does not provide enough room for a full memory dump with continued operation. 

Reason: 

This error (warning) is more for production environments. Its a calculation based on the size of the drive and the available free space. So on a Dev VM you will nearly always see this error. Nothing to worry about. That said I would still keep an error on the available disk space and the total size of the ULS log files.