Archive for the 'Software Apps' Category

How to trouble shoot SharePoint with “critical error”

MOSS 2007These days the MOSS site went down a couple time, every time there was the following error messages:

page has encountered a critical error. Contact your system administrator if this problem persists.

At first, we could reboot the database and application servers to let the problem go away. But rebooting is not the good choice. Finally I figured out it was not about the database.

Here is what I did to find the real issue behind the generic error message above.

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Resolve Access Denied Error while creating new article page in SharePoint MOSS 2007

MOSS2007[1]A user with Full Control permission on the top site could not create an article page. The error message was Access Denied.  I tried different ways to resolve this issue, include put her Full Control permission directly on the top site and Page library, but still had the same issue. Then I assign Full Control, Approve and Contribute and all permission levels to her, I got the following error:

List does not exist

The page you selected contains a list that does not exist.
It may have been deleted by another user.

But this user can do everything else except the Create Page from the Site Action drop down. From the URL, you can see the Create Page is using /_layouts/CreatePage.aspx file which I believe is using publishing template

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How to change the Domain name URL for the SharePoint site

MOSS2007[1] We just launched a new Intranet web site powered by the SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007). Everything works fine except the URL. By default, the SharePoint services uses the computer name of the server. But we need a nice name like “http://intranet” as the new site name.

We created a new DNS record named “Intranet” and pointed it to the SharePoint server. But it only did the initial re-direction, and it came back to the default http://servername/Pages/default.aspx URL again.

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How to display SharePoint list from another site

There is no a straight way to add SharePoint list from another site to the web part page. Recently I found out a simple way to do so from Path to SharePoint blog.

1), Create a new Content Editor Web part on the page you are working on.

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How to refresh a SharePoint page automatically in 60 seconds

As I indicated in my previous post, I need to set up a SharePoint page with some frequently-updated lists. And I need this SharePoint page to be refreshed automatically every minute.

Here are some methods I tried.

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How to add weather and traffic information to SharePoint page

Recently I added some weather and traffic information to one of our SharePoint page, and would like to share the process here. Of course, you will have to select the right web service based on your location. I use Georgia state here as the example.

Normally to add external information to the SharePoint page, you can use RSS feeds, or the Javascript code snippet provided by the external web site.

Weather:

I selected accuweather.com not weather.com since weather.com has domain name restriction.

Here is simple steps to add weather on the SharePoint page.

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How to open SharePoint link list item in a new window

In SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0), you can put any URLs in the Links List. But when you click any of these links, they will be opened in the same browser window instead of in a new window.

I checked the Internet, and found a couple of ways to open the links list in a new window. The first one was the simplest one as I am concerned. I implemented and it worked for me.

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Post emails onto SharePoint list

Challenge:

We are using a service called Roam Secure Alert Network to notify subscribers about any news needs immediate attentions. These alerts can be posted through Web, Email and SMS. And the subscriber can receive  alerts with emails, phone text messages.

Recently we need an internal SharePoint web page to be developed to show all these alert messages. Since the Roam Secure system is not part of our system, and did not provide any RSS feeds due to secure concerns. We could not set up any data connection to retrieve these message from their system.

The simple way is to use the Incoming email feature of SharePoint to post these messages in a new list.

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How to pass InfoPath form fields to SharePoint workflow but hide from Document Library item properties

Challenge:

Create a form in InfoPath 2007 and implement a SharePoint Workflow to it for approval processes. In each step, a Status field in the InfoPat form should be updated automatically according to the change of workflow task status. So a different view in the InfoPath can be opened based on the Status field in the form.

But after the InfoPath was published to the SharePoint (MOSS 2007 with InfoPath Form Services turned on) as Document Library and Content type, the Status field could not be displayed when “Set Field value in Current item” action was selected in the workflow design. Even it was promoted to be available in the SharePoint document library.

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How to fix non working “Edit this task” button of SharePoint workflow notice in Outlook and InfoPath 2007

Challenge:

Set up a workflow for the InfoPath form in the MOSS 2007 and the workflow worked fine. The approval notice had been sent to the next person’s mailbox, but the Edit this task button on the toolbar of Outlook 2007 did not work. When you click it, nothing happened. You can click the infopath xml link in the message body and the infoPath form was opened. And the Edit this task button in the InfoPath 2007 message bar did not work either.

According to Kerry’s MOSS blog:

This is apparently related to Outlook 2007 using InfoPath to display the approve/reject form. This form contains a CLSID of {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}. This CLSID is apparently “kill bitted” on some systems and is prevented from being displayed.

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How to auto find and replace text in bulk Word files and save convert to other format with script

Challenge:

As I indicated in my previous post, I needed to rename thousands Microsoft Word documents based on the updated old/new catalog ID pairs.

But that was just one part of my requirement. Since these Word DOC files have the old catalog IDs inside the content which need to be updated with new IDs as well. The methods of my previous post could only resolve the file name part but not the contents.

Unsuccessful trials

I started with some existing utilities I found on the Internet but they were not working as I hoped.

1), I tried the Useful File Utility along with its free plug-in “Batch Replacer for MS Word” (Useful File Utility is a shareware which can allow you to use 15 times for free, then $29 for a single user license). It looks promising as it indicated on its web page, but it failed on me with too many un-successful replaces in a few hundreds files.

2), I was impressed with this VBA macro I found on Internet named VBA Find and Replace. But it could not work well with the Find and Replace text list. I always get an error saying my name list is not valid.

After one night’s trying, I decided to write my own script to handle such automate job.

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How to rename thousands Word documents file name in bulk based on an Excel list

Challenge:

We have a few hundreds Microsoft Word documents with old catalog names as their file names. We need to rename them with these new catalog ID as their new file name.  Good thing is that we already have these old/new catalog name pairs in an Excel worksheet.

To save the time of manually changing all file names, we come up two solutions/approaches to automate the process.

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Install Ubuntu 9.10 on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

I have never tried installing Ubuntu on the Microsoft Virtual PC before, I did successfully on VM ware though. If you don’t know what Ubuntu is, please Google it, basically it is a Linux operating system with pretty desktop features. In the Thanksgiving holiday, I used my DELL Dimension 4600i (Windows XP sp3) to explore this option which turned out a good experiment, even Microsoft officially says its Virtual PC does not support Ubuntu.

The following is what I used to install Ubuntu.

Virtual PC 2007, (get it here).
Ubuntu iso image, (get it here).

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Re-install these 20 free applications (categories) on my new Windows XP system

Two weeks ago, my system disk toasted (damn western digital, got two hard disk failed from you) and I had to re-install the Windows XP on another spare hard disk to bring my computer life back. Glad I had my data on a different hard disk and backed-up everything to the external disk every week.

During the re-installation process, I thought it would be better if I record every application I had to install first to be productive and enjoyable before I sit down to do anything else. And, inspirited by the post from lifehack.org The first 10 free Apps to install on a new Windows PC, I decided to write this post.

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