Yesterday’s post talked about how I’d tried to apply the Infrastructure Update for WSS so that I could get workflow’s to start automatically from incoming emails (history here and here) and I ended up killing my server!
This morning I applied service pack 1 and then the update (after taking a complete backup of course 🙂 )
I was expecting it to all work this time around as I’m basically doing it on a brand new install and I’m pleased to report the updates applied ok!
So this then led me back to the original reason for applying the update in the first place.
In the Description of the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: July 15, 2008 page there was another link, Issues that are fixed in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Infrastructure Update in here there was one specific issue I was interested in
This describes the exact problem I was having.
When an e-mail arrives from an external source they are submitted as the system account. SP1 stopped the service account from being able to run workflow’s automatically
The fix is to use impersonation. The workflow will run under the account of the user who initially created the workflow association. As there may also be security implications to consider they don’t turn it on by default
The KB article I mentioned above (KB953289) states the following
“To enable workflow’s to start using the impersonation scheme, a network farm administrator must understand the impersonation scheme and its implications. The network farm administrator must enable the workflow with the following command by using the Stsadm.exe command-line tool:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn declarativeworkflowautostartonemailenabled -pv true
Administrators can also create a special user account for creating workflow’s that all workflow authors can use. By doing this, administrators can prevent other people from impersonating specific workflow authors.”
If your happy with that disclaimer run the command on your server
I’ve done it and I can confirm it works!
Finally!!
The joy after the pain 🙂
You can download the update from here – Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695)
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I’ve also applied this update, and now I can’t get manual workflows to run, can you confirm if you’ve been able to get manual workflows to start?
Hi Timothy
Yes my manual workflows work fine
Not sure what effect this update would have on them
Is it ALL workflows that have stopped?
Hi, manual workflow worked fine (as far as I know) before the infrastructure update, but not email triggered workflows, so I installed the infrastructure update and got email triggered workflows running, but I cannot get manual workflows to run, and I cannot see anything in the logs, althought I may not be viewing all of the logs at the moment.
Very strange
Have you tried creating a new one from scratch?
Yes I have using Visual Studio 2008, but lets not go there….. that won’t update the workflow when I change it….
I couldn’t possibly comment on Visual Studio Workflows i’m afraid
I’m using SharePoint Designer for mine as i’m in no way what you’d call a developer!