SharePoint, Incoming Emails, Automatic Workflow’s, SORTED!

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

A declarative workflow that is configured to start automatically when e-mail enabled items are created does not start automatically after you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1

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)

Lucky Lucky Boy!

Yesterday I was supposed to be spending the day thinking about SharePoint at an event Combined Knowledge were running (Vijay posted the details here)

I did spend the day thinking about SharePoint but for different reasons

First a little bit of background

We run two SharePoint sites internally that pretty much run our business

There is the SBS “companyweb” SharePoint site (WSS v2) – we’ve been using this from the beginning and we have a ton of information in here. Contract details, company calendar, contacts, customer network information, etc (you get the picture)

Not that long ago I did the side-by-side install to get WSS v3 up and running

(David Schrag has an excellent post on this and there is also the official white paper on the SBS blog)

The idea long term is to move everything over to the WSS v3 site but we’re doing it a bit at a time with the main function of that site currently being our helpdesk system

So back to the story!

I’d blogged a couple of times about problems I was having with emails and workflows so when I saw the details of an “infrastructure update” on the Microsoft download site I thought this may be the answer I’d been looking for

So I eagerly downloaded the update and this is where I made a fatal error

I’ll hold my hands up and say recently I haven’t been treating our internal systems with the same attention we would one of clients systems. We keep drumming into our clients that their systems run their business and why you need to look after them properly so I’m really disappointed in myself

So I installed the update and it failed

The “friendly error message” message was MOST unhelpful.

“Configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies failed”

I was then informed that nothing would be rolled back and that I should correct the problem and re-run the update

This is where I first failed. Instead of taking my time and trying to figure out what the problem was I did a couple of searches and found solutions that seemed to fit some error messages I found in the logs and tried those

It made it even worse. I couldn’t get to the WSS v3 site or the v2 site (I still don’t understand why that was the case)

So at this point you’d think. Ok go back to the backup you took before you started.

Second failure. I’d just jumped in at the deep end on this one. Very careless of me

However, the overnight backup had taken a full copy of the v2 site so it wasn’t too long before I was able to get that up and running

My main panic was over as so much data was in there. Since a lot of the WSS v3 stuff is still work in progress most of the data was available somewhere else. If the worst came to the worst I’d have to start over and build it from scratch

Then I realised my next failing.

I’d been getting some notifications from the backups recently telling me “backup completed with exceptions” – basically it couldn’t backup some files so just skipped over them

I’d had a quick look and added it to my “to-do” list.

This is when I wished I’d treated the problem the same as I would a clients system and given it immediate attention. The files it skipped just happened to be the WSS v3 SQL database files…..argh!

This was when I got lucky. Before I’d started the update I had SharePoint designer open as I’d been working on some workflows and even though I wasn’t expecting anything to go wrong I took a backup from here – just in case

The difference between this and the WSS v2 site though was that it didn’t matter that the site was down. The restore fixed that!

To restore my SharePoint designer backup I needed a working SharePoint site!

Since I’d been so careless up till now I decided to get back to doing things right

I fired up a virtual machine and configured a SharePoint installation from scratch, then connected to it using SharePoint designer and verified my backup would restore ok

Once I was happy with this it was just a matter of removing SharePoint and reloading it back onto the SBS where I was then able to create a blank site and restore my backup file

It may sound so simple but it took up the whole of my day and I did my final restore at 1am

My workflows are now broken and all the alerts have gone but it could have been a lot worse

So another lesson learnt. I’ve added our internal systems onto our help desk system so it will now be treated in the same way as any other system we look after. I won’t jump in head first “just because it’s our system” and treat it no differently to any other server we look after

The next question I asked myself is why I did I get into this situation?

Impatience I guess.Things have been very busy lately and there were a ton of other things I wanted to get on with instead of testing a patch in a controlled environment to then put it on our own server. My attitude to the running of our own network was very wrong here

As with any mistakes I make I’ve certainly learnt from this one

I was a bit dubious about posting this but I’m treating it as my punishment (even though I feel like I’ve been punished twice as I missed the SharePoint event as well!   ) 

Still Having WSS Email Workflow Problems

I posted a while back about a problem I was having with my WSS workflow’s not working when I used an email to initiate them

I’ve been looking at it on and off since then and I’m still getting nowhere

I can confirm that other automatic workflows fire ok. The problem is to do with receiving emails

Interestingly I found a post on the MSDN Forums that describes exactly the problem I’m having

The author (J.Amen) managed to prove it was the service pack by creating two virtual machines with identical setups expect one system had SP1 and one didn’t

The thread then goes on to say Microsoft have been looking at it and it has “officially been verified as a bug” (that was on the 25th Feb 2008) and the thread is then filled up with lots “is the hotfix available” questions

I think I’ll perform the same experiment over the weekend with two different setups just for my own piece of mind

The problem I have now is that I don’t know if the MSDN thread is correct and I’ve got to wait for a hotfix or is there still something I need to do to my configuration

I wish I knew either way!

UPDATE:

Found another thread that confirms the same thing

Some very angry developers on the thread

Sharepoint Event – 29th April 2008

I had such a busy day yesterday I didn’t get around to posting about this.

I spent Tuesday afternoon travelling down to Microsoft’s offices in London (Victoria) with Vijay to attend an event he had organised with Combined Knowledge

The idea behind the event is to help educate more about WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) as opposed to full blown MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). Especially in the SBS area as it’s already installed with your SBS server!

Something I certainly found out when first exploring SharePoint was finding WSS specific information wasn’t easy due to the fact that SharePoint – as a whole – generally means MOSS (or SharePoint Portal Server as it was!)

This is understandable as SharePoint experts will be dealing with MOSS more on a day-to-day basis (and from a Microsoft perspective it’s the product that makes licensing money!)

The event was kicked off by Craig Carpenter from Combined Knowledge who gave a demonstration of Search Server Express (eventually…as is always the way at these events someone’s demo usually does something unexpected and this time it happened to Craig but he managed to sort it out and do the full demo)

I’d read about Search Server Express (specifically over on Dave Overton’s blog) but not looked into any further than that.

The demo Craig gave showed how I do need to go back at look at it. The ability to ramp up WSS search capabilities is very compelling and features such as federated search (imagine including technet search results within your SharePoint results), custom search scopes and complete control over what is and isn’t crawled is all very cool

After this Steve Smith, also from Combined Knowledge talked about Content Types and document management. Since content types is something I only recently get my head around it was good to reinforce some of the things I’d been working with and also also show me some things I hadn’t given enough consideration to

The final speaker was Bill English. He’d flown in from the US to do a little bit of site seeing and speak at a couple of events about his product

I was really looking forward to hearing Bill speak. When I first started looking at SharePoint the first book I picked up was one of his books (Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit). I learnt awful lot from this book so this was like seeing a SharePoint celebrity speak to me

Bill was there to talk about his DeliverPoint product. The idea of the software is to give you a central location for managing SharePoint permissions. I can see on large installations how this could get out of hand so the product is certainly worth a look as it’s very easy to use and the feature list is very impressive. Take a look at the site for more information as I won’t do it just here!

As well as the usual networking opportunities we also got some great pizza! On the whole I really enjoyed the event and even though I didn’t get home until 1am it was thoroughly worth the trip

 Their is a SharePoint user group in the Midlands so I’ll be looking out for upcoming events in the Midlands!

Really Deleting a Sharepoint User (WSS v2)

Richard Tubb gave me a call a couple of days ago as he was having a problem with his user account in SharePoint (read about it here)

He mentions I’d had a similar problem

It was along the same lines but worthy of a blog post I think

I have a client who uses an Infopath form as a time sheet. On the form is a drop down list with all the staff members names to identify who the time sheet belongs to. I’d gained access to the user list via one of the SharePoint web services (I posted about this technique here) 

The problem was that some staff members had left the company and after I’d deleted their user accounts the names were still showing up in the Infopath form

This entry on the WSSFAQ site pointed me in the right direction

I had deleted the user from the SITE but not from the SITE COLECTION (e.g a site collection could be 10 sites but specific users only have access to 3 of them. Hence the need to remove them from both places – though I imagine deleting them from the site collection will sort out the other sites)

To do this I did the following

From the site at the top of the site collection click the Site Settings menu then Site Administration. In the “Site Collection Administration” section click  “View site collection user information “

From here I was able to delete the user and they disappeared from the Infopath list

Sharepoint Question…HELP!?

A while back I was experimenting with e-mail enabled lists and workflows

I had it setup so that when an email was received (a backup failure alert for example) it would go straight into a sharepoint email enabled list where it would then examine the contents and set some column information

The experiment went well and I left it at that with the plan to do something with it at a later date

That date ended up being today.

I create an email enabled list and had a workflow that examined the email and performed actions after. While I was testing I fired the workflow off manually and it all worked fine

I set it to run automatically and that’s where I had a problem. The workflow just wouldn’t fire

I found a knowledgebase article that indicates a security fix in service pack 1 stops workflows starting automatically

I followed the instructions and reset the application pool logon account which stopped SharePoint picking my emails up from the “drop folder”

So i set the Sharepoint timer service to the same logon account and this fixed that problem but it still wasn’t firing off the workflow

If I create a new item myself the workflow starts automatically as expected

So it’s only incoming emails it has a problem with

Further research suggests that it’s the anonymous nature of external e-mails (that are marked as created by the “SYSTEM ACCOUNT”) but this isn’t the case in this situation because if i send a message internally the workflow still doesn’t fire (and yes it is marked as created by the internal user)

Said research can be found here

http://spforsquirrels.blogspot.com/2008/02/sharepoint-designer-workflow-does-not.html (read the comments)

http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads/How%20to%20configure%20Email%20Enabled%20Lists%20in%20Moss2007%20RTM%20using%20Exchange%202003.pdf (read the troubleshooting system)

I found an entry on the managed newsgroups (do a search for “Workflow doesn’t start” and MANTAS) which recognised the problem. The end user suggested he could create an event handler to manually fire the workflow but this isn’t an option for me for two reasons

1) I’m not a sharepoint developer – this is a “no-code” solution

2) This needs to be easily deployable for other installations as it’s a really useful feature that used to work..and doesn’t now

Any help would be appreciated if you have run into this before. I’ll update the post of I find out anything else

Restore a list or library in WSS v2

This might be a pretty obvious tip but hopefully it will help someone!

The version of SharePoint that comes with SBS is a little unforgiving if you delete something. Out of the box there is no recycle bin so if something is gone it’s gone.

On the backup section of there is document (also available here) that explains how to setup the following command as a scheduled task to backup the sharepoint on a daily basis (you are doing this? right?)

“%SystemDrive%\Program files\Common files\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\60\Bin\Stsadm.exe” -o backup -url http://Companyweb -filename target path -overwrite

Where target path is where you save the backup of your internal Web site. You must type the quotation marks.

I’ve wrapped this in a vbscript to give me five days worth of backups, just in case and i’ll post this another time

The idea then is if you need to retrieve a document or a list item you restore the whole site to a temporary location and copy back what you need using this command

“%SystemDrive%\Program files\Common files\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\60\Bin\Stsadm.exe” -o createsiteinnewdb -url http://companyweb/sites/RestoredSite -ownerlogin DOMAIN\administrator -ownere-mail administrator@DOMAIN.local -databasename STS_RESTORE

where DOMAIN is your server domain and administrator@DOMAIN.local is your administrator’s e-mail address.

Once your finished you tidy up after yourself by deleting the restored site using Sharepoint central administration and deleting the SQL database (the exact details for this are in the document i mentioned above)

I did this last week and it’s a pretty straightforward thing to do

However my client wasn’t after a specific document or list item. They were after the whole thing as they had “accidentally” deleted an important list

Once i’d restored the site i initially thought i’d have to re-create the list by hand, adding all the columns and the views then copy the items back

I thought there had to be an easier way and this what i did

Go to the restored version of the list (or library) and click “Modify settings and columns”

Then click the “save as a template” option. Enter a filename and title and most importantly ensure the “include content” checkbox is checked and click OK. This saves the template to the site templates gallery

Then click on the “Site Settings” option, then “Go to Site Administration” and finally “Manage list template gallery”.

In here you will see your saved item. Click on the file name and save the STP file to file location of your choosing

Go to the production site and repeat the steps to get into the List Template Gallery.

From here you can now upload the saved STP file

The click on the CREATE item at the top and you will see you can create a new list based on your restored item.

Once created everything will be back in place including all the content inside! (I’m guessing security will need to reset by hand if it originally didn’t inherit from the site)

You can then delete the list template as it’s not needed

VOILA!

As i said from the start on reflection this seemed pretty obvious but in the past i’ve done plenty of things that seemed obvious only for them to turn up in another blog a couple of days later so hopefully someone will get some use from this!

Calendars and Content Types in SharePoint 2007

Two SharePoint posts in one day!

I only recently “got” content types in SharePoint. I’m not exactly sure why I had such a mental block about it but the penny finally dropped and I got quite excited about the possibilities (I’m such a geek)

So what I wanted to do was create some content types to use in calendars

In the previous version of SharePoint I had a company calendar that I used to track everything from meetings, to on-site support visits, to holidays and sick days

Once single form to try and figure all that out. Very ugly and difficult to use

For example, if your going to a client site, the customer name, a contact and a ticket reference are all pretty useful pieces of information. But if I’m just taking a couple of days off those fields become very pointless

Enter the content type!

I had the bright idea to create a content type for each of these “event types”

I pretty quickly ran into a problem. When creating a content type it has to be based on a parent type and the EVENT content type was no where to be seen.

So I had a poke through the help files and it mentioned that you could hide content types by adding them to the _HIDDEN group. That seemed oddly familiar so I went to an existing calendar, ensured content types were enabled and found the EVENT content type specified for the list

By drilling down onto the content type I was able to get the parent content type (also called event) and where it showed the group as _HIDDEN

After that it’s a two second job to put it in your own group

But that got me thinking

“It must be hidden for a reason”

After some quick searches I came up with two other posts

This one basically details the same steps I’ve outlined here

Working with SharePoint events lists

and this one talks about doing by getting in behind the scenes and changing the content type by hand in the ctypeswss.xml file

Calendar Content Types in SharePoint 2007 – Blog

Neither of them really go into any detail about if this will cause any problems or if it’s even a supported configuration

My only thinking is to do with how the calendar interacts with Outlook? and if you start making changes it could break it? Though I’m probably completely guessing on that to be honest

But I’ve done it and I now have this and everything seems ok so i’m happy for now!

Though I may need to change the title for the sick day content type

Using Site Columns to lookup information across sites in Sharepoint 2007

I shared a couple of links with fellow AMITPRO member James Cash earlier this week but thought it would also be worth a blog post as i don’t post enough about SharePoint.

A limitation of the previous version of Sharepoint  (WSS 2.0) when using lookup fields was that it could only lookup information on that specific site

This was a pain if you had information that you may need to reference in different sites

For example

I have a site that handles call logging, a site that holds customer documentation, a site i use for billing, etc,etc

If i needed column to store customer information (out of the box) you had to create a customer list on every site. As you can imagine when you needed to change the customer list you had to make the changes in every instance of that list

Thankfully the latest version of SharePoint can get around this (WSS 3.0)

In the top level site i created my customers list with all the fields i needed (name, address,tel no, etc)

I then clicked the “site settings” option and clicked “Site Columns”

Then create a new site column, give it a name and select the lookup option

(Set the Group it as you see fit, i usually create my own group for columns i have created)

Set the “get information from” field to the customer list

Set the “In this column” field to the customer name field and save the new site column

The list is still stored in the top-level site but any sub-sites will have access to the site column which has access to the data!

(click the “add from existing site columns” when you want to add it to a list or library)

This isn’t new so i’m not going to claim any credit here!

I also found these posts explained it well

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/dortiz/archive/2008/01/24/leveraging-the-use-of-site-columns-part-i.aspx

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/dortiz/archive/2008/02/27/leveraging-the-use-of-site-columns-part-ii.aspx

There is also a solution that allows you to do with without having to setup site columns here though i haven’t tried this out yet (requires sign-up)

Hope this is of help to someone!

Sharepoint Event – April 2008

Just trying to help spread the word…

Vijay has organised a Sharepoint event in conjunction with Combined Knowledge…i think they employ just about every UK Sharepoint MVP so this should be an unmissable event!

The event is on 29th April at 6.00pm for a 6.30pm start at Microsoft London, Victoria

There will be more information available over the next week but with limited spaces i’d let Vijay know if your interested ASAP, especially as the Sharepoint user groups will be getting involved too

I’ll certainly be going!