SharePoint – Fixing things

November 12, 2013

SharePoint Correlation error: system.invalidoperationexception: namespace prefix ‘xsd’ is not defined. When using the person picker.

This is an interesting problem which only occurs when the people picker is being run in IE9 mode. You may find older versions of IE work without issue and other browsers too. A quick server side fix can be implemented by opening the pickerdialog master file and editing the header. The file should be located here: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\pickerdialog.master

Simply add the following to the top of the file using your favorite text editor.

<head>
<meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft SharePoint” />
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE8″ />

You should then perform an iisrest. Either use the IIS graphical tools to do this or in an eleveted command window run IISRESET /noforce

As always take a copy of the master file before editing and if possible test this change in your dev/test environment first. (You do have one right?)

May 11, 2013May 11, 2013

Azure – a cloudless sky?

I signed up for my azure trial some time ago, unfortunately long before infrastructure services reached general availability and for me this is the main feature I am interested in; SaaS and PaaS are secondary points of interest.

The interface is lovely and clear but from an infrastructure point of view some of the concepts of a VHD existing inside a blob which is displayed elsewhere is a little confusing and on more than one occasion I found myself with multiple VHDs floating about without a virtual machine associated. Sometimes I was also unable to delete the VHD’s or storage blobs as they were showing as in use; usually waiting till the next day cleared the problem and I could delete them as expected.

The templates which were on offer in the preview were a little disappointing but that situation has improved dramatically and since the announcement of general availability there are now three new Windows templates, SQL Server, BizTalk Server and SharePoint Server. This should really take the sting out of deploying these services to azure and in my opinion lowers the barrier to entry a little as SharePoint in particular can be a demanding deployment. For everyone else you can simply pick up one of the basic server 2012, 2008 or Linux templates and build from there or even upload your own virtual machine images. I think Azure offers a great get out of jail card for smaller businesses and enterprises a like who can leverage the IaaS as a Virtual DR site for their datacentres or critical apps.

Along with the announcement of general availability of IaaS there has been separate announcement of price changes which from my understanding removes the discounted preview price and brings some of the larger compute instance costs in line with Amazon. Personally I am a little disappointed to see the Extra Small (A0) instance jump in price by 50% as this was my favourite instance for running a little “Desktop in the cloud” but it is good to see the larger instances drop in price.

One advantage to the Azure cloud with the Extra small instance is that there is no difference in cost between Linux and windows compute instances so Microsoft are effectively giving away the windows server guest license for free so while It can on the surface look pricey to leave a server always on in the Azure cloud, once you factor in the server license as well things start to look a little more competitive.

I would love to be able to take my trial over again and play with some of the new templates for free but I fear I will have to get the credit card out to play with Azure again.

April 16, 2013

This workbook cannot be opened because it is not stored in an Excel Services Application trusted location when using SSL in Sharepoint 2010

When attempting to view or edit and Excel workbook in the browser you get the following error:

Curiously this error doesn’t occur when opening the same file without using SSL over a HTTP which suggests it isn’t actually the location the file is stored in which isn’t trusted but in fact the URL used to access it.

To resolve the problem follow the following steps:

1. Open the central administration site and navigate to “Application settings” and then “Manage Service Applications”

2. Once the “manage Service Applications” page has loaded locate and click on “Excel Services Application”

3. Click on “Trusted File Locations”

4. Click on “Add Trusted File Location” and type “https://” in the address field then tick the “Children trusted” box. You may also wish the change the “Allow External Data” setting to “Trusted data connection libraries and embedded if required in your worksheets.

5. Click on OK and re-try opening your excel workbook. The workbook should open correctly.

While the above settings are appropriate for most organisations you may wish to edit the default http:// path to reflect only your own access URLs instead of the whole http:// and https:// range. If you do this just remember to revisit this should you add or change any alternate access mappings.

January 31, 2013May 11, 2013

SharePoint management shell commands fail with access denied when using run-as

I often log on with a non privileged account and then execute individual applications or scripts as a privileged account using the “run as” feature found in windows. Unfortunately it seems with the sharepoint management shell that this often fails with access denied.

error message

First double check you are sure the account your using is correct, is in the farm administrators group and has shell access (try Get-SPShellAdmin and if you don’t have it get a user who is a shell admin to add you with Add-SPShellAdmin with no database specified.)

I found that actually logging on as the privileged user worked around the error. It is a shame as it means working interactively as an admin which always introduces a little bit of risk and I personally like the safety net of having to explicitly run something as admin if I want to make changes.

No error message

Notice the change in background colour and the window title when run directly instead of with the run as option.