Business Intelligence Center site template missing

Issue Description

Recently I was trying to create a SharePoint site based of the BI Center template and noticed that this option was missing.

Resolution

1) Browse to Site collection Features and Activate PerformancePoint Services Site Collection Features

/_layouts/ManageFeatures.aspx?Scope=Site

2) Browse to Site Features and Activate PerformancePoint Services Site Features

/_layouts/ManageFeatures.aspx

User Name is displaying incorrectly in SharePoint

Issue Description

A user's display name is incorrect on a SharePoint site .A user in your organization has recently updated some of his or her information (such as the user's display name) in Active Directory Domain Services. The information was updated correctly in the user Profile Service Application. However, on a specific Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Site Collection, that information was not updated.

Cause

The user is not synchronizing correctly to a Site Collection. This most likely occurs because the user is not flagged as Active on the Site. In Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007, you could remove the user from the All People group and re-add them. This option is no longer available in SharePoint 2010.

Resolution

In simple words – Note the permission of the user in the site. Remove the user from the site and add again. Detailed explanation is below

Important: If you remove the user from the All People group, all the user's permissions to this Site Collection are removed. Before you remove the user's permissions and re-add them, note the user's permissions. To do this, on the Site Actions menu, click Site Permissions, and then click Check Permissions.

The All People group is hidden in SharePoint 2010. However, to access this group, you can modify the following 

URL in the browser:

<Site URL>/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0

For example, the URL will resemble the following:

https://contoso.com/sites/<SpecificSiteName>/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0

If you remove the user from this group, this also removes the user from the userInfo table in the Microsoft SQL Server database. When you re-add the user, the user's information is updated in this table.

Reference

Invalid WorkflowInstanceID parameter in URL

When an end user clicked on an View the workflow history from an older email send as a part of a SharePoint Workflow approval, the user got the below error message.

This error might be encountered for the item(s) whose workflow completed and initiated long back.

This is because of AutoCleanupDays property of Workflow. By default, the value is set to 60 days. After 60 days, if the workflow status is complete and initiated 60 days before, this workflow instance will be deleted. 

To delete all these old workflow instances, SharePoint runs a timer job named "Workflow Auto cleanup".

This deletion after 60 days is a default setting and is setup like that to avoid site performance issues. 

To retain these workflow instances

Browse to Central Administration -> Operations -> Timer Job definitions -> Disable Workflow Auto Cleanup task.

P.S.: Please note that this is not a Microsoft best practice to disable this timer job.

Documents are not visible with Read permissions on SharePoint Document Library

Issue Description

End user is not able to see a file in the document library. Users with Read Only permissions do not see the file. If permissions on this library is changed to anything else (Edit, Contribute, etc.) they can see the file. The permissions on the document are inherited from the library.

Resolution

In the Versioning Settings of the library, "Who should see draft items in this document library" was set to "Only users who can edit items”.

Change this to "Any user who can read items". 

SharePoint 2010 Search Query Suggestions

SharePoint Query suggestions (or Search suggestions), appear below the Search Box Web Part and on the search results page.

So how do we get these query suggestions? There are 2 ways to do this :

1) The first one is created automatically based on user searches.

Query suggestions depend on users' searches. Only search queries that have been previously returned and then clicked through at least six times will appear in either the search box list. Therefore, a newly deployed SharePoint Server 2010 system will not show query suggestions in either location. Moreover, a query suggestion will only appear in the search box list if the query suggestion contains at least one of the words that are typed.

2) The second once is created manually.

We can use Windows PowerShell to manually add query suggestions. The benefit of this method is query suggestions are available immediately to users of a newly installed search system. We can also supplement the default Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 behavior by adding query suggestions for key search terms.

In this manner, you can provide query suggestions that might not be generated by the system because users are not using the search terms that would create the query suggestions that you want to appear.

PowerShell to do this:

Here we are adding the following query suggestions manually (ford, test1, test2)

$searchapp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication -Identity "<SearchServiceApplicationName>"

New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $searchapp -Language En-Us -Type QuerySuggestionAlwaysSuggest -Name "ford"

New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $searchapp -Language En-Us -Type QuerySuggestionAlwaysSuggest -Name "test1"

New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $searchapp -Language En-Us -Type QuerySuggestionAlwaysSuggest -Name "test2"

Start-SPTimerJob -Identity "prepare query suggestions"

There are options to turn off query suggestions so that they will not appear at query time. This is made possible by editing the Search Box Web Part.

How to move SharePoint list items from one list to another

If we have a list which is growing more than what was planned, it is always a good idea to split the list for performance improvement and for ease of use. There are multiple ways of doing this. Below is a simple way to do this.

For this exercise I have created 2 lists list1 and list2.My goal is to move all items from list2 to list1

1) Browse to Site Actions -> Manage Content and Structure

2) Alternatively, you can browse to Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Site Administration -> Content and structure

 

3) You are taken to the Site Content and Structure page.

4) Choose the items you want to move from list2 -> Actions -> Move

5) A pop up appears listing the destination. Choose list1

6) The move operation starts

7) list1 is populated with all items from list2.

ULS log Event ID 5240 “There was an error in communicating with Excel Calculation Services”

Issue Description

Recently I came across this issue where some of the end users were getting an error message when they tried to open an Excel file in SharePoint in the browser.

Unable to process the request.

Wait a few minutes and try performing this operation again.

- On checking the ULS logs I got the below error message.

ULS log Event ID 5240 “There was an error in communicating with Excel Calculation Services”

- On checking the Event Viewer on the server , there was the below error.

Event 2159, SharePoint Server

Event 5240 (Excel Services Application) of severity Error occurred 20 more time(s) and was suppressed in the event log

Cause

The Excel Services Application server computer is in a non-valid state and may need to be restarted.

Resolution

Most of the online articles were asking me to restart the Central Administration server.I did not want to do that and found a different fix.

Identify the application pool running the Excel Services service application (from IIS) and Recycle it.

1) Start –>Run –> inetmgr

2) Under the Sites click on SharePoint Web Services. This will list down the Services in SharePoint.

3) Click on each GUID –> Change the view from Features View to Content View

4) On finding ExcelService.asmx -> Right click that web service -> Manage Application -> Advanced Settings.

5) Identify the Application Pool (make a note of this).

6) Now in IIS –> Application Pools –> choose the Application Pool you noted down in previous step   -> Recycle (recycle the application pool).

SharePoint Shell Admin Access

SharePoint Shell Admin Access

To execute a command in the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, the user should open the Management Shell on a SharePoint 2010 server. To execute commands, the user must have the necessary privileges to the SharePoint object model and to the SharePoint databases. When you are working with SharePoint objects, connections to the database are generally created with the permissions of the current user. 

In order to use Windows PowerShell for SharePoint , a user must be a member of the SharePoint_Shell_Access role on the configuration database and a member of the WSS_ADMIN_WPG local group on the computer where SharePoint is installed. 

You can use SPShellAdmin for configuring a user’s privileges and security. Here’s how. 

To run this cmdlet to add a user to the SharePoint_Shell_Access role, you must have membership in the securityadmin fixed server role on the SQL Server instance, membership in the db_owner fixed database role on all affected databases, and local administrative permission on the local computer.

1. To list Shell administrators
Get-SPShellAdmin 

2. To add a user as a Shell administrator
Add-SPShellAdmin -UserName <user name> -Database <database name> 

Note

- If you specify only the user, the user is added to the role for the farm configuration database.

- If you use the database parameter, the user is added to the role on the farm configuration database, the Central Administration content database, and the specified database. Using the database parameter is the preferred method because most of the administrative operations require access to the Central Administration content database.

$db = Get-SPContentDatabase -Site http://sharepointsiteurl/

Add-SPShellAdmin -UserName "domain\user name" -Database $db

3. To remove a user from Shell Admin
Remove-SPShellAdmin -UserName <user name> -Database <database name> 

Deleting a SharePoint list through PowerShell

When SharePoint lists are corrupted and you are unable to delete them from UI, you can delete them from SharePoint PowerShell. If you want to force delete a SharePoint list using PowerShell, open SharePoint Management shell and run the below commands:

$web = Get-SPWeb -Identity http://sitename

$list = $web.Lists["corrupted list name"]

$list.AllowDeletion = $true

$list.Update()

$list.Delete()

Error Message: Content Advisor Will Not Allow You to See This Site

Issue Description

When you attempt to access a Web page using Internet Explorer, Content Advisor may display the following error message:

Sorry! Content Advisor will not allow you to see this site.

The error message also indicates that the page has no rating.

Cause

This issue can occur when Content Advisor is enabled, but the "User can see sites which have no rating" option is disabled.

Resolution

This is not a SharePoint issue. This issue is an Internet Explorer Browser issue.

Please refer to this KB article for the fix