It is great to be back and blog again.  I have been away for sometime with my new engagement with Capgemini.  This is a known issue that I would discussing where site administrators and users are unable to view responses of an incomplete survey in Sharepoint.  When you use Page Separator type questions in a survey, the respondents get an option to type or choose their response and move to the next question or Save survey so that it can be completed at a later time.  When investigating we found that the incomplete post is only and only visible to that respondent who added his/her response partially.  The site administrators and other users are unable to view the response.  However, the Number of Responses shows the updated number but in no way we can check that incomplete response other than that respondant.  We have tried toggling and switching the web part views but to no avail.  We found that this is supposed to be an intended design of the product which we can expect to change in the next release or so but there is no such updates from the confirmed sources.

Alternative:  The survey creator can either choose not to have a Page Separator type question in the survey or use a workaround as per the blog mentioned below where the survey creator can hide the Save button and can still the Page Separator type questions in the survey.  In this way the respondents will not get an option to save the survey and will need to complete the same.  This should populate the responses correctly as per the total number of responses in the survey.

Here is the link to the workaround: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1371

Here is a simple issue which took us some time to get hold of.  Heartiest thanks to Vijay Kumar Acharya who gave us this lead.  This is how it goes…  Site Collection Administrator creates a link in the Site Directory and can view the same after logging back to the site.  Users with lower permission level are unable to view this link in the Site Directory.  We logged back into the SharePoint site and navigated to the Site Directory.  Clicked on View All Site Content.  Under Lists we clicked on Sites.  We found in the List settings > Versioning Settings we found that Content Approval was enabled hence any new links being created in the Site Directory has an Approval Status as Pending.  We approved the list item for the concerned link and the other users with any permission level were able to view links in the Site Directory.  If the Site Collection Administrator does not wish to continue this operation then the Content Approval can be disabled and the links should appear to other users just like that.  Hope this helps!

We come across this almost in every issue that we work with pertaining to Lists in SharePoint.  Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to move just one List item to another list and not all of them.  So here is the way we can do it.  Open your SharePoint site and make sure you’re logged in atleast as a Site Collection Administrator (not that you cannot do this operation with other permissions.)  Before we proceed also make sure that publishing is enabled for the Site Collection Features and Site Features.  Navigate yourself to the Site Settings and then to Manage Content and Structure.  Select the List where you have the list item and then hover over the list item you want to move.  Drop down the menu and select Copy/Move.  It should open a dialogue box displaying a the site tree structure again.  Select the List you would like to the copy/move the item to and the operation would be executed.  Voila! Open the destination List and you would see your List item listed there.

I am sure most of us have come across this situation when users try to add webparts to their SharePoint site and have difficulties with that.  Ever wondered how .dwp and .webpart are different to each other?  Well then here is the answer to this question which is a good one to start with to understand.

The .dwp is a SharePoint web part. This would be one like the Content Editor.  And the .webpart is a .NET framework.

The primary differances are that the SharePoint webparts are built with backwards compatibility and more functionality in the web parts communitcation area. If you needed a web part that worked in WSS 2.0 and WSS 3.0, this would be your guy.

The later is one that most likely originated in Visual Studio.

Source:  http://www.shannonbray.com/2008/07/dwp-vs-webpart.html

Browsing blogs over the internet brought me to this blog where you can be one of the first ones to have a look at the much awaited Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna).  Click here for the source.

Windows 7 Beta videos: a peek at the coolness to come from Microsoft.  Click here for the source.

Restricting views for users in Sharepoint could not have been easier.  Searching through the internet got me to this website where I found this handy tool:  http://www.codeplex.com/SPViewPermission.  Installing this tool will make a feature available in the site collection feature called “View Permission Settings (powered by Bewise)”. Activating feature will add one item “View Permission Settings (powered by Bewise)” in the list or library settings where you can control which user group should view certain views.  Please visit the above link for screenshots and procedure.

Alternative:  Creating personal views and making them their default view by individual users will show them their own views but that will not restrict them from viewing other views as well.

This is a common situation we all virtual techies face when we use Microsoft’s Virtual PC when we need to the internet traffic from the host system to your virtual machines.  There is this blog which gives us a clear explanation what happens and how does it work under the hood (Link to the source blog mentioned below).

Normally using Shared Networking is very simple.  You just enable it and set the guest operating system to use DHCP – and everything works.  This is not the case with a Windows Server 2003 guest though.  The problem is that Shared Networking configures the guest operating system to use the same DNS servers as are used by the physical computer.  However – all DNS packets are actually returned from ‘192.168.131.254′ – which is the virtual gateway used by Shared Networking.  Windows Server 2003 looks at the DNS packet, sees that it is coming from a source other than the DNS server it requested the information from, and rejects it.  A simple fix for this is to manually assign the DNS server inside the virtual machine to 192.168.131.254 – then everything will work just fine.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/01/06/347965.aspx

This was something really new we figured out while working on this sharepoint site.  We were unable to add the active directory users to the exisiting sharepoint groups in the site.  We encountered the following error message “Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80004004 (E_ABORT)”. We had no clue where to look at and how to move ahead! Had some SQL expert advice on this one and eventually figured out the cause. This is how we progressed to resolution…

We edited the web.config file of the affected virtual server in the IIS and set the value for “CallStack” as true and set the value for “Custom Error” as off.  We saved the file and reset the IIS.  We tried to reproduce the error again and found the following error thread as follows:

Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80004004 (E_ABORT))   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.UpdateMembers(String bstrUrl, Guid& pguidScopeId, Int32 lGroupID, Int32 lGroupOwnerId, Object& pvarArrayAdd, Object& pvarArrayAddIds, Object& pvarArrayLoginsRemove, Object& pvarArrayIdsRemove, Boolean bSendEmail) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.UpdateMembers(String bstrUrl, Guid& pguidScopeId, Int32 lGroupID, Int32 lGroupOwnerId, Object& pvarArrayAdd, Object& pvarArrayAddIds, Object& pvarArrayLoginsRemove, Object& pvarArrayIdsRemove, Boolean bSendEmail)

Upon research found that there is option in the SQL Server Instance called XACT_ABORT under Default Connection Options which needs to be unchecked.  How would we do that?  Follow these simple steps.  Open the SQL Server Management Studio and check for the properties of the SQL Server Instance.  Select Connection and under Default Connection Options, uncheck XACT_ABORT and save changes.  Now that we are done with this we were able to add the users from the active directory to the existing sharepoint groups with no errors.

Here is the cause explained:

When SET XACT_ABORT is ON, if a Transact-SQL statement raises a run-time error, the entire transaction is terminated and rolled back. So, if we look at a sharePoint content database, if SQL runs into a transaction that fails, it will roll the changes back, essentially editing the database. If you break the role inheritance on a group you get two membership adherence lines into the database for that group and then when you try to add new users, and you get a SQL exception error, something like ” Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint “Webmembers_PK”. Cannot insert duplicate key in object ‘dbo.members’. SharePoint functionality is not hindered by this error message but if the “xact abort” SQL option is enabled on the SQL server in the properties of the default instance under connections, then the transaction is rolled back by the SQL server and this generates a HRESULT abort error in SharePoint. This option is turned unchecked by default.

There was this case that we were working on where the user was unable to open the sharepoint sites using the site url viz. http://sharepoint and gets the error message “HTTP 404 – Page not found”.  But when the users types in “default.aspx” at the end of the specified url viz. http://sharepoint/default.aspx the site just comes up fine.  This issue is multi-faceted but the resolution that we figured out in our case was to get the aspnet.isapi.dll added to the IIS virtual server’s Home Directory.  How do we do that?

Here it is… Open Internet Information Services and right click the website (virtual server) and click properties.  In the properties dialogue box click on the tab Home Directory.  Under Application Settings click on the Configuration button.  Under Wildcard Application Maps check whether there is an entry like “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll”.  Select it and remove it. Click on the Insert button and browse to the correct Aspnet installation folder viz. “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727″and select the file aspnet_isapi.dll.  Save changes and reset the IIS.  And you’re done!  Try the sharepoint site url without the “default.aspx” this time and you’re back in business.

Note: This is one side of a resolution that worked for us but however there may be other causes for the site to not load without manually entering “default.aspx” which may need another approach for troubleshooting.

Unable to save .pdf files from Adobe Acrobat Reader to the Sharepoint Document Library.  As per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/265867/en-us this is a known issue and the workaround is mentioned in the Microsoft KB article.  During troubleshooting it is discovered there is another way this can be done.

For this we first need to ensure that WebDav is enabled in Web Service Extensions in the IIS.  Also make sure that the WebClient service is running in the Services.msc in Windows Server 2003.  Once we have this done, we add a network place using the UNC path.  For instance, if your document library url is http://sharepoint/documents then type in the path as \\sharepoint\documents and this would ask for your valid credentials.  Once you enter your credentials, a network share folder would be created in your My Network Places.  Now you can open your favorite .pdf files in the Adobe Acrobar Reader and save a copy of it directly into the Sharepoint Document Library using the netwrok share in My Network Places.

Note:  The above procedure can be used only to create network shares for folder in the Sharepoint site running on port 80 only.  This is because Web Folders are created for other port numbers and as per the above quoted Microsoft KB article, it is a known issue that .pdf files cannot be saved.  This applies to all non Office applications like .jpg, .rtf etc…