When using the SharePoint command-line tool STSADM, you may receive “Command line error.” even though the syntax is correct:

Solution

Manually type out the command rather than copying/pasting from another application such as Internet Explorer. This is caused by the encoding method, particularly any hyphens in the command. Hyphens and dashes vary between ANSI and UTF-8 encoding.

We got an error recently when trying to install  the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe  from the SharePoint media. The error message was “Error: the tool was unable to install Windows Identity Foundation (KB974405)”.

We simply resolved this by installing the component manually (Download Link http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17331)

We then re-ran installer and all worked fine

I have managed to get hold of a public beta account for the new cloud offering from Microsoft Office 365. I just wanted to know how big the content databases could get.

I came across this Microsoft Download in my RSS feeds:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6c6ecc6c-64f5-490a-bca3-8835c9a4a2ea

This gives you all the info on Office 365 beta that you need if you want more detail, but for quick reference, here is the breakdown for SharePoint databases:

Initial Storage = 10GB + 500MB per user

Site Collection Storage = Min is 24MB – Max is up to 100GB

Total for any company = 5TB

In answer to one of the questions that I had, yes additional storage, incremented in GB, can be bought for around £2.50 which is charged at a month by month basis.

Hope this helps.

Paul

Many of our users have uploaded PDF files to SharePoint document libraries but it would always show up with a generic file icon and was difficult to distinguish what type of file it was as the document libraries store other files that have the generic file icon:

To get the PDF icon showing in SharePoint 2010 we had to do the following:

1. Download the small PDF logo from http://www.adobe.com/images/pdficon_small.gif

2. Save the file in the in C:/Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Web Server Extensions/14/TEMPLATE/IMAGES/

3. Navigate to C:/Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Web Server Extensions/14/TEMPLATE/XML and open DOCICON.xml in notepad that has been run as administrator, otherwise you may have problems saving back the file.

4. It is a good idea at this time to make a backup of the file by simply copying it to another location.

5. Add the line <Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”pdficon_small.gif”> where the other mapping key entries are and save back the file.

6. Open a command prompt as administrator and type in IISRESET and press enter.

After the IISRESET has been performed you the PDF files should be showing the icon:

Please note that if you have more than one server in your SharePoint farm then you will need to repeat the steps above for each server.

Paul

We were running through an upgrade from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 in our test environment and came across this error when trying to attach a content database in 2007:

The pre-upgrade scan tool has not yet been run on this database SPContentDatabase Name=DATABASENAME Parent=SPDatabaseServiceInstance. You must run the pre-upgrade scan tool before you can continue with the upgrade process. Run the tool from the following path: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\prescan.exe.

We had already run the prescan.exe tool on the database and we thought that we had resolved the errors that it produced.

What we had to do is use an SQL query on the affected database in query analyser to find any sites that the prescan.exe tool could not successfully scan or access:

SELECT FullUrl, Id FROM Sites WHERE bitflags NOT LIKE ’262144′

In our case it only listed one personal site of a user that was no longer in use. We then ran the following command to delete the entry:

DELETE FROM Sites WHERE bitflags NOT LIKE ’262144′

After the record had been deleted we re-ran the stsadm.exe to attach the database and it did it successfully.

Came across an issue today where we were unable to reinstall SharePoint 2010 with the following error “The install in progress conflicts with a previously installed Microsoft Office 2010 Server product”

Previously office web apps was also installed on SharePoint but was remove via Add/Remove programs successfully. However i did a quick search in the registry and found that it still looked like some components remained from Office Web Apps. (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18)

I then decided to run the uninstall strings to remove these components (MSIEXEC Commands below)

Full List

Microsoft Office Web Apps Proof (Arabic) 2010
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-1141-0401-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Microsoft Office Web Apps Proof (German) 2010
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-1141-0407-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Microsoft Office Web Apps Proof (English) 2010
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-1141-0409-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Microsoft Office Web Apps Proof (Russian) 2010
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-1141-0419-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Microsoft Office Web Apps Proof (Spanish) 2010
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-1141-0C0A-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Microsoft Office Web Apps Proof (French) 2010
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-1141-040C-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Microsoft Office Web Apps Web Front End Components
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-1144-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Microsoft Office Web Apps English Language Pack
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-1145-0409-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Microsoft Office Web Apps Application Server Components
MsiExec.exe /X{90140000-112D-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}

After this i could re-install SharePoint 2010 with no errors

We have had a few requests from our users to have their most used SharePoint Libraries easily accessible as mapped network drives in Windows 7. This can be achieved with the following steps:

1. Go to “Map Network Drive” and click on “Connect to a Web site that you can use to store your documents and pictures”

2. In the wizard that appears click on “Next”

3. Click on “Choose a custom network location”

4. In the Internet or network address but in the URL of your SharePoint document library. E.g.

http://sharepointsite/Documents/library/ 

5. Click on “Next” and in the next screen give it a name that will appear in Explorer

6. Click on “Finish”

If you open up “Computer” and take a look at where your mapped drives are then you should see the SharePoint document library that you just set up and you can browse this using Windows Explorer:

Paul

We came across this issue last month after patching our SharePoint servers, after all the servers came back up after reboot , users tried to upload a document  onto a specific site within our SharePoint and they didn’t have any option to at all, no matter what account we were logged in as it was not possible.

It was actually not possible to make any changes to the specific site at all, however we had 2 different SharePoint sites on this SharePoint server and they were fine.

The issue in the end was that the website had got locked down into read-only mode and we just had to simply change this to not locked.

Resolution

1, Open up Central Admin

2, Go to Application Management

4, Open up ‘Site Collection Quotas and Locks’

5, Change the site collection to the site your having trouble with and simply change the site to not locked.

6, Now change the lock status to not locked and ok this change and your site should be fully functioning again

Daniel Davies