SharePoint Designer cannot display the item

Problem Description:

When you use Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, you may experience one or more of the following issues:

When you try to edit or publish a workflow, you receive one of the following error messages: 

1.      SharePoint Designer cannot display the item.

2.      The list of workflow actions on the server references an assembly that does not exist. Some actions will not be available. 

When you try to create a new list workflow, site workflow, or reusable workflow, you follow the steps to create the workflow. However, after you have completed the steps, the item is not present. 

When you connect to a SharePoint Online site, you receive the following error message:

Microsoft SharePoint Designer cannot be used to edit web sites on servers different from SharePoint Server 2010.

  

When you connect to a SharePoint site, you receive the following error message:

This web site has been configured to disallow editing with SharePoint Designer. 

Resolution:

To resolve these issues, install Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2013. SharePoint Designer 2013 is available at the following Microsoft website:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35491

Note:- You may install SharePoint Designer 2013 alongside SharePoint Designer 2010. However, we recommend that you uninstall SharePoint Designer 2010 before you install SharePoint Designer 2013.

Important Guidelines:

1.      You experience these issues if one or more of the following conditions are true:

2.      You have received the most recent update to the Office 365 SharePoint Online service. 

3.      You have upgraded your on-premises installation of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. 

4.      You have upgraded your installation of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 to Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013. 

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know. I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issuesJJ

"List from Spreadsheet" using SharePoint Designer 2010 throws "An unexpected error has occurred"

We are all aware about ‘How to import a spreadsheet’ from normal GUI functionality. This time I was playing the same functionality with SharePoint Designer 2010 and faced some challenges. I would like to share the exact steps as how we can reproduce the same error and workaround for the same.

Problem Description: If you try to import a spreadsheet from within SharePoint Designer 2010 to create a list in SharePoint 2010 you get an error

"An unexpected error has occurred."

Steps To Reproduce:

1.     Browse to a SharePoint site 

2.     From the Site Settings menu click on "Edit In SharePoint Designer" 

3.     Within SharePoint Designer, choose left menu "Lists and Items" 

4.     From the Ribbon menu click "List from Spreadsheet" 

5.     SharePoint Designer will launch the SharePoint site within a browser 

6.     Add a title on the list and choose File then click Import 

7.     You will get error message "An unexpected error has occurred" 

Workaround:

The URL when you try to load the page from SharePoint Designer will look something like the following and it will not work:

http://server/_layouts/new.aspx?ListTemplate=SpreadsheetImport  

Append to the URL on the page that is being called from SharePoint Designer with the following and reload the page.

&ListBaseType=0&DisplayName=Spreadsheet+Import  

Example:

http://server/_layouts/new.aspx?ListTemplate=SpreadsheetImport&ListBaseType=0&DisplayName=Spreadsheet+Import

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know. I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues J J

Exchange Public folder migrations to SharePoint

Migrating content from Exchange Public folders to SharePoint can be a complicated task.  Public Folders contain a variety of content (email, file attachments, distribution lists, contacts, tasks, etc.), so your first task is to figure out what will be migrated and where.  Some items will go into doc libraries; others will end up in lists.  You'll have to run an extractor tool to extract content out of PF's and then import that content into SharePoint. 

Microsoft doesn't offer a free migratory tool from PF to SharePoint, so you have to either write one yourself, use a community tool, or buy a third-party product. There are some free, open-source extractor and migratory tools available, but I'd recommend going with a third-party migration tool, such as the Quest or AvePoint products:

http://www.quest.com/public-folder-migrator-for-sharepoint

http://www.avepoint.com/exchange-public-folder-to-sharepoint-migration-docave

We need to consider the following points before migrating public folders to SharePoint:

·        Find out what folders and data items you have and who has permission to access them

·        Remove any unnecessary or outdated items from the folders

·        Remove unnecessary replicas of the folders

·        Design a SharePoint infrastructure that’s suitable for your needs (a topic that’s outside the scope of this article)

·        Migrate your public folder data to SharePoint

·        Decommission your public folder servers

Few questions based on the above theory

What kind of items we need to migrate from exchange folder?

·        Mail items

·        Calendars and Appointments (Events in Calendars, including recurring events)

·        Contacts and Distribution lists

·        Posts

·        Tasks

·        Notes

·        Documents

How many public folders you have and how important they are?

Do we have any custom tool to generate a list of all your folders and their last access and modification times? (Purpose behind this-That will immediately help you identify folders that haven’t been used in a long time)

Which mode of discussion is really important by migration point of view?

Because: Exchange public folders mix discussion functionality (which we normally use for email) and document storage. SharePoint uses two separate models for these two different types of data: Document libraries hold documents, and discussion lists hold threaded discussions. If you move Exchange public folder discussions to a document library, you lose the conversation threading from Exchange; if you move documents to a discussion list, you won’t have the versioning and check-in and check-out capabilities.

Thanks Amol again for content contrubution....!

Data Optimizations in SharePoint

SharePoint mainly concentrates on the following optimization techniques:

·         Infrastructure Optimization

·         Database Optimization

·         Caching Optimization

·         Server Optimization

·         Page Optimization

Infrastructure Optimization:

Search in SharePoint is very memory intensive. It is often the first source of performance headaches.

The better the links to the database are optimized, the better the overall performance will be.

If all the servers (front-end servers and application servers) are behind the same switch, the application servers that run search will be going out through the switch each time an incremental crawl is kicked off. 

Database Optimization

Database Operations:

Different things in SharePoint have different effects on the databases

Order of items by their impact (1 being the biggest killer whereas 10 have the least impact):

·        Performance Point Services

·        Search

·        Content Query

·        Security Trimming (SPSecurityTrimmedControl delegate)

·        Collaboration

·        Workflow

·        Publishing

·        Social

·        Client Access

·        Browsing

Database Size:

Even though Microsoft says that each content database can hold up to 4 TB, the recommended practical limit is 200 GB for easily manageable backup and restores.

Analytics databases grow very quickly to very large sizes. Try to isolate Analytics databases. Analytics reports can have significant impact on CPU load.

Search uses multiple databases for its operations. It uses separate databases for crawl, properties and administration. Crawl databases can be extremely large. Crawl databases also have heavy transactional volumes. Try to isolate temp and crawl databases if possible.

Database Management:

Performing the below steps at the database might result in better performance:

·        Manually configure auto-growth settings. The default auto-growth setting in SQL Server is 1 MB. Set it to 100MB / 200 MB depending on your environment. This allows the database to grow in larger chunks, which is more efficient since these databases tend to grow rapidly.

·        Defragment database indexes regularly.

·        Limit content DB size per site collection.

·        Isolate transaction logs by writing them off onto separate disks.

·        Enforce site collection quotas in Central Administration.

Caching Optimization:

Make sure that all the custom controls / web parts use caching.

SharePoint supports the following types of cache:

1.      BLOB Cache

2.      Output Cache

3.      Object Cache

4.      Branch Cache

Server Optimization:

IIS Compression:

IIS Compression is turned on by default in Windows Server 2008. An important thing to note is that it is just enabled but not configured.  IIS Compression takes all the objects in the site, compresses them and delivers them as smaller packages to the clients.  It can be configured to be set at a level between 0 and 9. By default, it is set to 0 when it is turned on. 9 means lot of pressure on CPU utilization.  We recommend it being set to 6/7/8/9 depending upon your hardware.

Page Optimization:

Optimize Pages:

SharePoint pages contain lot of resources; these can include but are not limited to:

·        JavaScript Files

·        CSS Files

·        Navigation Controls

·        Menus

·        Web Parts

·        Custom Controls

·        Ribbon Control

·        Delegates

·        SPSecurityTrimmedControls

·        Publishing Fields

·        Search Controls

·        Hidden Controls

Customized pages (unghosted pages as they are called in earlier versions) may be easy to develop but they are bad in performance. However, The advantage with customized pages is that they can be created and modified using SharePoint Designer.  When a page is customized in SharePoint and saved, it will no longer be served from file system. Instead a copy of the page will be written into the database and from there on whenever the page is requested; it will be retrieved dynamically from the database.

Thanks Amol for your contribution for this text.