Dinusha's Blog

One important and regular task of a SharePoint administrator is to identify issues/risks in his SharePoint environment. Most probably the first task of a newly recruited SharePoint administrator would be to understand and report the current status of the SharePoint system. The objective of this article is to describe different ways to identify issues or risks. Some techniques and tools mentioned here can be used for regular monitoring and some of them can be used when you encounter a symptom of an issue. I will split the article in to two parts based on the SharePoint version.

Part 1: Identify issues and risks in WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS)
Part 2: Identify issues and risks in SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation

Identify issues and risks in WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS)

Although those SharePoint versions are very old, they are still being used in small to large scale organizations. So there is a good chance that you will have to manage a WSS 3.0 or MOSS system in your organization. By the way there is a good chance that those versions are selected for new installations over SharePoint 2010 due to various business decisions (e.g.: Standards, Compatibility, Cost, etc.…) .

So let’s assume we have an older version of SharePoint and we need to monitor for issues and risks. Following section will provide different tools that we can use to identify problems in WSS 3.0 or MOSS systems.

1. Site Collection Usage summary

I believe this should be the starting point of our analysis. You have to do this exercise for every site collection in your farm. By doing this you will get a better idea of what are the heavily used and what are not being accessed at all.

Most important sections in this report are current storage used, the maximum storage allowed (site collection quota), number of users and recent bandwidth use. By monitoring first 2 sections we can identify if there is a risk of our SharePoint to be out of service due to lack of storage. If the rate of storage used over time (change of storage used/ time period) is alarmingly high we may reduce the maximum file upload size temporary until proper solution is in place (This should be done after monitoring Storage space allocation). The network utilization section denotes the number of megabytes per day of network utilization attributable to sites in the site collection. We can detect network related risks/issues if this figure is too high compared to the available bandwidth.

2. Storage space allocation

This feature is only available if a quota template is applied to the site collection. If the current storage is reaching the quota you can check what has taken the most of storage. Following are some practical scenarios where this report is extremely helpful

There was an instance in one of our SharePoint systems where the recycle bin had occupied more than 50GB.

If you see large document libraries, you need to take special care in order to overcome possible performance compromise. You can use this Microsoft guideline as a framework to tackle this kind of situation.

3. Event viewer

We can get a list of recent errors, warnings and notification related to SharePoint using this console. Most of the SharePoint related items will be available in the Application category.

4. SharePoint ULS

SharePoint Unified Logging Service (ULS) writes SharePoint events to trace logs located in “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS\” path. As a general practice we can first monitor Windows application events in Event Viewer. If there is a SharePoint related event we can further study in SharePoint trace logs. There are some third party tools to view ULS logs in a user friendly manner.

We can control the level of Windows and ULS logs using event throttling settings. I will describe that in a separate post.

5. SharePoint diagnostic tool

This tool can be downloaded from Microsoft using this URL. You can setup this tool according to this guideline. It does the analysis based on several areas and finally provides a report.

6. Microsoft Performance Monitor

Various performance counters are available in the performance monitor. We can select more relevant counters to do our analysis

Following are some relevant performance counters. You can select some more counters as well

7. Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM)

This is little bit advanced but the recommended approach for WSS as well as MOSS. WSS and MOSS Management Packs (MP) are available to download for this purpose. If your SharePoint is a multi-server farm this will be the practical monitoring tool as it is required to collect data from each and every server of the farm. MOM has predefined performance counters. So it will track and respond to events based on those performance counters. Furthermore this is capable of alerting the administrator if it detects a problem.

8. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

This can also be used to monitor WSS 3.0 and MOSS, since this is applicable to SharePoint Server 2010 as well, I will describe this in the next part of the article.

Those are some of the techniques we use regularly to monitor WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 and identify issues and risks. Hope this will help someone.

Querying SharePoint

When we consider accessing data from SharePoint, there are many data technologies that we can use
according to the given context. Those technologies are Server Object Model, Client Object Model, LINQ,
REST & Web Services API.

If we are using SharePoint 2007, our data querying capability is limited to CAML(Collaborative Application
Markup Language) queries. CAML queries does to work by using SPQuery object.

There are several limitations, we have to face if we stick in to CAML queries.

1] There are no strongly typed objects
2] There is no syntax checking in CAML API (We can see if the query is correct at runtime only)
3] We have to use 3rd party tool like CAML Query Builder
4] It has no IntelliSense support at design time

SharePoint LINQ (SPLINQ)

You can find more information regarding LINQ from here

In order to minimize issues with CAML queries, Microsoft has introduced LINQ capabilities with SharePoint 2010
release. The LINQ provider translates the SPLINQ queries in to CAML and execute that in the server.
There are several advantage of using the LINQ provider for SharePoint

1] Queries are strongly typed
2] Compile time syntax checking
3] IntelliSense support at design time
4] It is easier to join multiple lists

The following section of the article will provide you with a step by step guide of using LINQ with SharePoint.

Step 1 – Add a reference to SharePoint LINQ provider

Make reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq

Step 2 – Generate entity classes with SPMetal

Entity classes will be used as an abstraction layer where we can query in object oriented manner.
We can create entity classes on SharePoint objects (eg: SharePoint lists and other content types) by hand or
generate them by using a command line tool called SPMetal.

To generate entity classes using SPMetal, open the SharePoint Management shell and put following command.

   1: SPMetal.exe /web:http://sitecollection/ namespace:Infosense /code:SPLinq.cs

   1: public partial class SPLinqDataContext : Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.DataContext {

   2:         

   3:         #region Extensibility Method Definitions

   4:         partial void OnCreated();

   5:         #endregion

   6:         

   7:         public SPLinqDataContext(string requestUrl) : 

   8:                 base(requestUrl) {

   9:             this.OnCreated();

  10:         }

  11:  

  12: /// <summary>

  13:         /// List to store application page permisions

  14:         /// </summary>

  15:         [Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ListAttribute(Name="PagePermissions")]

  16:         public Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.EntityList<PagePermissionsItem> PagePermissions {

  17:             get {

  18:                 return this.GetList<PagePermissionsItem>("PagePermissions");

  19:             }

  20:         }

  21:  

  22: /// <summary>

  23:     /// Create a new list item.

  24:     /// </summary>

  25:     [Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ContentTypeAttribute(Name="Item", Id="0x01", List="PagePermissions")]

  26:     public partial class PagePermissionsItem : Item {

  27:         

  28:         private string _groupName;

  29:         

  30:         private string _pageName;

  31:         

  32:         private System.Nullable<bool> _viewPermission;

  33:         

  34:         private System.Nullable<bool> _fullPermission;

  35:         

  36:         #region Extensibility Method Definitions

  37:         partial void OnLoaded();

  38:         partial void OnValidate();

  39:         partial void OnCreated();

  40:         #endregion

  41:         

  42:         public PagePermissionsItem() {

  43:             this.OnCreated();

  44:         }

   1: public List<ApplicationPagePermission> GetPagePermissionLevel(SPUser user, string page, List<string> myGroups)

   2:         {

   3:             using (SPLinqDataContext data = new SPLinqDataContext(SPContext.Current.Web.Url))

   4:             {

   5:                 EntityList<PagePermissionsItem> pagePerm = data.GetList<PagePermissionsItem>("PagePermissions");

   6:                 List<ApplicationPagePermission> appPagePermissionList = (from pp in pagePerm

   7:                                                                          where pp.PageName == page &&

   8:                                                                          myGroups.Contains(pp.GroupName)

   9:                                                                          select new ApplicationPagePermission

  10:                                                                          {

  11:                                                                              FullPermission = (bool)pp.FullPermission,

  12:                                                                              GroupName = pp.GroupName,

  13:                                                                              PageName = pp.PageName,

  14:                                                                              ViewPermission = (bool)pp.ViewPermission

  15:                                                                          }).ToList();

  16:  

  17:                 return appPagePermissionList;

  18:             }

  19:         }

LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query,which was introduced with .Net framework 3.5.It is used to query data sources as strongly typed queries.It defines a set of Standard Query Operators that helps it to get data from different data sources, Query expressions, Lambda expressions and anonymous types.

There are few types of usage

LINQ to XML

LINQ to DataSet

LINQ to SQL

LINQ to Entities

I got this error message when submitting my InfoPath 2010 form via web browser. But it worked pretty fine when I submit the same form through the InfoPath filler.

In my form there were several text box controls and a rich text box. In my SharePoint error logs I found the following entry that lead me to the correct path

There was a form postback error. (User: Domain\spadmin, Form Name:
Cash Advance Chit,IP:,Request: http://domain.com/sites/workflow/Page.aspx,
Form ID: urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:infopath:Cash-Advance-Chit
:-myXSD-2011-02-18T03-28-33, Type: InvalidCastException, Exception Message: 
Unable to cast COM object of type 'HTMLCHECKERLib.XMLPProcessorClass' 
to interface type 'HTMLCHECKERLib.IHTMLtoXHTML'. This operation failed 
because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with 
IID '{A260B372-BC78-441B-8764-D0B83F4004F4}' failed due to the following 
error: No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004002 
(E_NOINTERFACE)).)

regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE14\htmlchkr.dll"

Although we have State Service service application running in our SharePoint farm, it doesn’t mean that it directly support ASP.Net session state. State service is more towards facilitating session information for office internal components such as InfoPath form services, Visio services, etc.…

If we need to maintain ASP.Net session state for SharePoint 2010 pages we have to enable it manually. Recently I wanted to enable ASP.Net sessions in one of my Visual Web Parts.

There are two ways that you can use to enable ASP.Net sessions.

1] Using PowerShell command

Use following command to enable the ASP.Net session state service

Enable-SPSessionStateService –DefaultProvision

<pages enableSessionState="true" …… >

<httpModules>
<add name="Session" type="System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule" />
</httpModules>

Input a name for the module and select following for the module type from the dropdown

Sri Lanka SharePoint forum March 2011 offline meeting happened on Wednesday 9th of March. Seminda Rajapaksha did the first session on Introduction to SharePoint 2010. He described history,features and carrier opportunities of SharePoint.

I did the second session on Introduction to Excel Services 2010. I described about features of Excel Services, architecture of the excel services and presented few demos. from the following links you can access the presentation and a demo that accesses the Excel Web Service (EWS) which is a component of Excel Web Services 2010.

Introduction to Excel Services presentation

Excel Web Service Demo

Any comment on this session will be greatly appreciated.

It was an important day of my life. My first ever .Net Forum session was on 6^th of January 2011. I would like to thank all who participated for that session. I appreciate the support given by Prabath and Wellinton for providing me with this opportunity. Finally I like to extend my gratitude to my team mates at IronOne technologies and my batchmates at UCSC for the encouragement.

the presentation can be downloaded from here

I hope you would encourage me with comments :)