I’ve been migrating classic mode SharePoint 2010 sites to claims sites for a while now, so much that I even have a script to do it for me. However, for some reason I have never come across the problem I encountered today. The documentation on converting a classic mode web application to a claims based application I though was pretty solid on technet. Today I came across a strange issue where the site collection administrator was getting access denied in odd locations… or locations I thought were odd because SharePoint hadn’t security trimmed the links as I thought it would if access really was denied.

Issue Summary There is a bug in SharePoint 2010 that can cause an entire site collection to become corrupt which can only be fixed by restoring a backup. This issue is only likely to occur with code in custom solutions as the equivalent manual actions through the web interface do not cause the same issue, therefore general SharePoint use is not affected. When does the issue occur When using the SharePoint Object Model or PowerShell to programmatically set permissions on a sub site (SPWeb) by first breaking role inheritance.

If you have ever decided to make a blank site just because you know your going to start from scratch then find out that alot of the features your used to in a team site simply arn’t available or don’t work as they do in the team site? SharePoint has a number of hidden features which you can’t activate via the interface. If you have decided to use managed meta data and run into issues then its probably because the hidden “TaxonomyFieldAdded” feature isn’t available.

Note: if you are here looking for a guide on configuring FBA in SharePoint 2010 the following are good resources: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee806890.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/mahesm/archive/2010/04/07/configure-forms-based-authentication-fba-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx Although there are a number of possible reasons for this error in the Event Log (the obvious being an incorrect username and password), there are some that just baffle you as you believe it “SHOULD” be working and you have been over and over the instructions/walkthroughs. My experience on this matter after completing yet ANOTHER walkthrough to check was that I hadn’t realised the importance of the “ApplicationName” property.

Symptoms Multiple Upload is disabled along with the Explorer option on Document Libraries. Resolution This problem is usually caused by a mismatch with Office and Internet Explorer. If you are workign on a 64bit version of Windows you will have two Internet Explorer links, one which opens the 32bit version (x86) and another which will open the 64bit version. The client integration options will only be available in the version which matches your office bit version.

The Get-SPHealthScore power shell commandlet is a simple commandlet that will query the value of the health score for any SharePoint 2010 URL (providing the header hasn’t been removed for security reasons which I will discuss in a later post). function Get-SPHealthScore([string]$url) { $request = [System.Net.WebRequest]::Create($url) $request.Method = "HEAD" $response = $request.GetResponse() if(($score = $response.Headers.Get("X-SharePointHealthScore")) -ne$null) { Write-Host $score } else { Write-Host 'The specified URL is not a SharePoint 2010 site or does not contain a health score' } } If you’re not familiar with the health score header, it is added to any SharePoint response for use by Microsoft Office applications in order for them to reduce their request rate if the server is particularly busy.

Came across a problem recently while on site with a client which I have never come across before. If you are trying to test your SharePoint Server web applications locally on a SharePoint server and you find that it is refusing to accept the locally logged on user or another user who should have access to the site by asking for your credentials 3 times before telling you that you don’t have access, it is because of a security feature within IIS which will not allow the use of integrated security for a hostheader that is not the server’s hostname.

One of the things that annoys me about SharePoint is the way in which it automatically names the databases, even when you don’t use the wizard (don’t get me started on that). One thing you can’t do when you run the configuration wizard to create a brand new farm is to specify the database name for the central administration database. Instead you end up with something like “Content_Admin_abcdefg0093857378383”, if this annoys you as much as it does me then there is a solution.

If you’re working with larger SharePoint farms it’s conceivable that you may have a requirement for multiple User Profile Service Applications. This is completely supported, however one thing to be aware of is the fact that each User Profile Synchronization Service instance only supports 1 User Profile Service Application. Therefore it you need to run two User Profile Service Applications with Synchronization you will need at least two servers running the User Profile Synchronization Service, one for each.