Friday, October 29, 2010

SharePoint 2010: EventID 8306

I was given a pair of servers to install SharePoint 2010 on. I had been told all the necessary patches and hotfixes needed for SharePoint 2010 were installed.

After installing I couldn't get the User Profile to work... So I did a hunt through the event log and the following stood out.

Symptoms:
I get this in the Event Viewer:
An exception occurred when trying to issue security token: Method not found: 'Void System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenRequirement.set_IsOptionalToken(Boolean)'..

EventID 8306

Fix
Install this: KB976394

Lesson
Double check yourself that all patches, hotfixes, band aids and bandages are in place before doing the SharePoint 2010 installation. Small investment at the start can save you a lot of time.

Good luck with your SP2010 installs.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

SharePoint 2010: Top Navigation on Search pages

To add the standard top navigation menu to your search pages you will need to either modify the out of the box (OOB) minimal.master or to create your own master page with the menu in place.

If you are going to modify the OOB file then please make a copy of the original first. Incase something goes wrong.

To add the menu to the minimal.master open up the masterpage. Insert this in a line above <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb" runat="server" />
<!--Navigation-->
<div class="s4-pr s4-notdlg" id="s4-topheader2">
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderTopNavBar" runat="server">
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderHorizontalNav" runat="server">
<SharePoint:AspMenu
ID="TopNavigationMenuV4"
Runat="server"
EnableViewState="false"
DataSourceID="topSiteMap"
AccessKey="<%$Resources:wss,navigation_accesskey%>"
UseSimpleRendering="true"
UseSeparateCss="false"
Orientation="Horizontal"
StaticDisplayLevels="2"
MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="1"
SkipLinkText=""
CssClass="s4-tn"/>
<SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="TopNavigationDataSource" Id="topNavigationDelegate">
<Template_Controls>
<asp:SiteMapDataSource
ShowStartingNode="False"
SiteMapProvider="SPNavigationProvider"
id="topSiteMap"
runat="server"
StartingNodeUrl="sid:1002"/>
</Template_Controls>
</SharePoint:DelegateControl>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
</div>
<!--End of Navigation-->

Public holidays

Having public holidays in your calendar is a very common request of clients.

Microsoft does provide a way of adding public holidays to your Outlook calendar: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/outlook/archive/2008/01/18/adding-holidays-to-your-outlook-calendar.aspx

You can then export these calendar items and then import them into a SharePoint calendar. All great and good.

But it came to my attention that Microsoft haven't quite got it right. There are a number of inaccurate holidays and missed holidays.

Adam Vero has kindly provided a fix for these dates http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2010/09/03/outlook-2010-has-incorrect-holidays-for-uk-and-many-other-countries/

Thanks Adam.

SharePoint 2010: Contacts Web Database and search results

Minor issue but one that was raised by a client. After you create a "Contact Web Database" there are a number of files created which also get indexed. So they will appear in your search results but they really shouldn't. Again I'll have to investigate further to see if there is a way to exclude these items from the crawler or to not display them in the search results.

I wish I had more time to investigate these issues...

SharePoint 2010: Organisation Chart (Silverlight)

Ok my client asked me there was a way to show more data in the Org Chart control in SharePoint 2010.

The short answer is no. The control only shows:
Name
Position
About me

One way to get around this is to display more information in the About me field.

Or you could make your own org chart control (which I might do when I get a couple of days free).

SharePoint 2010 Workflows: String builder in Designer 2010

To add a string builder type of action to your workflows:
In a Step, type string and hit enter.
Add: "Extract substring from Index of String."
Add the text as per your requirements.
If you want the whole string you need to start at 1 (not 0).
Select your output and off you go.

Took me a little while to figure this one out so I thought I would blog about in case my memory fails me.