In Windows Vista and Windows 7, every time I reinstall Live Messenger I’m annoyed by the border around all messenger windows. I can never remember the exact fix and usually filter through web results until I find the fix. But this time, I’m writing it down so hopefully I’ll remember.

All you have to do is make a simple change to the registry. No reboot is needed.

1. Run Registry Editor (start > run> regedit).
2. Navigate to the following registry key:
   • 32-bit (x86): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Live\Messenger
   • 64-bit (x64): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows Live\Messenger
3. In the right pane, right click on any blank space, then select “New > DWORD (32-bit) Value”  in the context menu to create a new registry value entry.
4. Name the new registry entry “AeroWindowFrameEnabled“.
5. Double-click the “AeroWindowFrameEnabled” registry entry and set its value to “0” to disable the Aero window frame of Messenger. Set the value to “1” to show the Aero window frame.
6. Close and re-open any Live Messenger windows for the change to take effect. There is no need to exit the application or reboot your computer.

Thank  you to MyDigitalLife.info for originally posting this information which I have used numerous times: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/01/09/enable-or-disable-aero-border-frame-in-windows-live-msn-messenger-with-auto-switcher.

Want SharePoint to display the pdf icon next to documents like it does for Office documents? Then you need to install the PDF iFilter on each front-end web server in your farm.

Below are instructions for installing the PDF IFilter 6.0 on a MOSS 2007 server. This allows PDF files to be indexed (full text) by the Search Service and for the icon to be shown next to PDF documents.

1. Download Adobe PDF IFilter 6.0
2. Stop the IIS Admin service: Start -> Run -> services.msc -> IIS Admin Service -> Stop
3. Run the Adobe PDF IFilter 6.0 Setup program to install the filter on the server.
4. Copy the ICPDF.GIF file to “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Images”
5. Edit the file C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\60\Template\Xml\DOCICON.XML
   1. Add an entry for the .pdf extension.
      <Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”icpdf.gif”/>
6. Perform an iisreset or recycle the SharePoint Application Pools
7. Add the .pdf file type to the index list:
   1. Go to Central Administration, then to the Shared Services Administration Web of the current SSP, go to Search Settings and next to File Type
   2. Add a new file type pdf
8. Perform a Full Update on the Search content indexes

Deleting site content types can be an easy 10 second task or a lengthy multi-hour troubleshooting task. More often than not, it’s the latter.

To delete a site content type, navigate to “top level site” > Site Settings > Galleries > Site content types. Then, simply find the content type and click delete. However, for this to work, the content type must not be used anywhere on the site (or subsites). This means it must be deleted from all lists, documents, etc.

If the content type is still being used, you’ll get the following wonderful error message: Error: content type is still in use. Wow… thanks SharePoint, that’s very helpful! It’s difficult to identify where the content type is still being used. There are no reports or aspects of the UI to help in this search. You can write code and stored procedures… but that’s not for everyone. There are also 3rd party management tools that can help with this, but they usually must be purchased.

In my troubleshooting, I’ve found that there are a few key places to look, some are obvious, some are not.

Obvious places to check:

• Lists – this includes all Document Libraries, Calendars, and Custom lists you’ve created.
• Documents and List Items – each time a new item is added to the list a content type gets associated with it.
• Page Layouts – if a Page Layout is based on a content type, you’ll need to change the page layout for all existing pages using that content type.
• Master Pages

Less Obvious places to check:

• Recycle Bin – this is both the end-user recycle bin and the site collection bin
• Version History – if versioning is enabled, SharePoint keeps a copy of all the previous versions of a document or list item. This means that a previous version of a document may still be using the Content Type. Unfortunately, I have not found a way to easily check this… it tends to be a very manual effort.

MOSS users can use their My Site to manage and share personal content. By default, MOSS has a 100MB limit on the amount of disk space associated with each personal site. You can change this quota through ”Central Administration > Application Management > Quota Templates” but this will not impact any existing personal sites. Here is how you increase the site storage quota for an existing personal site:

Setting up outgoing email for SharePoint is a pretty straight-forward task in most cases. Navigate to Operations > Topology and Services > Outgoing e-mail settings and set the following values:

• Outbound SMTP server: mail.domain.com
• From address: sharepoint@domain.com
• Reply-to address: no-reply@domain.com
• Character set: 65001 (default)

However, when you add a new user to a site and send the email, you may receive the following error:
“The user or users have been added successfully, but there was an error in sending the e-mail message. The server may not be set up correctly to send e-mail. To verify that e-mail is configured correctly, contact your server administrator.”

This error is caused by SharePoint not being able to connect to the SMTP server – in most cases this is Exchange.

To resolve this error, you need to add a relay on the Exchange server to recognize the SharePoint server. On Exchange 2007, this is done as follows:

1. Open Exchange Management Console and navigate to Microsoft Exchange > Server Configuration > Hub Transport
2. Add a new Receive Connector and specify the SharePoint server’s IP address as an allowed remote server
3. Use Basic and Integrated authentication
4. Select the Anonymous Users permission group

Return to SharePoint and re-add the user to the site. The email should be sent successfully.

If errors still exist, ensure you can communicate with the SMTP server by opening a telnet connection. Open a command prompt and enter: telnet mail.domain.com 25.

I was working with a customer today to troubleshoot a search configuration for Windows SharePoint Services v3. I hadn’t come across this issue before, so I wanted to document it here in case others are having he same issue.

Issue:

The environment had SharePoint, SQL, IIS and all services running on the same server (Windows 2008 and IIS 7). The SharePoint site was accessible from user’s workstations but they weren’t getting any search results delivered.

Steps to Troubleshoot:

I verified that the Search service was configured correctly and then reviewed the Event logs. The logs indicated that the search service was denied access to the SharePoint site and wasn’t able to crawl the content. The search service crawls content by making an HTTP request to the site from the local server. So, to check this, I attempted to login to the SharePoint site locally on the server, but was denied access.

I checked the IIS site and found that no host headers were being used. The site was simply on port 80 and users accessed it using the url: http://servername.domain.com.

Looking a little deeper, I found that I could connect to the SharePoint site using http://localhost, but not the specified URL. I modified IE settings to change the security zone, logon settings, etc. but to no avail. I then installed Firefox on the server to see if the issue was related to IE and tried browsing to the URL. I was able to successfully load the site using Firefox.

Ok, so the site will open in Firefox but not in IE on the server. The issue seemed to be related to a difference in how these browsers communicated with IIS. Time to turn to Google for help.

Cause:

I came across three different posts that all pointed to the same issue/fix.

This issue occurs on Windows Server 2003 SP2 and newer. These versions include a loopback check security feature that prevents the server from accessing itself via different names.

Resolution:

The fix is to disable the loopback check in the registry.

1. Open regedit and navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
2. Create a new dword: DisableLoopbackCheck and give it a value of “1”
3. Restart the server

Implementing this allowed me to browse the SharePoint site from the local server. I activated the Search Service again and now content is indexing as expected.

References:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861
• http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/06/14/i-m-indexing-and-i-only-get-errors.aspx
• http://www.fishbrains.com/2009/07/31/sharepoint-sites-unavail-from-local-host/

Occasionally, when accessing Dynamics Enterprise Portal, all you will see is the default SharePoint Team Site template. While the URL will be correct (i.e. http://servername/sites/DynamicsAx/), you won’t see any of the usual Enterpise Portal content.

If you navigate directly to a Role Center or another Enterprise Portal page (i.e.  customers.aspx), you will receive the generic SharePoint error text: ”an unexpected error has occurred”. When you enable the stack trace for the error, you’ll get the following:

At this point, you might be thinking that the EP site got deleted or that the installation was corrupted. While this can happen, the above issue is generally caused by the Dynamics AOS service being stopped. Because the service is stopped, EP is not able to communicate to the AX through the .NET Business Connector.

To resolve, navigate to the AOS server for your environment and start the service.

1. Login to server running AOS
2. Click on Start > Run. Type “services.msc” and click OK.
3. Locate the “Dynamics AX Object Server” service and start the service
4. Return to your Enterprise Portal site and refresh the page

Great… another blog! While it’s quite possible that I will post about random occurrences or travel, I also hope to add some value to those of you looking for technical tips and tricks – particularly around Dynamics AX, Enterprise Portal, and SharePoint.