SharePoint 2010 User Profile Synchronization Error

We recently started to notice the following "ma-extension-error" in ForeFront Identity Manager when we'd run a user profile synchronization with our Active Directory:

System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: 'Void Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileManagerBase.UpdateProfileWithBulkProperties(Int64, System.String, System.String, System.Collections.Hashtable)'.



at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileImportExportService.UpdateWithProfileChangeData(Int64 importExportId, ProfileChangeData[] profileChangeData)


--- End of inner exception stack trace ---


at System.RuntimeMethodHandle._InvokeMethodFast(Object target, Object[] arguments, SignatureStruct& sig, MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeTypeHandle typeOwner)


at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks)


at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)


at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebServiceDirectProxy.WebMethodInfo.Invoke(Object webServiceInstance, Object[] args)


at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebServiceDirectProxy.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] args)


at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ManagementAgent.ProfileImportExportDirect.UpdateWithProfileChangeData(Int64 importExportId, ProfileChangeData[] profileChangeData)


at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ManagementAgent.ProfileImportExportExtension.Microsoft.MetadirectoryServices.IMAExtensibleCallExport.ExportEntry(ModificationType modificationType, String[] changedAttributes, CSEntry csentry)

After checking all the steps under the bible of User Profile configuration found here, we were fairly certain our configuration and accounts hadn't changed. It turns out the error was caused by a SharePoint 2010 security patch that had been applied to our servers as part of our regular patching process. Microsoft support confirmed this to be the case and even have an excellent post on it:
 
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tehnoonr/archive/2011/09/19/september-security-bulletin-ms11-074-and-sharepoint-2010-issues.aspx
 
Basically we applied KB2560890 without applying several other patches. Simply apply the other patches (KB2494022, KB2560885, KB2566456, KB2566954, KB2566958, KB2566960) listed in the article above, and the error should go away.
 
A couple of notes:

• After you apply the patches to all the servers in the farm, you need to run the SharePoint Configuration wizard on all the servers as well.
• KB2566960 failed when we tried to install it because we don't use Office Web Apps in our farm.
• You can Install SP1 and and the August CU to resolve this problem as well, but simply applying the patches is much less disruptive and less likely to cause new issues.
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-074

Bad Blackberry Pictures from SPC2011

SharePoint cheerleaders. It's about time!

Wall to wall vendors. Try not to make eye contact.

Keynote

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011, Anaheim, CA

Keynote Quick Notes

Nerdy looking guys with both straps of their backpack on? Check. 80% of the room staring at their mobile device? Check. Well-dressed Euros taking pictures of everything? Check. We’ve got ourselves a tech conference!!!

Introduction

Jared Spataro - Sr. Director of SharePoint Product Management

• 7500 attendees

• Over 1 billion dollars in sales and growing in the double digits

• 125 million licenses sold (62 Million of SharePoint 2010 alone)

• 67% adoption among Microsoft enterprise customers

• Celebrity video: Luke Perry, Carmen Electra, Allan Thicke, Florence Henderson,

Speaker #1

Jeff Teper- Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Product Group

Theme is to get the most out of the conference and never hear yourself say “I didn’t know SharePoint can do that”

Redefine collaboration

• Empower users by rolling out a self-service user experience 
• Self-service business intelligence. Pull data from your whole infrastructure and use and manipulate it in SharePoint. 
• Create a social fabric using things like the Outlook social connector 
• Build relationships and break down silos 
• Extend collaboration outside the firewall and include partners and customers 
• Showed video on how Spacex has built a strong collaboration infrastructure. They’re excited about the cloud and mobile aspects of SharePoint.

Unleash the Ecosystem

• The developer community is growing exponentially 
• Will continue to push integration with Visual Studio 
• Want to further integrate with third party data. Not just read only, but manipulate and make better 
• Have numerous partners building solutions on the SharePoint platform. BCS to remote web services with Office 365 is coming. 
• There are new levels of SharePoint certifications coming to help identify those with the highest level of knowledge.

Build a world-class platform

• MS are growing their SharePoint engineering team 
• Merge silos like websites, blogs, wikis, document management systems, record management systems into SharePoint. 
• Creating an architecture that supports hundreds of millions of documents and properly manage them.

Demo

• Demoed a 15 server farm with 400 TB of storage. 1 contend database is 15 TB! 
• Has 7500 users connected and using a SharePoint environment 
• Navigates a document library with millions of documents with zero lag
•  Using FAST
• High availability with SQL Denali. Allows you to replicate all db’s to another SQL server (not just content databases). Failed a 14.4 TB content database over in 10 seconds. The crowd goes wild!

Back to Jeff

• The goal is to make their cloud solution this robust 
• 50000 organizations moved to Office 365 when it first became available 
• They will continue to support enterprises that want to keep SharePoint internal

Music Video about customers and how they’re leveraging SharePoint (eBAY, the Hub, EA Sports, Scotia Bank)

Speaker #2

Kurt Delbene - President, Microsoft Office Division

More on the Cloud vision – Are you sensing a theme yet???  

• 65% deploy social software tools
• 85% have a remote work force 
• 4 million millenials enter the workforce every year

The Office division’s vision:

1. Continue to lead in productivity. A connected ecosystem .

2. Cloud on your terms

3. Unified platform – no more silos

Office 365

• Where Office meets the cloud (Lync, Exchange , SharePoint, Office)
•  Tailored 365 to each tier of the enterprise.
•  Backed by Microsoft so it’s secure, reliable and well supported. Really hammering home the point they probably do it better than you can! I would not want to be calling India when SharePoint isn’t working properly, working my way through several layers of support to get the engineer that can help me.

Another video about an organization called NetHope who use Lync and SharePoint in the cloud to help numerous aid organizations work together. Demo with a guy from NetHope showing how they leverage Windows and SQL Azure combined with Office 365.

Big news!!! There will be another SharePoint conference next year at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Vegas is great and all, but that was the same city and venue as the last SharePoint conference. I'll just have to suck it up.

How to Delete a SharePoint Site and All of It's Sub Sites

We were recently doing some maintenance cleaning up old sites when we noticed an annoying feature. When you try to delete a site that has numerous sub sites, SharePoint will continually kick out errors telling you it can't delete the current site because it has sub sites. This forces you to manually go through and delete the lower level sites, then work your way up.

I understand this is a "safety" feature to help make sure you don't delete any sub sites you didn't mean to, but I really want to get rid of this legacy site that's taking up a big chunk of SQL disk.

The solution? Run the following powershell command. Be sure you have a good backup in case you change your mind and substitute the site name (http://site/subsite) with the name of the sub site you want to nuke.

function RemoveSPWebRecursively(
  [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb] $web)
{
Write-Debug "Removing site ($($web.Url))..."


$subwebs = $web.GetSubwebsForCurrentUser()


foreach($subweb in $subwebs)
{
RemoveSPWebRecursively($subweb)
$subweb.Dispose()
}

$DebugPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
Remove-SPWeb $web -Confirm:$false
$DebugPreference = "Continue"
}


$DebugPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
$web = Get-SPWeb "http://site/subsite"
$DebugPreference = "Continue"

If ($web -ne $null)
{
RemoveSPWebRecursively $web
$web.Dispose()
}

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is Now Available for Download

Here's the info on where to get it and how to install directily from the SharePoint Team Blog

Download - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ee748587.aspx

Known Issues - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2532126

Directions:

Install the service packs in the following order on every server in the farm.


1. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010
2. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Language Pack (if applicable)
3. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010
4. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010 Language Pack (if applicable)

The SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard or "psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b -wait” should be run once on every server in the farm following the final update installed.

The version of content databases will be 14.0.6029.1000 after successfully installation. For more in-depth guidance for the update process, we recommend reviewing the following articles. These articles provide a correct way to deploy updates and identify known issues (and resolutions).



It is strongly recommended to install the June 2011 Cumulative Update immediately after the installation of Service Pack 1. The June Cumulative Update includes several important security and bug fixes that are not included Service Pack 1.

SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 Will Be Available Shortly

According to the SharePoint Team Blog Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 will be available towards the end of June and it promises stability, perfomance and security enhancements the community has been asking for.

Here are the highlights of what we can expect:

Site Recycle Bin
Service Pack 1 will introduce long awaited Site Recycle Bin functionality that enables self-service recovery of site collections and sites. In the past IT Professionals were tasked with restoring entire databases to recover deleted site collections and sites and would generally require expensive restore environments to support the task. Now in Service Pack 1 administrators can quickly and easily recover site collections and sites accidentally deleted by their owners in a process similar to that of the Recycle Bin we have for Lists, Libraries, and Documents.

Shallow Copy
If you’re using Remote BLOB Storage you’ve probably realized that when moving Site Collections (Move-SPSite) between content databases each unit of unstructured data (BLOB) was round tripped (I.e. uploaded and subsequently downloaded again) serially during the move. This operation was both time consuming and resource intensive. In Service Pack 1 we reduce that overhead by enabling “shallow copy” when moving Site Collections between databases where Remote BLOB Storage is used. New Shallow Copy functionality with the Move-SPSite CmdLet enables moving site collections between content databases without moving the underlying unstructured data, i.e. Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint Presentations, etc. significantly increasing performance and reliability for organizations using Remote BLOB Storage by simply updating the pointers to those objects in the destination content database.

StorMan.aspx
In SharePoint 2010 we removed StorMan.aspx (Storage Space Allocation) (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982587/EN-US) which in previous versions of SharePoint enabled granular management and insight into storage. For example, the page would show you the top 100 documents or document libraries in terms of size. With that information end users could the page to clean up content from their site(s) by deleting the large content that they no longer needed. In Service Pack 1 we are bringing back an improved StorMan.aspx, enabling users to better understand where their quota is going and act upon that information to reduce the size of their sites.

New enhancements will improve the way you interact with information in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 1 adds support for working with SharePoint and the Office Web Applications using Internet Explorer 9 and the Google Chrome browser (for a complete list of supported browsers for SharePoint 2010 see also http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx), support for Open Document Format documents, and more.

There are also some unconfirmed reports of improvements to backup and restore, better Project/SharePoint integration and support for Google Chrome.

To read the official announcement click here and to be notified of updates sign up for the RSS feed here. Joel Oleson also has some information on his excellent SharePoint blog here.

Error - An unhandled exception occured in the Silverlight Application

SharePoint 2010 users will come across this error eventually when they try to create a new site, list, library, etc.

Going by what the error said, we re-installed Silverlight on both the server and the client machine. No luck. After doing a Google search we learned that the error was caused by the Web Page Security Validation Web Application setting being set to Off.

To resolve the issue, follow the steps below:

1. Login to Central Admin
2. Select Application Management - Manage Web Applications.
3. Select the Web Application you were having the problem with, then select General Settings from the ribbon.
4. Scroll half way down the Web Application General Settings Window and turn security validation On.

That's it. Never has an error message given so little information to resolve the real problem!

Let us know if you have a similar issue.

SharePoint 2010 December Cumulative Update

The SharePoint 2010 Foundation and SharePoint Server 2010 Cumulative updates are available from the SharePoint Update site:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff800847.aspx

We're running SharePoint 2010 in a farm configuration with two web front ends, and two application servers. To properly update the environment, Microsoft recommended that we use the following procedure:

1. As always, make sure you have a backup of the environment.
2. Login to the servers with the same account you used to install SharePoint.
3. Run the Foundation updates on all the servers in the farm and reboot.



5. Run the Server updates on all the servers in the farm (presuming you have server installed). Microsoft told us running the Server updates alone might be fine, but they recommended running the Foundation updates first. Re-boot all servers after the second update is applied.



7. Run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard on the server that hosts the Central Admin site.




9. Run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard on the other servers.
10. Note that you can also run the configuration wizard from powershell: PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures 
11. You must restart the User Profile Synchronization service after installing this cumulative update. For more information see the Start the User Profile Synchronization service section in the Configure profile synchronization article in the library.

Here's some info from MS on known issues with the updates:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2459257

That should be all. Let us know if you have any issues.

Error Overlaying Exchange Calendars in SharePoint 2010

We recently came across an error when users tried to overlay their Exchange calendars on a SharePoint 2010 calendar. Basically, they would browse to the calendar.aspx page and select the Calendar tab in the ribbon. Next, they'd select the Calendar Overlay option and enter the OWA URL and Exchange Web Services URL.

When they hit OK and tried to view the calendar they got an error saying:

"Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority"

The solution is to export the certificate you're using on your Exchange Outlook Web Access server to a .cer file and save it to somewhere you can access it from your local machine. Next, login to Central Admin and select Security - Manage trust - New

Give it a simple name like OWA and provide the location to the certificate. Hit OK and you should no longer get the error when you add and Exchange calendar.

Here's an article with a little more explanation from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982982