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If you have the above problem, check your Time Job Definitions and Delete the "Enable Features" job, that should stop this particular activity from running indefinitely.

Whenever you have issues connecting to SQL Server 2008 from your SharePoint installation wizard or when you are having trouble accessing your Windows 2008 machine from outside (your VMWare or VirtualPC) - trust me, the issue is with the Windows Firewall! Turn it off (it has Domain, Public and Private Profiles) and turn all of them off for you to seamlessly connect through!

You get this error when you have a custom ASPX page having a ReportViewer WebPart. I initially had my SSRS 2008 running in SharePoint Integrated Mode, later I changed the mode to Native and also uninstalled the SharePoint Reporting Services Add-in. Even after this, I still had this error coming up. This is what I did to fix it : added inside the tag of my SharePoint application as well as the virtual directories of ReportServer and ReportManager (these are inside C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services) Last but not the least, I also restarted the server for this to start working! :)

I usually want to keep my blog to only technical stuff, but am unable to resist writing about this new speakers that I have bought! - Logitech V10, I must confess I am a big fan of Logitech products, they are just superlative quality at the same time, value for money! - costing about US$35, it attracts right from its presence in the shelves - its just compact among every other speakers kept in the store... Once you bring it home and get it connected to your USB! - You will just be very surprised with the fidelity, volume, quality, build quality, nice little compartmented pouch (you can just easily keep it in any standard laptop bag) - trust me, this is the best if you are looking at something that just powers from your USB, is compact and does not hit on your wallet!

The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component When you are running your SharePoint 2010 beta 2 on a machine that has the domain controller, you might sometimes face this issue of SharePoint search sevice not working, inspite of a Search Service Application being associated. This is what I did to solve this: I had this problem as well on my SharePoint 2010 machine and I feel this specifically occurs when you have the Domain Controller running on the same machine. I sorted out with the following steps:    Deleted the 3 databases that gets created along with a Search Service Application from SQL Server directly Stopped the SharePoint Search Service using stsadm command Reset all the crawled index Started the Search Service again using stsadm Created a new Search Service Application (I also ensured - the same account - for example spsearch is used for the Crawl Service, Search Service and Query Service Application pools) - previo

Whenever you encounter this error "The given key was not present in the dictionary" when opening a SharePoint List or when creating a new item on a list, am sure you are led to search your own code to see if you have wrongly referenced any non present field... But, that is not the case unfortunately! This mostly comes in lists where you have Custom Fields (inherited from SPField) created. You will have to check if you have the corresponding fldtypes xml created and placed in the template/xml folder apart from placing the .ascx file in the ControlTemplates folder. So in your case, you will mostly not have placed the xml file and that is what will be causing this issue!

When you have a missing feature in your SharePoint that refuses to go away inspite of deactivating it as well as uninstalling it by force, a site template (.stp) that depends on - fails to work... so how do you make this work? Well, you have to manually delete the feature id reference from the manifest.xml that is present in the .stp file. As you know, .stp files are nothing but .cab (cabinet) files, so all you need to do is rename, change the extension, open in WinRar or any such cabinet handling program, extract the files out, modify the manifest.xml file  (just delete the xml tag that points to that missing feature) and then when you have to place it back - you have to be careful! You have to make sure there are no sub folders that get created! Check my another post on how you can use the makecab.exe utility to recreate the cabinet file. Once you create that, then you need to rename it back to .stp, upload it back to the Site Template Gallery - and start using it!!!

To compress multiple files into a single CAB file, you need to use a directive file. The directive file contain instruction how MakeCab should compress and package the files. Below is a sample of the most basic directive file. Replace the file list with your actual files. .OPTION EXPLICIT .Set CabinetNameTemplate=mycab.CAB .Set Cabinet=on .Set Compress=on "file1.pdf" "file2.doc" "This is a third file.doc" All directive start with ".". Comment start with ";". In the above example, option explicit specify all variables must be declared before it is used. CabinetNameTemplate specify the name of the output CAB file. Cabinet specify whether include the files in the CAB file. When creating setup package, you can use this directive to exclude certain file such as setup.exe from being included into the CAB file. Compress specify whether to compress the file. The remaining lines specify the files to be included into th

I have moved onto Project 2010 for the last couple of months and I must confess its been a great experience, experiencing the new features.... Among the visually new features, the feature that I would say is of best utility is how copy, paste to excel works, you select a set of tasks from anywhere in your project plan and paste into excel - the formatting is so nice, the fonts are nice and clean and on top of it, it automatically adds "Tasks" and "Duration" headings in the first row! Try it and you will simply love it!

In SharePoint when activating through GUI, "Publishing infrastructure" feature, you get this error inspite of the product not being in Trial. I fixed it by first running stsadm -o activatefeature -name PublishingResources -url http://site/  in command line and then activating using the GUI.

I found this behaviour when you have just changed your index location to a different folder instead of the default location. The full crawl just does not stop! It keeps running forever! All I did was to "Reset all Crawled Content" and then reran the crawl. It started working like a breeze! :)

Change Default Index File Location In a farm environment it will be usually a requirement to have the index file location on a separate drive and folder as opposed to the default location which is: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Office Server\Applications" You can set this path for an SSP by using the UI through Central Administration. But to set the default path for Office SharePoint Server Search Service and for WSS Search Service you will have to set the location through STSADM command. Office SharePoint Server Search Service is configured using OSEARCH command: stsadm -o osearch -defaultindexlocation e:\Data\MOSS_Search_Index (By default, the search index will be located at this path on this server. For index servers, you can specify a different path when you create an SSP. Note: Changing the index location will reset the index. To move an index with a reset, use the noreset parameter of the Spsearchsensitive or Osearchsensitive op

Excel 2010 sparklines feature seems to be one of the favourites among people using the beta version of the most anticipated Office package!

If you ever have issues in your Outlook 2007 not doing instant search, the article here : http://www.thenetworktechnician.com/2009/06/how-to-fix-outlook-2007-instant-search-from-not-working/ certainly helps! For me it started working before even repairing the installation. So, just the Control Panel, rebuilding the index, worked for me.

If you are a person who is eagerly looking to use Office 2010, kudos to you! - Yes, please go ahead... but Outlook 2010 Beta is sure to surprise you.... with not just the good features but also the most important aspect of Outlook Send/Receive not working!!! Outlook 2010 is inspired from Gmail and shows your mail as conversations, so that is really good! Send/Receive however simply does not work :( I am running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. After hours of struggle, I lost hope and reverted back to Outlook 2007. Now, every other software in my machine is Office 2010's apart from Outlook. Atleast, my Send/Receive is now working!

When you try to install the new breed of Microsoft OS' on a VMWare Workstation, especially using a iso image, VMWare gives us the option of going with "Easy Install" and prompts us for the product key right in the beginning, after the installation starts, it gives us a invalid key message! Quite annoying, don't worry, all you need to do is open the autoinst.flp file in notepad and re-enter the key... Now start the VM and the installation will go through fine!

Sometimes, when you save your Site as a Template, you get a .stp file and then when you try and create a new site out of it, it could give you a Site Template Invalid or not found issue.... This usually is because your Site Template has got dependencies (features) which are not correctly present ie installed. The best way to see this is to use STP Inspector tool ( http://stpinspector.codeplex.com/releases/view/38429 ) which will show you the various dependencies and then you can independently go and troubleshoot them. Once you correctly install all dependencies, the site template will start working correctly.

You may sometimes (for me, most times! - on both Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2008 R2- in Windows Server 2008, this error may not come sometimes come during installation, but when you are attempting to run the services, you will get a User Profiles error, so it is better to install this fix before you even start the SH installation) end up getting an error which has this text : Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport' Do not panic, all you need to do is install a hotfix from this link: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806&wa=wsignin1.0

When you are installing SharePoint on a single machine, we usually simulare a 2 server farm environment by choosing "Complete" and then in the Products and Configuration Wizard, we put in the local administrator username as "Workgroup\Username" and it just goes through fine, basically we were able to cheat SharePoint 2007 to consider the same machine as 2 machines! Not with SH 2010, SH 2010 "Complete" installation, during the products configuration wizard, does not allow you to enter a workgroup administrator, it definitely requires a domain account! Which means, if you need to have SH 2010 installed on a single machine, either the machine needs to be a Domain Controller with Active Directory hosted or you need to just use the inbuilt database installation.

If you are looking at running 64 bit guest machines inside a Virtual PC, you will only end up disappointed as both VPC 2007 and Windows Virtual PC (that comes with Windows 7) do not support running 64 bit guest machines.... very disappointing indeed. The only way if you need to do this, is to use VMWare Workstation : not free though :( . Ofcourse, do not forget the fact that your processor needs to be VT enabled and Hardware Virtualization option needs to be enabled in BIOS

There are two tracks of certifications in MS Dynamics GP 1. Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) 2. Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCIP) MCTS goes into every module of GP, so normally people start with MCIP. There are two exams in MCIP for GP. • Applications for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 • Installation and Configuration for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 The recommended one for starters is the second - Installation and Configuration. These links might help: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=MB3-527&locale=en-us#tab1 http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/dynamics.aspx#tab3 http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/dynamics-gp-specialist.aspx#tab2 All the best!

When buying your new laptops or desktops and if you are looking at SharePoint 2010, you must already know that it only works on 64 bit. So make sure you get a 64 bit machine with atleast 4 GB of RAM in it. Another thing that you need to keep in mind is VT (Virtualization Technology) enabled processors (and thus BIOS as well) - basically this is hardware support for virtualization and the new Windows Virtual PC in Windows 7 as well as Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 require this. All the more important is the ability to run 64 bit guest OS and applications - so on a Windows 7 x64 host, inside Windows Virtual PC, you can have you Windows Server 2008 x64 with SH 2010 installated and running... Intel Site helps you to find, filter and choose processors with VT technology and so is the case with the AMD site...

Windows Powershell in new breed of Operating Systems (Windows 7, Windows 2008) be the way to move forward... - Command Prompt will just die out, there is almost EVERYTHING that you can do with this... quite powerful

It is important to note that - Unified Messaging Role is not supported inside Hyper-V. So when installing Exchange Server 2010 inside a VM (Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2), you can only choose Mailbox Role, Hub Transport Role, Client Access Role and Management Tools.