Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

I had a call from a colleague today. He’d created a SharePoint site collection inside an existing and working web-app, using the standard ‘sites’ managed path (e.g. http://server/sites/newSiteCollection). It seemed to have created it okay, but if he went to it he got a HTTP 404 – yup, “Page not found”.

This seemed a bit weird, so I went to see what he’d done wrong. I looked in Central admin – it showed his site collection as existing, but going to it, I got a 404 too. So I created my own – and after it was create, if I went to it, it 404′d too.

(The examples below use the managed path ‘demos’ – I took the screenshot when I was reproducing the problem, having apparently fixed it for the ‘sites’ managed path already. Trust me, this happens just the same if the items involved are using the text ‘sites’).

If you look at the screenshot you’ll see that I’m trying to go to the site collection ‘vaa’ inside the ‘demos’ managed path.

Well, at this point I tried using some other managed paths to create a site collection, and they worked fine – no 404s when you try going to them just after creation. I began to wonder if it was something about this path, so I opened IIS Manager to see if anything was going on.

Inside my virtual directory for my web app, I found a ‘sites’ folder (or ‘demos’ in this screenshot):

That was a bit strange – normally I wouldn’t expect to see ‘sites’ folder. It seemed empty, so I deleted it, and then I could access my new site collection without getting a 404. I then created a folder to interfer with one of my working managed paths (I created a folder called ‘demos’), and suddenly I started getting 404 errors if I tried going to it.

I don’t know why there was a ‘sites’ folder in that virtual directory, but it was definitely causing problems. I guess I won’t be using a managed path of ‘bin’ or ‘aspnet_client’ then

Tags: Admin, IIS

I like the Admin model in SharePoint. We have a structure of Farm administrators, who keep the system running, backed up and reliable. Then we’ve got Site Collection admins, and Site Admins.

Delegation of administrative responsibility is, in my eyes, a Good Thing. IT departments are busy, and have to prioritise work, which can make them seem unresponsive to an individual user’s/team’s needs. By giving the users the right to administer their team’s/department/group’s site, they can get on with getting things done without having to bug IT all the time – which ultimately annoys both parties.

However, I’m not convinced it is working. Read more »

Tags: Admin

I have been tearing my hair out over a problem with dates and timezones. We have a site column ‘Document Date’ that we are using in our search results page. It only holds a date.

Our client noticed that some dates appeared on the search results page as a day earlier than the value in the lists themselves. For example, the list would show a document date of the 8th of May, but the search results would show the 7th of May. Curious, and the start of a bit of a detective story… Read more »

Tags: Admin, Bug, Dates, Timezones

This blew me away – Central Admin in SharePoint 2007 doesn’t have any ‘Regional Settings’. Now, at one level, this might make sense – perhaps you always want it to match, say, the server time, or UTC time. I’m not convinced, but it might make sense.

<rant>What absolutely doesn’t make sense is that the date format it uses is the stupid American ‘mm/dd/yyyy‘ format. Why can the US not accept that the rest of the Gregorian calendar using world (i.e. nearly everywhere else) uses a format of ‘dd/mm/yyyy‘? I mean, isn’t sensible to have a format that offers a gradiated precision of time, rather than dumping the most specific part of it in the middle? Or, if we wanted to accept that central admin will probably only be used by techies, what’s wrong with ‘yyyy-mm-dd‘? Hell, I’d nearly prefer Javascript’s ‘milliseconds since the start of 1970‘ format (nearly, but not quite).

Make the format configurable, or use a standard format like ‘yyyy-mm-dd’. </rant>

I did find some solutions though – I particularly like the way that is transpires that the regional settings page is there, but that you have to enter the URL by hand…

Tags: Admin, Dates

A neat feature of the Publishing features is being able to see the items related to a page. To see this, go the the Site Actions Menu > Manage Site Content and Structure.

You should then see a window like this:

Use the left pane to browse your site collection, and the right one to select the item you want to see the related items for. Then click the ‘Related Items’ button:

This should then show you the page with a third pane, showing the related items and the nature of their relationship, where they’re located, and so on…

Tags: Admin