SharePoint

SharePoint requests fail when memory is low

Summary When working in virtual labs, I don’t always adhere to best practices. For example, we all know the minimum memory recommendation for SharePoint is 16GB for production use. So, when testing in my labs, SharePoint web requests may fail. As a result, I find myself troubleshooting the issue, only to find the failure was […]

Does SharePoint 2019 still need the SMTP Service?

Summary Now that SharePoint Server 2019 has been released, the official deprecated / removed list has been published. After reading this you may have noticed that “Incoming email automatic mode” has been removed from the product. Incoming email automatic mode As announced by the Windows Server team, Microsoft is deprecating the IIS 6 Management compatibility […]

Finally – SMTP Authentication included with SharePoint 2019

Summary On July 24, 2018 Microsoft has announced the availability of both SharePoint Server 2019 Preview and Project Server 2019 Preview. One of the features I’m excited about is SMTP Authentication directly from SharePoint. This means, there is no need to setup a standalone SMTP relay just for SharePoint to send outgoing e-mail when authentication is required. […]

Unable to access Crawl History from SharePoint Central Admin

Summary Have you experienced an issue where “Crawl History” is inaccessible in your Farm and throwing error, “Could not find stored procedure ‘Search_GetRepositoryTimePerCrawl’“? If so, you may have some across this blog https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sambetts/2014/12/10/sharepoint-2013-crawl-history-error/ which details how the store procedure is created and the issue could be that the timer job to complete the provisioning is […]

Create a wild card DNS zone for SharePoint APPS

Summary To support installing and publishing APPS from your SharePoint Farm you will need to configure DNS to support a wild card host names for the specified app domain. This blog will demonstrate a quick way to configure your Microsoft Active Directory integrated DNS Server to support SharePoint Apps. Why is this needed? The APP […]

Install SMTP Server and Telnet with PowerShell

Summary SharePoint and general app servers often use the SMTP Service to integrate e-mail into the systems functionality. Since Windows supports a well vetted SMTP Service, using the built-in application is often the best choice. With the said, when testing your app functionality with e-mail, Telnet is almost always needed and not installed by default. […]

SharePoint Site Population Script for Testing

Summary The following script will create and populate data in a SharePoint Farm for testing. What does the Script do? Create a new web application, with a new web application pool. Create new database and associate it with the new web application. Update the local HOSTS file to make the new site accessible from the […]

Symptom Have you ever experienced intermittent but short-lived delays while rendering your SharePoint site, which seems to correct itself, but then returns at random times?  If so, read on… as the issue detailed below may be occurring in your Farm and going unnoticed. If you happen to catch one of the delays in action while […]

SharePoint fails to create Configuration Database for a new farm

Problem Description A new installation of SharePoint fails to provision a new farm due to a failure while creating the configuration database. Example: Here is the exception stack from the PSCDiagnostics log:

Cause This issue can occur if you chose to download and install all the prerequisite software manually, namely in this case the […]