SharePoint 2013

SharePoint Designer cannot display the item

You run into ‘SharePoint Designer cannot display the item’ error when you are trying to edit an existing workflow setup in Designer quite often when there is a windows update or update to .NET framework installed in your computer. In some cases it may also not allow you to create new workflows. Resolution: Clearing Designer […]

Create alerts on views in SharePoint document library

This is one of the most frequently raised question or complaint by end users. Why can’t I create alerts on views in my SharePoint library? When you try to setup alerts on items in a library, sometimes you have the option to set ‘Someone changes an item that appears in the following view: Drop down […]

Application Server Administration job failed for service instance - SharePoint Search error

Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance (GUID) - Event 6482, SharePoint Server is popping up in the server running Search service once every minute. Search is working fine without any issues, Content sources are crawled, indexes are created normally. No issue on user side of things.But the above error is flooding the event […]

The specified database has an incorrect collation

The specified database has an incorrect collation. Rebuild the database with the Latin1_General_CI_AS_KS_WS collation or create a new database - got this error when I was trying to mount a content database to an existing Web application in SharePoint using PowerShell command: Mount-SPContentDatabase “Content.database” –WebApplication “http://mysite.company.com” Error message clearly stated that the database is created with incorrect […]

There was an error opening this document. Access denied - Adobe Reader error

One user started getting this ‘There was an error opening this document. Access denied‘ adobe reader error while trying to open any PDF documents downloaded from any SharePoint site. This error shows up irrespective of level of access in SharePoint. Word documents, excel workbooks and all other office documents open up in office client in […]

EventCache Table in SharePoint Content Database

Every SharePoint content database has an EventCache Table. Changes to the SP objects contained in the content database are logged to this EventCache Table. Every change is added as an entry/row to the table. EventCache table is the change log for objects in database. Columns in EventCache Table: Column name Data Type Description EventTime datetime […]

The upgrade command is invalid or a failure has been encountered - PSConfig error

Running PSConfig after installing updates is a stressful experience(atleast for me). Every time is comes up with a different challenge. But unlike some unfriendly errors, psconfig gives us much more details about the failures in the upgrade logs. Okay then, I was updating SharePoint 2010 with May 2015 CU. Everything goes well until - The […]

Convert path-based site collection to host-named site collection - SharePoint 2013

With SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 Host named site collections have become an instant hit.Microsoft introduced a new Powershell command with February 10, 2024 Cumulative update KB2910928 to convert path-based site collections to host-named site collections. First of all,a host named site collection is something which has its own DNS entry and looks like http://host.mycompany.com. […]

Sorry, we couldn’t open .xlsx file - Excel error

We had one user constantly having issues while opening Office documents stored in SharePoint site. Sorry, we couldn’t open ‘http://sharepointsite/sites/teams/documents/report.xlsx’ file. Even though it is one user, he had issues with multiple office files. We tried with user logging into another machine and try accessing the file. As expected, all the files open fine. This makes […]

Move documents to a different library without losing version history

There can be many scenarios where you would want to move documents to a different library without losing version history. Either you need to have 3rd party tools for migration or you have to use good old explorer view to migrate the documents. If you try to copy over the files by opening both the […]