Fixed:--SharePoint Designer 2013 Crashing on Open Site

The Problem

When I installed SPD2013 on my laptop, all went well. However, every time I tried to use the Open Site dialog, it would crash. SharePoint Designer 2010 (SPD2010) was still working fine when I accessed other 2010-based installations, but not SPD2013.
I found a fix that worked for me in the Technet forums. You may or may not want to trawl through the thread, as it is quite long. Instead, here’s the Cliff Notes version of what worked for me.

You can repair your SPD 2010 to restore the regkey for SPD2010.
The issue might happen in case the ClientGUID of the Open Site dialog in SPD14 is the same as the one of the open site dialog in SPD 15 in a certain Side by Side environment.
(this repro’s only in a specific environment, but I couldn’t find the enviroment yet and when the GUIDs could be the same)
so I have couple of questions. Sorry to bother you, :(
1. Could you please check if ClientGUID value under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Open Find\Microsoft SharePoint Designer\Settings\Open Site is the same as the ClientGUID value under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Open Find\Microsoft SharePoint Designer\Settings\Open Site?
2. If the values are the same, could you please check if the crash still happens after removing both registry keys?
3. Have you ever installed any other version of SPD15 on your machine? (e.g. beta version) or any other version of SPD14?
4. if the issue still happens at #2, how about removing the registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComDLg32\LastVisitedPidlMRU ?

Points 1 and 2 did the trick for me. Apparently both SPD2010 and SPD2013 had the same GUID for the ClientGUID value in the registry. I had not installed any betas of SPD2013 on my laptop because I was concerned about exactly this sort of incompatibility. (I’d limited my use of SPD2013 to launching it inside virtual machines.)

The Fix

If you have this problem and want to fix it, here are the steps.
Open the Registry Editor. You can do this by going to the Start menu (I’m still a Windows 7 stalwart, so I can’t vouch for how this might work on Windows 8), choosing “Run”, and typing “regedit” in the Open: box.
Look for the keys:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Open Find\Microsoft SharePoint Designer\Settings\Open Site
and
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Open Find\Microsoft SharePoint Designer\Settings\Open Site
In my case, they were identical, as shown below.
SharePoint Designer 2010 (14.0)

SharePoint Designer 2013 (15.0)

Delete both of the ClientGUID keys. You can do this by highlighting the key and hitting the Delete key or right clicking and choosing Delete.
Once I had deleted these two registry keys, I was able to open sites in both versions of SharePoint Designer with no problems.
Unfortunately, the two versions of SharePoint Designer seem to use the same recent sites list, so I see the same Recent Sites in both versions. This is going to make it confusing when I am trying to figure out which site to open. Now I’m a three SharePoint Designer version guy, as I’m still using SPD2007 and SPD2010 for client work in addition to SPD2013. Yeesh.

How to Resolve Error Creating Publishing Sites In SharePoint ?

I have come upon a problem in SharePoint 2013 related to the creation of publishing Sites. rather than the site being created, the user is confronted with the error below.

A list of errors logged in the ULS is at the top of this post, however the problem is because of access being denied to __DeviceChannelMappings.aspx.

To resolve the error use SharePoint Designer to assign the Restricted read access to _catalogs/masterpage and DeviceChannels.
Within SharePoint Designer, right-click on masterpage and select properties.

Now, Click on Permissions for this list

Then Assign Restricted Read permissions to the appropriate user, or group.

Next, repeat the process for the DeviceChannels folder.

List of ULS error messages:
<nativehr>0x81070211</nativehr><nativestack></nativestack>Cannot open file “_catalogs/masterpage/__DeviceChannelMappings.aspx”.
System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)),
Unexpected error when trying to populate mobile mappings file ‘_catalogs/masterpage/__DeviceChannelMappings.aspx’ in web ‘/SITENAME': Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))
A runtime exception was detected. Details follow.  Message: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))  Technical Details: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))    
Watson Reporting Cancelled) System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))   
Event log message was: ‘Failed to initialize some site properties for Web
at Url: ‘http://SITENAME&#8221;. Exception was: ‘System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))
Publishing Feature activation failed. Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to initialize some site properties for Web
at Url: ‘SITENAME’ OriginalException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) —> System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

New Features of SharePoint 2013

Branding improvements:
SharePoint 2013 offers an improved process for designing a public-facing internet site or an internal-facing intranet site with pixel-perfect branding.
It minimizes the amount of SharePoint knowledge to design and brand a SharePoint site successfully.

SkyDrive:
It is Microsoft's cloud storage mechanism for consumers.
SkyDrive helps to work with documents in SharePoint - save, sync, share and collaborate and, what is more, to get the documents offline in the Windows Explorer, Office applications and so on.

Records management and compliance:
SharePoint 2010's records management features had improved from SharePoint 2007's.
SharePoint 2013 Preview has enhanced compliance simply by extending retention policies to SharePoint sites.
This also applies to any Exchange Server 2013 Preview team mailboxes associated with those sites.

Cloud App Model:
Share Point 2013 introduces a Cloud App Model that enables to create apps.
Lists, libraries, calendars, workflows and site pages are called “Apps” now. These can be easily added to the SharePoint site.
An app may also surface a remote web application and remote data in SharePoint.
There are a lot of benefits of such solution vs classic one.

Users now can have one of the following views:
Contemporary view – is available to Mobile Internet Explorer version 9.0 or later versions for Windows Phone 7.5, Safari version 4.0 or later versions for iPhone 4.0, and the Android browser for Android 4.0 or later versions.

Classic view - is identical to the mobile browser experience of SharePoint 2010.
Full-screen UI - Full desktop view of a SharePoint site on a smartphone device.

SharePoint 2013 Search:
Search in SharePoint 2013 now includes several enhancements, custom content processing with the Content Enrichment web service, and a new framework for presenting search result types.
SharePoint 2013 additionally adds new Content Search Web Part – which makes search experience even more effective.

Business Connectivity Services:
In SharePoint 2013 BCS (Business Connectivity Services) are improved and enhanced in many ways, including OData connectivity, external events, external data in apps, filtering and sorting, support for REST and others.

Web content management:
The web content management improvements in SharePoint 2013 simplify how to design publishing sites and enhance the authoring and publishing processes of the organization.
It also contains new features that use enterprise search to surface dynamic web content on publishing sites.

Mobile devices:
SharePoint Server 2013 offers new, optimized viewing experiences across different mobile platforms. Additionally, there are several features that are available to help improve both worker productivity and usability on the device.   New in Application services:
New for SharePoint is the Machine Translation Service, which translates sites, documents and streams for multilingual support. SharePoint 2013 also includes Access Services and a new data access model.

SharePoint 2013 has now Word Automation Services which you can use to convert files and stream to other formats. PowerPoint Automation Services are also new for SharePoint.
SharePoint, additionally, provides data analysis tools, like PerformancePoint Services and Visio Services that enable business intelligence and powerful new features in Excel Services.

eDiscovery:
Showing SharePoint's increasing presence in the world of litigation, eDiscovery improvements have been added that, unfortunately, are probably sorely needed. They include a new site template, the eDiscovery Center, which creates a portal for managing cases—you can access cases to search, hold content and export content.
Microsoft has added improvements to in-place holds, including site-level preservation; the ability for users to work with content that's preserved; and the ability to define the scope of preservation via a query filter. The results of your eDiscovery search—including documents, wiki pages, Exchange email messages and tasks and export them into a review tool.

Social computing:
The social computing and collaboration features in SharePoint 2013 offer an improved administration and user experience, in addition to new functionality for enterprise users to share and collaborate with others in their organization. The introduction of Community Sites offers a forum experience to categorize discussions around subject areas, and to connect users who have knowledge or seek knowledge about subject areas. Additionally, the new Community Portal enables a search-driven result page of communities for users to discover and explore from a link on their My Sites.
Improvements to My Sites offer a more intuitive workflow for users to develop their personal profiles, store content, and keep up-to-date with activities of interest through the use of the new micro blog and feeds experience.

Enhancements & Removed features in SharePoint 2013

The latest upcoming version of Microsoft SharePoint is SharePoint 2013. Improvements from SharePoint 2010 include major changes in on both the technical and user-interface fronts.

In the article, we will discuss a few of the salient changes that Microsoft is boosting for its latest version of SharePoint. SharePoint 2013 offers a multitude of performance improvements and new feature sets at both the user and developer level. The landscape for SharePoint 2013 users looks bright for many years to come. 

Cloud App Model:

Instead of sandbox solutions in SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 includes a new cloud app model, where apps are completely self-contained and extend a SharePoint site’s capability. Communication between these apps and SharePoint can be achieved using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, OData (Open Data Protocol) and OAuth (Open Authentication Protocol).

The latest Visual Studio 2012 lets you develop applications for both SharePoint and Office, while a new web-based development tool named Napa has also been launched to build apps for Office 365. Napa can come in real handy if you do not have Visual Studio installed and you want to check code functionality on the fly.

It is worth mentioning here that Napa itself is a SharePoint app. It can only be used to develop SharePoint-hosted apps. After initial prototyping, applications developed in Napa can also be opened and edited in Visual studio.

Social Collaboration:

SharePoint 2013 sites offer better collaboration and sharing functionality. New collaboration features include:

Community Sites

Follow People

Interactive Feed

Follow Sites

You can easily perform common micro-blogging activities like sharing content, links and media with other people in your SharePoint environment, and following people, sites, content and conversations. SharePoint 2013 also sports an activity feed that gives you a view of every activity related to people, content, media and links.

Enterprise Content Management:

SharePoint 2013 offers the best content management capabilities so far:

Managed Navigation

Cross-site Publishing

Design Manager

e-Discovery

This version of SharePoint includes site-level retention policies that extend compliance levels to sites. These policies include project closure and expiration policy and team and retention policy for sites and associated mailboxes.

With eDiscovery, you can search and export content from file shares. You can also export discovered content directly from SharePoint and Exchange. Team folders now provide you complete flexibility and ease of use by seamlessly integrating Exchange and SharePoint.

Search improvements:

The new and improved search engine now uses a unified search architecture and content enrichment web service for custom content processing. Search results are now personalized based on users’ previous search history. The new search functionality also gives you rich contextual result previews against your queries.

The search features include:

Rich Results Framework

Consolidated Search Results

Keyword Query Language (KQL) Enhancements

Here are some features that are removed from SharePoint 2013

1.  SharePoint 2013 has removed Document workspace site template.
2. SharePoint 2013 also removed Personalization site template.
3. SharePoint 2013 also removed one feature in SharePoint 2010 designer. Previously SharePoint 2010 designer has Design, Split and Code view for editing Aspx/Html pages. But SharePoint 2013 removed Design and Split view, now only Code view is presented in SharePoint 2013. This changed feature is because Design view is not up to date with updated version of Internet explorer.
4. SharePoint 2013 removes UI for changing search topology, Now Search topology can be changed only by using PowerShell.

Enable Sign in as Different User Option in SharePoint 2013

In SharePoint 2013 Microsoft removed "Sign in as different user" option from the welcome menu. In this article we will discuss how we can customize welcome.ascx and bringing back the login as a different user option.

I found that by default in SharePoint 2013, there is no option for "Sign in as different user". If you compare SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, it appears like below:

There are 3 ways of doing this:

1.  Just add the following to the url: /_layouts/closeConnection.aspx?loginasanotheruser=true.
2. Start your browser as another user 
3. For enabling this option need to follow below steps:

Go to the Path Location:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft shared\Webserver Extensions\15\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES

Here you will find a file named "welcome.ascx".

Open the welcome.ascx file and add the below code, below to <SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server   id="ID_PersonalInformation" tag:

<SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server" ID="ID_LoginAsDifferentUser"

  Text="<%$Resources:wss,personalactions_loginasdifferentuser%>"

  Description="<%$Resources:wss,personalactions_loginasdifferentuserdescription%>"

  MenuGroupId="100"

  Sequence="100"

  UseShortId="true"

  />

After this Save this, the option will appear like below:

Usage Report in Sharepoint 2007

SharePoint 2007 has built in usage reports that can easily be enabled to allow site administrators and site collection administrators to monitor statistics about the use of their sites. These reports are NOT turned on by default when install MOSS 2007.

Sharepoint has usage reporting feature , this will be handy for the basic usage reporting.This feature is there in sharepoint but we need to enable them to start reporting.One of the drwaback of this reporting it supports only 30 days.

This report could be filtered by the following criteria.

• Page
• Browser
• Referrer URL
• User
• Operating System

If you are sharepoint admin you will be intrested in following information from Usage Report

• Total hits and recent bandwidth usage across all sites.
• Maximum storage space allowed.
• Total amount of storage used by the site collection.
• Percent of storage space used by Web Discussions.
• Number of users for all sites in the hierarchy.

Three Quick Steps to Configure Site Usage Reporting

1. Enable Usage Logging in Central Administration
   

   A. On the Central Administration home page, click                Operations.

   B. On the Operations page, in the Logging and Reporting section, click Usage analysis processing.

   C. On the Usage Analysis Processing page, in the Logging Settings section, select Enable logging.

   D. Type a log file location and number of log files to create.

   E. In the Processing Settings section, select Enable usage analysis processing, and then select a time to run usage processing.

2. Enable Usage Reporting on SSP Admin Page
   

   A. On the SSP home page, in the Portal Usage Reporting section, click Usage reporting.

   B. On the Configure Advanced Usage Analysis Processing page, in the Processing Settings section, click Enable advanced usage analysis processing.

   C. In the Search Query Logging section, select Enable search query logging.

3. Activate the Reporting Feature for the Site Collection
   

   A. On the Site Actions menu, click Site Settings.

   B. On the Site Settings page, in the Site Collection Administration section, click Site collection features.

   C. On the Site Collection Features page, click the Activate button for the Reporting feature.

IMPORTANT: You must also enable Office Sharepoint Server Standard Site and Collection Features if you have not already done this. The sharepoint server that I inherited did not have this turned on, so reporting did not work.

4. Activate the Office SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection Features
   

   A. On the Site Actions menu, click Site Settings.

   B. On the Site Settings page, in the Site Collection Administration section, click Site collection features.

   C. On the Site Collection Features page, click the Activate button for the Office Sharepoint Server Standard Site Collection features.

5. Activate the Office SharePoint Server Standard Site Features ( This needs to be done on each site)
   

   A. On the Site Actions menu, click Site Settings, click Modify All Site Settings.

   B. On the Site Settings page, in the Site Administration section, click Site features.

   C. On the Site Collection Features page, click the Activate button for the Office Sharepoint Server Standard Site Collection features.

After site usage reporting is enabled the site administrators and site collection administrators will be able to view reports detailing:

• Requests and queries in the last day and the last 30 days
• Average number of requests per day over the last 30 days
• Requests per day over the last 30 days
• Top page requests over the last 30 days
• Top users over the last 30 days
• Top referring hosts over the last 30 days
• Top referring pages over the last 30 days
• Top destination pages over the last 30 days
• Top search queries for the last 30 days
• Search results top destination pages
• Number of search queries per day over the previous 30 days
• Number of search queries per month over the previous 12 months
• Top search queries over the previous 30 days
• Search Queries per search scope over the previous 30 days

Site collection administrators will be able to view reports detailing:

• Total amount of storage used by the site collection
• Percent of storage space used by Web Discussions
• Maximum storage space allowed
• Number of users for all sites in the hierarchy
• Total hits and recent bandwidth usage across all sites

Let see how we will enable this feature

1. Go To Central Administrative Site of Sharepoint Farm

2. Go To Operations Tab
3. In Operations Page Go To Logging And Reporting Section

4. Click On Usage Analysis Processing Link

5. In Usage Analyisis Page Enable Loging and set the Log Path

6. Enable Usage Analysis Processing and Set the time
7. Click OK and Save the settings

Now you are enabled analysis in you Farm, So the next step is to enable it in Shared Service level.

1. Go To Shared Service Home Page

2. Go To Office SharePoint Usage Reporting section, click Usage reporting
3. In Configure Advanced Usage Analysis Processing page, in the Processing Settings section, click Enable advanced usage analysis processing.

4. Search Query Logging section, select Enable search query logging


Now you could enable it in the Site Collection.
1. Go to the Root Site (Home page of your site)
2.Click on the settings ->Modify All settings

3. In Settings Page go to SiteCollection Administrative Section and click Site Collectin Features

4. In Feature Listing page Activate Reporting Feature

Let see How we can view this reports

1. Site administrators - Site Settings -> Site Administration section -> Site usage reports
2. SSP administration site - Site Settings -> Site Administration section -> Usage summary

SharePoint Designer Workflow Actions using elevated permissions

Workflow Issues in Permission.

After the completion of workflow, form is not getting copied to destination forms library. If the user who initiated the workflow is having access to the destination forms library, form is getting moved over but for other users workflow is showing error in Sps2010.

Some of us might have encountered a situation where we need to copy or move a document (usually InfoPath form) once it is uploaded/submitted by the user to a different library where the user doesn’t have permission. With SharePoint 2007, we used an open source extension to achieve this functionality. With the extension, we were able to copy/move the document from one library to another using the System account privileges. Using the system account privilege in a workflow action of course has its own security issues.

Now, SharePoint 2010 workflow (SharePoint Designer 2010) is out of this hassle. SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow has a new feature called “Impersonation Step”. This is nothing but a workflow step by any actions included in this step will be executed using the Workflow author’s privilege instead of the user who is submitting the document. The Impersonation Step is present in the Insert section of SharePoint Designer ribbon.

Tip:

SharePoint Designer always use the logged in user’s (workflow author) credentials for running the impersonation step. If you are unable to log in to the local computer using the account you want to use for impersonation step, you can run SharePoint designer as a different user using the following method.

1. Navigate to the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\
2. Right click the file SPDESIGN.EXE and select ‘Run as different user’ context menu item (you can also create a shortcut to this file on Desktop and right click the shortcut).
3. Enter the network credentials (or different user account) you prefer to run SPD as.