Very very annoying error, I know. This is one of those errors that Microsoft decided not to provide a lot of detail. I just spent the better part of 2 hours searching the web trying to find a solution. I found a lot of differing fixes, but none seemingly applied to me. I finally sucked it up and applied each solution I found even though "I know that's not the issue." Silly me. I had this occuring on two servers at the same time, a customer server and my development server. The is... [More]

I recently had to create some functionality for a customer to take a subsite, and duplicate it for backup purposes. I would normally walk them through the process using stsadm or use Save Site as Template but they wanted a simple method of doing it. I created them a on click solution. My code is below. We were going to move forward with the SPWeb SaveAsTemplate option but the site was too large. Even after increasing the template size SharePoint still errored. See KB Article 960969 for more det... [More]

Unfortunately I know this first hand. We were working on a customer's SharePoint instance and had to uninstall a feature. So using stsadm we went to uninstall the feature and forgot to include the feature part of the command. So we ran stsadm -o uninstall........... and uninstall it did! It completely uninstalled SharePoint from the server with no prompt or warning! The only thing left was the configuration wizard and the IIS websites were stopped. I reran the configuration wizard and received ... [More]

Sometimes if you're performing several stsadm commands (like adding, deploying, upgrading, and/or removing solutions) SharePoint get's some things stuck and it then proves to be a bear to get it out. For example, we upgraded a solution for a customer using stsadm and we were receiving an error stating we couldn't upgrade the solution. So we removed the solution completely and then tried adding it. We then received an error stating that the feature with this ID already exists. So we went ah... [More]

A customer's MOSS implementation stopped sending alerts after items were being updated. If someone was to sign up for an alert they would get the initial email but then after that no more alerts. If you look in Central Administration and go to Operations then Timer Job Status, you should see a job Immediate Alerts for your website url. If you do not, the timer job was removed. Don't ask my how it was removed, good luck finding that out! Anyway, run these two easy commands and you'll be back up... [More]