Intro to the SharePoint Hurdle Series

SharePoint is like the stereotypical bad-child that you love so much and would do anything for, yet sometimes you just want to wring its neck and knock some sense into it! Well, the SharePoint Hurdle Series will chronicle those moments where I have been sucker punched by the SharePoint Gods and graced with yet another hurdle to overcome. I hope you enjoy this series and learn a little bit – or just point and laugh at my troubles.

My Sites Get Real “Personal”

So, apparently My Sites is egotistic and wants everything to be about them. Don’t try and create your own custom quota template and apply it through Manage Web Applications > General Settings – oh no! My Sites is hard-coded to only look for and use the “Personal Site” quota template. Do you have a custom template applied but it’s not getting configured for newly created My Sites? Switch (or recreate) the quota template back to “Personal Site” and modify the storage limits as needed.

SharePoint Phones Home for E.T. (Extended Time)

Stop me if you have heard this before: “SharePoint is running slow”. Okay, everyone just stopped reading – great work, Adam. No, seriously, continue there may be help on the other side.

I hit this with two separate clients within the same week. Both farms were well above hardware requirements for SharePoint Server 2010, yet they were both acting like 4GB RAM VMs (yeah, you know what I’m talking about). The SharePoint Servers were behind tight firewalls and internet to the outside world was scarce. Thanks to our buddy, Fiddler, we were able to examine network traffic and find significant requests and delays from the SharePoint Servers trying to “phone home” to Microsoft via crl.microsoft.com. This address is used to check revocation for Security Token Service certificates on the server. If no or limited internet access is available from the server, this can cause page loading times to surge. I found this helpful post, as well as a handy KB article which resolved the slowness. Performing either the local host entry or importing the SharePoint Root Authority into the Trusted Root Certification store could just be the “call” you need to make to win back your users!

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