I was recently working on a pilot for a client that required auto-apply of retention labels. The client wanted to understand if Microsoft 365 could meet their needs for records retention and disposal. To assist we set up your standard assortment of retention labels and policies such as auto-delete, disposition reviews, etc. One of the requirements was to configure auto-apply labels to decrease the level of involvement required by users. In their current record management system, they were configuring retention at the folder level. While this can certainly be accomplished with SharePoint Online, I strongly encouraged them to process auto-apply labels based on metadata instead. So one of our pilot configurations was to create a couple of auto-apply policies that applied labels based on a site column value. We created the policies, added content, set the metadata, and waited. Microsoft states it will take a little time for the labels to apply. I suggested a week, but by the second week, we still didn’t have any labels being applied automatically. I confirmed the queries were configured correctly (I’ll cover this in my next post), but in the end, we had to admit the auto-apply retention label policies were not functioning.
Ugh, patching servers. Yet another reason to move to SharePoint Online. I recently started another patching process as the servers were getting out of date and needed to have the environments upgraded. So while doing one server in particular I ran into a snag where the installer wouldn’t even run past the detection point. It simply kicked off and immediately returned the error “An Error Occurred While Running Detection”
I am going to go over the different steps I took to resolve this issue. I am even going to list the ones that should have worked but didn’t in case they will work for you.
So ran into a very weird issue. I had just finished patching our Dev and Test servers to the November 2017 CU. And after this occurred, any updates to solutions using JavaScript injection was not working. I’ll describe the problem in more detail here right away, but I want to make sure I give a call out to Trevor Seward. Trevor blogs from The SharePoint Farm and kudos goes to him for pointing me at the Blob Cache (but I am getting ahead of myself).
I have been working with SharePoint for a long time. An error was encountered not long ago that I have never seen when patching a SharePoint server (and unfortunately I have seen a lot of errors over the years). While running the configuration manager I received the following error:
“An exception of type System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException was thrown. Additional exception information: Invalid object name ‘Webs’.”
The error of course was really nice and pointed me to the log file to get more information. Opening up the log file and searching for ERR (put space at the end to have a better chance of finding an error entry instead of other words containing those letters) I was expecting loads of information to be made available to me so I could easily fix this problem. I really should have known better as I received the following:
At no point in the logs did it tell me where this problem was occurring. So where do we go from here?
Well let’s dig into it shall we?
There are already a ton of posts out there where a SharePoint 2013 workflow becomes stuck at started or starting. Well I have another one. This problem actually originated in a SharePoint 2013 farm. If you are using SharePoint Online, the cause is actually pretty easy to determine. So for those of you not lucky enough to be working with SharePoint Online, I will go through the symptoms you could come across and a possible resolution.