Using custom OWA URLs in SharePoint to display your inbox as well as calendar and other items

This one has been sitting in my drafts folder for a while but last year I was experimenting with our SharePoint environment and thought it would be a cool idea to have a view of our web mail and calendar come up into our SharePoint homepage as web parts. Now if you are running SharePoint 2010/2013 you can simply use the Outlook OWA web parts to display what you want to a degree but by using a web page viewer web part and specifying the URL we can have a better degree of control on the output of the page.

So start by adding a web page viewer web part to your page and point the web part to your exchange server hosting Outlook Web Access. The following is an example of a URL that you can use:

Exchange 2010

https://owaurl/owa/?cmd=contents&module=Publicfolders&fpath=School%20Calendar&view=weekly

Exchange 2013

https://owaurl/owa/#path=/calendar

For more information on how to format the links and available flags please follow this link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232199.aspx. I hope that has helped some people in bringing better looking mail access to their share point environments.

Browsing to Companyweb May Fail with HTTP Error 503 on SBS 2011 Standard after installing an Exchange 2010 update rollup

I was recently updating a client’s SBS Server and after giving it a restart I wasn’t able to browse their SharePoint 2010 site. After having a quick look at IIS I could see the SharePoint Application pool was stopped, so I started it up and after about 10 seconds, it stopped. So I went and looked in the Event Log and found the following error in the Application Event Log:

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles General
Event ID: 1509
Level: Warning
User: DOMAIN\spwebapp
Computer: SBSSERVER.domain.local

Description:
Windows cannot copy file C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14\Configuration5212_100.sqm to location C:\Users\TEMP.DOMAIN\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14\Configuration5212_100.sqm. This error may be caused by network problems or insufficient security rights.

To fix the issue, we need to fix the permissions of the folder stated in the event log error above. We can do that by opening up Windows Explorer to the following location C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14. and then for each file in this folder identified in the matching event (Configuration5212_100.sqm in the error above), open its Properties and select the security tab. Then click Advanced and click on the Continue button to allow us to change the properties on the current window.  We then simply want to enable Inheritable permissions from this object’s parent.

This issue was caused by being a part of the Customer Experience Improvement Program which is what the SQM files are part of, for Exchange 2010 and subsequently installing an Exchange update rollup using automatic updates, in my case it was Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (KB2582113).

Configuring SharePoint 2007 to accept blocked file types

One of my clients using SharePoint 2007 were uploading some files to their site recently and got the following error:

The following file(s) have been blocked by the administrator

By going through Central Administration, I was able to unblock the file and allow them to upload the particular file to the library they were wanting uploading to. After opening up Central Admin, Click on the Operations Tab and look at the Security Configuration Section. Under it you will see Blocked File types (Forth Down), click on it. This by default selects your default site, if required change this. You will now have a large list showing all of the blocked file extensions, allowing you to add and remove them from the list.

In this case we wanted to allow MSI files so they could deploy a setup file through SharePoint as a storage point should users need to re-install. Remove the offending file type and click OK which takes you back to the operations page.

Simple as that, now going back into your SharePoint site, you can see that the file type has now been allowed and can be uploaded to the libraries you are using under the site it was enabled for.