Help Content Cannot Be Displayed in SharePoint 2010

Today we had a weird error on our SharePoint 2010 production farm: clicking on help got the "help content cannot be displayed" error for all normal sites, even though it worked perfectly well in Central Admin. The same applied to Site Settings>Help Settings for the site-collection, it worked in Central Admin, but not in any other site. In addition, the 'SharePoint Foundation Search' service was running on one WFE server.

First I checked all settings in KB939313 without that fixing the problem, then I checked the log files and found this access denied error for our site's app-pool account:

SqlError: 'The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_EnumResourcesAtScope', database 'SharePoint_AdminContent_ABBAef34-7603-4da5-823a-43ee1327ABBA', schema 'dbo'.'

Before embarking on changing any database rights, we decided to test with an English site just in case, as all our custom site definitions are in Norwegian. Lo and behold - help worked for the new team-site; and what's more, suddenly help was working for all our existing Norwegian LCID 1044 sites also. Go figure...

[UPDATE] See the comments for tips on granting execute rights on the sprocs listed in the ULS to fix this problem once and for all - even beyond IISRESET.

Starting Term Store Management in SharePoint 2010

If you can't get any edit or management popup menus such as add term store term group to show in the SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Service application Term Store Management Tool, check that:

• Internet Explorer is started with "Run as administrator"
• You have added your taxonomy managers to the "Term Store Administrators" for the MMS root node

This is required even if you are an administrator of the MMS application itself and you have full control MMS connection permissions.

So then you're ready to realize your ingenious taxonomy for classifying and organizing your knowledge with managed metadata and content types.

Arctic SharePoint Challenge 2011

The lynx is out of the bag: Get down with Arctic SharePoint Challenge at http://pzl.no/asc2011

Twitter: @spchallenge

Content Link Web Part for SharePoint

The Puzzlepart Content Link web-part works like the Content Editor web-part in ContentLink mode, but does not require you to configure anonymous access on source web-applications for cross site-collection linked content URLs. ContentLink is useful for showing common content stored in a central document library for use across other site-collections and sites.

Use the ContentLink property to set a server relative or absolute URL of the linked content to show. The user must of course have at least read-access to the document library where the linked content is stored. Note that the web-part is not suitable for solution gallery/sandboxed deployment due to the use of web request.

The web-part will work for retrieving linked content from other web-applications and site-collections even if anonymous access is not turned on. It also works when anonymous access is turned on, when the anonymous web-application policy is "no policy", "deny write" or "deny all". The code use the default credentials of the user when making the web request.

Download the WSP package or just the C# source for the web-part under Source Code at CodePlex.