Monday, April 4, 2011

Troubleshooting SharePoint Issues

Since I am still in the midst of lots of SharePoint work, one of the recent items I started on was a quick list of things to check when troubleshooting. As SharePoint is a framework and a platform it's often hard to find out where issues are coming from, so I use this as a guide to track down errors:
  • Check ULS logs with the ULS Viewer
  • Verify web.configs for the affected Site
  • Check the Event Log on the Central Administration machine or the Web Front End for errors
  • Turn on/off Custom Error Reporting for Local/Developer/Test environments only
  • Check IIS logs on the Web Front End for any errors not caught by ULS (this is a rare case)
  • Clear page cache
  • Assure the SharePoint User Permissions are correct
I also have a few locations I check to see if anyone else has my same issues
  • MSDN Forums
  • SharePoint Overflow (soon to be StackExchange Overflow)
  • The SharePoint Homepage, to check for updates
I've found SharePoint to be difficult to check sometimes because its not just a web server, often pages are encapsulated within what are called WSP files, these are basically templates that pull data from a database and build the pages. It makes tracking issues down complex as often the problem is code related, not a missing bracket or end tage on a page.

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