SharePoint Farming

One thing you can do to figure out which workflows are having problems is run a SQL query to get some details:

Select * from WFInstanceManagementDB.dbo.Instances where WorkflowStatus = 'SystemSuspended'

WFInstanceManagementDB is the database name if you chose the defaults during the Workflow Manager configuration pocess. If you entered a custom name when the Workflow Manager was configured, change WFInstanceManagementDB to be that database name.

Working list of reasons for suspended workflows:

- Workflow is trying to send an email to someone either externally, or that is not in the User Information List on the site collection. For a user to be in the User Information List, they must have accessed some site in the site collection at any point in the past, or been added explicitly (i.e. not as a member of a AD or SharePoint security group). 

-Tasks not started (perhaps due to preceding steps being delayed by workflow actions or slow human workflow involvement) before due date is reached. 

To get the farm version and build number use these two lines of PowerShell from the SharePoint 2013 Management shell on the server you want to analyze:

$farm = [microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spfarm]::local

$farm.BuildVersion

Your output will be similar to:

Office 2010 Update KB3055034 was released on October 13, 2015. I have discovered that this update, when applied to systems that do not have any Office 2013 products installed, causes Office Applications, namely Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Excel 2010, to crash upon attempting to open an office document such as a word or excel file, when that file is stored either in SharePoint or on a network file share. The version of SharePoint doesn’t matter. I’ve tried on both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013. 

To resolve any issues experienced by this bug, please uninstall KB3055034. To do so, go to Control Panel > Programs and Features. Select ‘View all installed updates’. Sort the updates by installed date. The update would be listed under Microsoft Office 2010 <Version>, with a date of October 13, 2015 or greater, depending on when you installed it. Choose Uninstall. Reboot once it has been removed, and you should be good to go. 

If you have your Windows Updates set to automatically download and install, you may want to change that for the time being, otherwise the update that you removed will be reinstalled shortly after removing it. 

When planning for disaster recovery or high availability in a SharePoint farm, most people start thinking of SQL Server AlwaysOn High Availability Groups or SQL Mirroring. With SQL Server 2012, the guidance from Microsoft was to avoid using mirroring because it is being deprecated in future releases of SQL. “Avoid using this feature in new development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use this feature. Use AlwaysOn Availability Groups instead.”

So dive right in and set up an AlwaysOn availability group for your new SharePoint 2013 on-premise farm, right? If you have workflow manager 1.0 and service bus (which you do if you want to use SharePoint 2013 workflows and not just built-in SharePoint 2010 workflows) then stop right there! 

If you check out the Workflow Manager documentation from Microsoft, it states that “since all of the data of Workflow Manager is stored in the above-mentioned SQL Server databases, any SQL Server based high availability and backup strategy should apply for Workflow Manager as well.”

Apparently this is poor guidance, or as Microsoft calls it, a ‘documentation bug’. Wish I could call my mistakes ‘bugs’ and get away with it! 

It has been confirmed with the Workflow Manager product team that SQL AlwaysOn was not explicitly tested with Workflow Manager and therefore they do not support such a configuration. They have only validated the techniques stated explicitly in the aforementioned documentation. 

So what are your options? 

1. SQL Mirroring

2. SQL Replication

3. Simple backups as well as a combination of backups and log shipping.

For anyone who has had a chance to install the SharePoint 2016 Preview, what are your initial thoughts? What changes are introduced that you’ve been waiting for? What features are still missing? 

SharePoint 2016 is the first version of SharePoint that was developed Cloud-First. Office365 users, chances are that you’ve already been using the SharePoint 2016 bits for months now, you just don’t know it. Being developed cloud-first means that Microsoft’s primary focus is on getting the product right for cloud users, getting the features they want available, in the cloud offering, and then considering which of those features translate well into an On-Premise offering for SharePoint.

You can sense this in the SharePoint 2016 Preview. The installation wizard asks you if you want to create a hybrid farm, utilizing the best of both cloud and on-prem features. If you choose not to at that point, you can still make that leap later on.

  This would basically tie your on-prem farm into Office365 / Azure / OneDrive and allow seamless integration (once configured of course) between them. 

The SharePoint 2016 Preview also hints at forthcoming changes to how Microsoft will disseminate the information and provide insights and documentation on the hybrid solution: The SharePoint Hybrid Solutions Center.