SharePoint Soup

Tag: SharePoint 2016

  • New Way to Install Workflow Manager On-Premises

    With Web Platform Installer riding off to the sunset, the old ways of installing Workflow Manager no longer apply.

    I recently encountered this while trying to install Workflow Manager on SharePoint 2019 on-prem. As of the new year (2023), we no longer have access to the product installers in WebPI. More information on that can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/429383/web-platform-installer-end-of-support-and-sunsetti

    After some research I found that Microsoft actually released a new package that simplifies the old process. They call it SharePoint Workflow Manager. It is what now powers the SharePoint 2013 Workflow platform and replaces Microsoft Workflow Manager 1.0 and Service Bus 1.1.

    The installation was straightforward and only requires the prerequisite of downloading and installing Azure Service Fabric Runtime and then running a PowerShell command to create an Azure Service Fabric Cluster.

  • Psconfig fails – Failed to provision the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application

    Recently when applying SharePoint patches (SharePoint 2016 – Dec 2020 Patches) and attempting to run the Products and Configuration wizard (GUI), it failed with the following error:

    Failed to provision the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application.

    This is a critical task. You have to fix the failures before you can continue.

    An exception of type System.ArgumentException was thrown.  Additional exception information: The IncomingUrl is already present in the collection in a different zone.  A url may only map to one zone at a time.  Use a different url for requests from this zone.

    The Problem

    I was confused and still don’t know what originally caused it. I recently did a database restore but it was not a central admin database, it was for a different web application. When I was running through the GUI the second time, I noticed the Central admin URL was wrong.

    Central Admin URL shows as: http://servername:443/

    We have a hostheader set for central admin using port 443 (https) but it was not showing. I checked IIS and the binding was missing (what?!). I have no idea how that happened. I added it back in and Central Admin worked for a bit so I could check the alternate access mappings. It was correct. I tried to run the GUI PSConfig again and it was still mismatched with the wrong URL and failed with the same error.

    Next, I tried to run PSCONFIG.exe via powershell using:

    PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

    It successfully completed but when I tried running central admin, it didn’t work. I got a 404 error. I checked the GUI again and it was showing the wrong URL again for central admin.

    The Fix

    What I decided to do was to run the GUI and remove central admin from this server (it’s the only server that was running central admin). It completed successfully but of course, I had no way to load central admin. I ran it again through the GUI and added central admin back using the hostheader. This fixed it. Yay! Central admin is working perfectly and PSCONFIG (GUI) completes successfully. I hope this saves someone some time. 🙂

  • Adding, Editing and Deleting a document from a Document Library

    We posted another SharePoint Basics video. Adding, editing and deleting a document from a document library. Click here to view it. If you have any requests for a how-to/walkthrough, please comment or contact us on our contact form. Thanks!