SharePoint 2013 Document Information Panel causes Office applications to crash

Another day in working on a production SharePoint 2013 for the real company and we have some more issues! As expected!

For some reason, after a successful publish of a content type from my Content Type Hub site collection to a subscribing site collection (see my last blog post), I encountered a strange problem.
Namely, the site column which I created and included in my content type happened to be a Managed Metadata column. After configuring it to be included in a Document Information Panel and upon opening a document form a library, the office applications (Excel, Word...) were crashing. This was happening while the Document Information Panel was trying to load.
For testing purposes, I deleted a Metadata Column from the content type, later deleted content type from the Document Library and documents were opening.

I could not afford to not have a Managed Metadata column in my library therefore I had to find a solution to get it working.

The first, immediate thought that came to my mind was: Because I have MS Office 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2013 installed on my machine, I knew this can cause issues. (You have to use SharePoint Designer 2013 if you are working on SharePoint Server 2013). Both Office 2010 and SharePoint Designer are 32-bit software, otherwise they will not work. I tried to go to:

Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Click on MS Office 2010 -> Change -> Repair!

You restart the computer and it all works! The Document Information Panel loads in successfully with Managed Metadata Column in it.

Stay tuned for more issues with bloody Sharepoint!    

SharePoint 2013 Content Type Publishing Proxy Error

When you provision one of the Site Collections to be your Content Type Hub for the whole farm so the other site collections (and even Web Applications) can subscribe to it to consume enterprise-wide Content Types- you may encounter an error: 'No valid proxy can be found to do this operation- publishing of content type'

As per the Steve Chen's blog post, this is due to:

a) Wrong URL settings on the managed meta data service application. 
- The content type hub was set on URL http://sp2k10a/sites/CTHUB/SitePages/Home.aspx 
- This URL was also set in the MMS app

b) Missing entry in the AAM’s 
- The MMS web service was listening on address http://hostname:32843/... But in AAM settings we only had a map to http://hostname:4000 which is the CA

The solution to tackle this issue is (depending on where you already are with your scenario) to:

1. In your Content Type Hub site collection- create some site columns you wish to include in a content type;

2. Create a desired Content Type and add newly created column(s);

3. In a newly created Content Type settings, try to publish- received error? Read on...

4. Go to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications and highlight 'Managed Metadata Service' [top link above Managed Metadata Service Connection]

5. Once highlighted, click 'Properties' on the ribbon and scroll down towards the end of page

6. Input the URL of your Content Type Hub Site Collection making sure you exclude /sites/home.aspx or any other suffix after the domain name.
Make the URL look like http://intranet.domain.com

7. Check 'Report syndication...' and click OK.

8. Being back on the Service Application page, highlight a 'Managed Metadata Service Connection' and click 'Properties' on the ribbon

9. Check the 'Consume Content Types from the Content Type Gallery at...'

10. Go to Central Administration -> Monitoring -> Review Job Definitions;

11. For 'Content Type Hub' and 'Content Type Subscriber' [subscriber for a required Web App], run the jobs immediately to push all of the changes:

12. Now, go back to your Content Type Hub Site Collection and re-attempt to publish a content type in question;

13. No errors? If you still see some error, most likely you need to correct your URL to make sure it has nothing after 'domain.com'.

14. Navigate to any other site collection -> Site Settings -> Site Content Types and verify a newly published content type is there!

Regards

SharePoint 2013 Navigation options

Ok, the time has come to provide some global navigation links to the users of our pilot site.

The immediate thought is to use Metadata Navigation- one of the great features in SP2013 (ease of use, ease of management and consistency). 

Unfortunately, in my scenario, not every user will have read access to every site/page/library in my site collection. Managed Metadata Navigation- as of 18/07/2013 does not provide security trimming! What is the point of users being able to see links to resources they cannot see? When they click on one of the links they do not have right to access, they will see an 'Access denied aspx'. I have a strange feeling that they will not like this.

According to one saying: 'Out of sight, out of mind'- we will have to stick to hard-coding our links in headers in Site Settings -> Navigation (in order to see this link in Site Settings you have to activate Publishing Infrastructure Features both in Site collection and site levels):

Unlike with using Metadata Navigation (up to 3-tier dynamic menu allowed), we will be limited to Headers (links of their own) and Links below them (2-tier dynamic menu):