"Value does not fall within the expected range" when a user attempts to create a MySite for the first time

Had a wierd issue on a customer site when I tried to create a MySite for the first time I got a an error stating

"There has been an error creating the personal site. Contact your site administrator for more information."

Yes I know, very unhelpful. Looking in Event Viewer I came across an Event which contained

"The following exception occured: Value does not fall within the expected range. "

This issue is highlighted in the following article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937207 and a hotfix is available.

The strange thing is that it happened to me twice and with the same conditions, which were that I did not create a separate web application for MySite but instead put it on the same web application as the SSP. Now I know this is against best practice but in the first instance I did it as part of the Microsoft Learning Gateway 2007 Refresh solution, following the deployment guide to the letter even though it was asking me to do stuff like put the MySite's portal on the same web application as the SSP. In the second instance it was a Microsoft Virtual Server sandpit which I had to build in a rush.

I still haven't found out what causes this.

Email sent to Mail Enabled Lists is bounced back by Exchange

Whilst on a customer site when mail enabling a document library called TestDocs the SMTP address for the contact created in AD was coming up as for example TestDocs@MOSS02.vsa.domain (name of my MOSS Server). Mail sent to this library was bouncing back as Exchange was trying to send it through its default SMTP connector and to a smart host which of course could not relay for MOSS02.vsa.domain

To get around this, once the list or document library is mail enabled a SMTP connector needs to be created in Exchange System Manager that allows mail to be routed to the SharePoint server. To allow this list to receive mail from external users you need to assign it a second SMTP address for the mail domain.

Viewing Site Usage Reports gives http error or you are prompted to logon again

When viewing site usage reports you are asked to logon 3 times and this fails unless you log on as the application pool account or alternatively you get a http error. There is a hotfix available for the 32bit version of MOSS outlined in the following article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913384

Alternativeley if you log on to each MOSS Front end server at least once with your application pool account for the web application where you are viewing the site usage reports it solves the issue. This is caused by a weird ASP error where the account running the process needs a user profile on the MOSS server.

When you try to create a new schedule or change an existing schedule for the content source in MOSS you get an "Access Denied" Error

This occurs when the WSS_WPG group account does not have the correct permissions to the %windir%\Tasks folder on the computer that is running the Office SharePoint Server 2007 indexing service. Follow instructions on the link below to fix this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926959

Issues with Gradual Upgrade to MOSS from the Learning Gateway

I tried to do a gradual upgrade (making a copy of the existing content DB and running an upgrade on it) to MOSS on an existing Learning Gateway 2003 and it kept failing until I eventually removed the 16 LG web parts using STSADM. Unfortunately this broke a lot of the sites even though the upgrade procedure went through. The sites based on the LG templates were giving errors in MOSS mainly due to the 'Welcome' code embedded in the page. Also I found that document libraries in LG pages came across as Data Connection Libraries. Don't know if this is a one off but haven't had time to test it further as I am on a customer site. I have now created a new MOSS farm and recreated the LG site structure. I will be migrating document libraries manually.

Update:

The conclusion I have come to is that there is no upgrade path from Learning Gateway 2003 to MOSS 2007.

Multiple documents uploaded to a document library configured with minor versions and enforced check-out are draft and checked out

When uploading a large number of documents to a document library in a migration scenario it may be a good idea to ensure that versioning and enforced check-out is disabled on the destination document library otherwise all documents will be checked-out to the account uploading the documents and files will have a minor version (draft). You can enable versioning and enforced check-out once all files are uploaded.

No Adobe PDF documents are returned in the search results when you search a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Web site

This is for a WSS 3.0 implementation only. Detailed instructions can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927675


If the WSS 3.0 site already has PDF documents before you installed the Adobe iFilter on the server, you will have to modify a property of the existing PDF documents on the server so that WSS can subsequently crawl it.