Sure Step Template for SharePoint 2010

Last year, I wrote an article explaining how to deploy the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step template in SharePoint 2007. This year, I had to figure out how to deploy the Sure Step template in a SharePoint 2010 environment. So here are a few tricks.

I used the Microsoft Sure Step client platform version 3.2.3.0, Content 3.2.5.0.

The first step is to retrieve the Sure Step Project Site Template.wsp file from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics\Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step\SharePoint Templates. Note that the .stp file is useless for SharePoint 2010. Once you have that .wsp file, upload it to the Solutions center of the site collection where you need your Sure Step template.

Once the file is uploaded, you need to activate it. In order to activate it, you must ensure that you have the necessary rights and also that the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service is started. If not, simply start it from the Central Administration -> System Settings -> Manage services on server page.

As soon as the Sure Step template solution is activated, you can create a sub-site using that template in your site collection.

Install Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal Server

Last week, I finally decided to look at the installation of the Enterprise Portal (based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0) for Dynamics AX 4.0. I therefore started to investigate about its installation and configuration. Microsoft provides a very complete document about it: Install and Configure a Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal Server.

The instructions are quite detailed and can be followed as is. However there is no guarantee that everything will happen by the book. This is why before configuring and deploying the Enterprise Portal itself, I decided to check if all previous settings change did not prevent WSS to run. I checked the WSS Central Administration and it was full of "SharePoint encountered an unknown error." preventing me to view any page.

I decided to run the SharePoint Configuration Manager but it did not solve the issue. A quick look at the Event Viewer revealed hordes of different nasty errors under both the Application tab and the System tab: error 10016, 5214, 18056, 3351, 2424, 6611, 2426, 110, and 8214.

The solution was to concentrate on the errors from the System tab by order of appearance starting with the first one (Error 10016). As you can see, the error consisted of a service account requiring additional security permission on a Component Service administrative tool. Ultimately the solution was to add the Network Service account as user authorized to start that Component Service component service. The additional trick here was to identify the right Component Service as error 10016 message only referred to the CLSID of the Component Service and not to its full and clear name. Happily Google quickly provided the right component service name: IIS_WAMREG. The operation had to be repeated as well for the Business Connector account (as described in the installation document).

Once both accounts' permissions were set up, all errors stopped occurring and WSS was running correctly. It was then time to start with the configuration and deployment of the Enterprise Portal itself. I launched the Dynamics AX client and went to the Enterprise Portal setup in the Administration panel.

The Enterprise Configuration wizard is pretty straightforward and I have no particular comment about it. Upon completion, it proposes to launch the "Manage deployments" wizard. That wizard is slightly different than what is described in the documentation but it serves the same purpose.

However when running it, we had a small error upon completion. That error was unhelpfully logged as event ID 1000 in the Event viewer. On top of that, the EP custom site template was not deployed in SharePoint and this alone completely prevented the creation of the EP site.

The solution came from the following article from Customer Source (Article ID 940365).

Before finding the solution I tried a few time to remove and redeploy the Enterprise Portal. During these try-and-fail tentatives, I discovered that:

1. Clicking on the Remove button (see below screenshot) while any site was selected would immediately and automatically crash the AX client.
2. To remove the Enterprise Portal, you need to first double click on all ticked boxes then click the remove button.
   

After applying the fix from Customer Source, I still had the AX error, still the crash-upon-remove behaviour but the EP custom templates were correctly deployed. I could finally create successfully my first Enterprise Portal site.

After its creation, the first step is to link the EP site to a company from Dynamics AX. And of course the first tentative failed miserably. This time the solution came from article ID 931939, still from Customer Source. Once the solution got applied, I could link a Dynamics AX company to the EP site and start checking all its nice features.

Deploying Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Project SharePoint Site

Because we run several Dynamics AX projects in parallel, with many more to come, we decided to start using more and more the Microsoft methodology: Sure Step. The 2010 version of the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step client allows you to create a local project repository or instead a SharePoint site on your SharePoint portal.

The portal deployment wizard is quite straightforward and if you are the primary administrator of your SharePoint site collection then there should not be any problem.

Except we ran into a rather strange issue. While the Sure Step wizard showed we have the right permissions to create a site, we ran immediately into an error which caused the SharePoint site creation to fail and simply stated that it could not be created.

After checking the Events and logs on the SharePoint site, the Events and firewall settings on the local computers (we tried from several computers), and even the network firewalls settings, we were still stuck with no clue. That error message remained cryptic and sadly, googling it did not bring any help as all words are far too generic.

We then decided to use fiddler to at least check if the problem was on the local computer or on the server by checking where it will stop. That helped a lot. Through Fiddler, we spotted a returned error message stating that the Sure Step Project Site.stp template could not be found. So we manually uploaded it in the Site Template Gallery and restarted the Sure Step Project Wizard. This time, the Sure Step Project site was perfectly deployed and the result can be seen below, using a Dynamics AX 4.0 project as example.