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.

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.