SP 2013 Preview - Your My Site experience is on its way!

After intstalling and configuring SharePoint 2013 Preview I thought of exploring social features of My site. I created one team site and clicked on the "About Me" menu. It is from this menu your my site/personal site gets created when you click for the first time.

After a few seconds I got the message "Your My Site experience is on its way!..........."

Agree this screen appears when your my site is configured for the first time. But for me this remain for more than a day and I realized something is wrong.

Self Service Site Creation Option

I found link mentioned below from MSDN forum.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sv-SE/sharepointitpropreview/thread/12221538-569b-4e9e-a5e5-27e5693ca832
For me this option was fine as mentioned in this link.

RE-SELECT "Use Self-Service Site Creation" and Save

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/80861946-801f-4d39-8e59-5446f05f08dc

Tried out re-selecting the "Use Self-Service Site Creation" but this did not worked for me.

Troubleshooted Other Options

I thought of looing into the event viewer and ahh the error description was:

"The exception was: Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.PersonalSiteCreateException: A failure was encountered while attempting to create the site ......................"

Could not find anything concrete with respect to SharePoint 2013 Preview but many of them have received this error with SharePoint 2010. I verified various options like:

1] Verifying access permissions (The account with which SharePoint is installed should have "Farm Administrators" permission - This was fine for me
2] Checked managed paths  and My host site and Personal site settings - This was fine for me

3] Checked if site collections are created under the web application of the My site host - Yes there were 2

Also tried most of the options mentioned in the below linked:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsocialcomputing/thread/c731ce02-f219-4356-985b-baf83a475c28/

http://sharepoint2010blog.blogspot.de/2010/01/can-not-create-mysite-in-sharepoint.html

Creating Root (/) site Collection

This did a trick for me. There was no root site collection created for the My Site host web application (which is created by default at port 80 during installation and configuration).

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/a3dde660-e6c4-421c-b14a-1e71fc0776f3

I created a root site collection on the My host site web appication. After creating the root site collection I was not able to create My site but the error message in the event viewer changed to:

"The exception was: Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.PersonalSiteCreateConfigurationException: A failure was encountered while attempting to create the site, wildcard inclusion used to create personal sites does not exist....."

Now this was a clear error message. I added my/personal in managed path of the my site web application as wildcard inclusion (earlier it was already there. Don't know how it went away). By default it should have been there but no idea why it wast'n there...

Now my site was running fine and all got created well. Below mentioned is the screenshot of the Newsfeed..

Enjoy Sharring, following and tagging.............

CA, Web app, Generel Settings, Updates are currently disallowed on GET requests

When we select (in Central Administration) Web Applications -> General Settings for a few of our web applications, we get this error message:

“Error Updates are currently disallowed on GET requests.  To allow updates on a GET, set the ‘AllowUnsafeUpdates’ property on SPWeb. Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation”

 

The behavior was that new web applications would throw the error ‘Updates are currently disallowed on GET requests’ when we went to ‘General Settings’ in CA.  Since creating webapps isn’t an everyday occurrence in our environment, we aren’t sure the exact cause, but being a dev environment it could be a number of things.

 

Below mentioned powershell fixed it:
$w = get-spwebapplication http://nameofproblemwebapp
$w.HttpThrottleSettings
$w.Update()

Page Layout and Text Layout Buttons Disabled on Ribbon

I was having trouble adding and changing content due to both the Page Layout and Text Layout buttons were disabled in the custom master page. It was working fine with default v4 master page. There are lot of possible reason for this issues. You can check the link mentioned below:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010general/thread/dfb9a2ab-3dc7-4171-a35d-6eaffce97b72
Any of the solutions mentioned in the above link did not worked for me. After comparing my custom master page I figured out that one of the default javascript was missing which executes on load of the page.
I changed  <body> to  <body onload=”javascript:_spBodyOnLoadWrapper();”> and the editing tools control started working fine.
Basically the javascript _spbodyOnLoadWrapper() was missing in my master page.

Hide Multiple Upload link in SharePoint 2010

I wanted to hide “Upload multiple Files..” link from the document upload page. There are various solutions for acheiving the same. All of the possible solutions are mentioned in the link below:
http://salaudeen.blogspot.in/2010/12/disable-multiple-file-upload-in.html
I added the below mentioned script in my CSS file (custom CSS file used of my master page). This will hide “Upload Multiple Files..” for all documents libraries for which this CSS is applied.

#ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_UploadDocumentSection_ctl03_UploadMultipleLink, #Ribbon\.Documents\.New\.AddDocument\.Menu\.Upload\.UploadMultiple-Menu32
{
         display: none; 
}