SharePoint Welcome Page Redirection To other Site collection or Web application!!!

Scenario: You have several SharePoint web-applications (only site collections). Whenever a user opens one of those using just an entry-URL (such as http://pravyns) you want to redirect to another site collection (not necessarily in the same web-application - for example to http://pravyns/site .

1. Go to the web you want to create the redirect.
2. If it is a publishing web, go to the "Pages" library, otherwise, you can use any other library that is of type "Document Library"
3. Go to the "List Settings"
4. Ensure that under "Advanced Settings" "Allow management of content types" is set to "yes"
5. In the "Content Types" section click on "Add from existing site content types"
6. Add the "Link to a Document" content type
7. Your content types list should now include the "Link to a Documet" content type:
8. Back on the list with its items, create a new item of type "Link to Document":
9. Don't forget to publish your link if you have a publishing/approval process setup for your library! 
10. Now go to the "Site Settings" of your web and choose in "Look'n'Feel" section "Welcome Page":

Enter your link as the welcome page of this web. 

Access Denied Error while creating new article page in SharePoint MOSS 2007

A user with Full Control permission on the top site could not create an article page. The error message was Access Denied.  I tried different ways to resolve this issue, include put her Full Control permission directly on the top site and Page library, but still had the same issue. Then I assign Full Control, Approve and Contribute and all permission levels to her, I got the following error:

List does not exist

The page you selected contains a list that does not exist. 
It may have been deleted by another user.

But this user can do everything else except the Create Page from the Site Action drop down. From the URL, you can see the Create Page is using /_layouts/CreatePage.aspx file which I believe is using publishing template

Resolutions Steps:

•  Go to Site Setting –> Modify All Site Settings from the Site Action drop down.
•  Select Master pages and Page layoutsfrom the Galleries section.
• From the Master Page Gallery document library, select Document Library Settings from the Setting drop down.
• And select Permissions for this document library option, and double check the permission setting. To be simplified, just inherit all permissions from the parent site. Then the user with full control permission will be able to create article page there.

          There you go!!!

Add Users and Site Permissions Error – Object reference not set to an instance of an object

While performing some testing as part of my current SharePoint 2007 migration project, I encountered the following error when accessing the Add Users link from People and Groups:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPRoleDefinitionCollection.Init()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPRoleDefinitionCollection.Undirty()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPBaseCollection.System.Collections.IEnumerable.GetEnumerator()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.AclInv.InitPage()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.CBaseAclPage.OnLoad(EventArgs e)
   at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive()
   at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)

I also received the same error message when going to the Site Permissions page of the same site. Going to either screen in other sites in the same site collection did not have this issue so at least it wasn’t a wide spread problem.

A quick search returned this forum post of someone encountering the same issue along with some responses indicating this was a mismatch between the Roles and Groups tables in the database. I didn’t want to edit the database directly as this would take the installation into an unsupported state and was about to continue searching when I saw in the last forum response that re-inheriting the site permissions also fixed this issue.

Along with the information about there being missing information in the database led me to the conclusion that something on those two pages was missing (a user or permission group perhaps) but this hadn’t be registered in the database properly. But how can I get to the re-inherit permissions screen if I can’t get to the Site Permissions page in the first place?

I contemplated digging through the source to figure out where that menu link takes you but instead figured this might be something I could achieve with the object model and hence Powershell! Another quick search revealed that SPWeb.ResetRoleInheritance() was what I needed so I fired up Powershell to see if I could resolve the issue.

First off I need a reference to my site (or Web in proper terminology):

$site = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://my.intranet.local/sites/subsite/")
$web = $site.OpenWeb()

Now I could just immediately call $web.ResetRoleInheritance() but I first wanted to see if I could see what permissions are currently assigned to the site so I can try and put them back to their original state once the permissions are re-inherited.

$web.Permissions | ft Member,PermissionMask

I’m using format-table (or the abbreviated ft rather) to show just the Member and PermissionMask columns in a nicely formatted table which gives me the following:

Member                       PermissionMask
------                       --------------
Intranet Owners              FullMask
Intranet Visitors            138612833
Site Owners                  FullMask
Site Members                 1011045712
Subsite Owners               FullMask
Subsite Members              1011045712
Subsite Visitors             138612833

So what permission levels do the PermissionMask values correspond to? I can presume that FullMask = Full Control and can take a guess that 138612833 corresponds to Read and 1011045712 corresponds to Contribute but it would be nice to confirm this.

I decided to get a list of the permission levels assigned to the site by doing the following:

$web.Roles | ft Name,PermissionMask

Which gave me the following:

Name                       PermissionMask
----                       --------------
Full Control               FullMask
Design                     1012866047
Manage Hierarchy           2129075183
Approve                    1011028991
Contribute                 1013125871
Read                       138612833
Restricted Read            196641
Limited Access             OpenWeb, BrowseUserInfo
View Only                  138612801

From this I can see that FullMask does indeed equate to Full Control and that 138612833 corresponds to Read as suspected, but interestingly 1011045712 does not exist at all. This confirmed my suspicion that a missing entry had caused the original fault – in this case it looks like a custom Permission Level may have been removed from the site. I would have thought SharePoint would handle this gracefully but perhaps not though I haven’t gotten around to confirming this yet.

At any rate, all that was left for me to do was re-inherit the permissions using the following:

$web.ResetRoleInheritance()
$web.Update()

Once this was done I could access both the Add User and Site Permissions screens successfully and was able to manually break the permission inheritance and reconfigure as required!