Making SharePoint Offline Solutions(during Site Maintenance)

ASP.NET 2.0 introduced the ability to take an application offline by placing a html file named app_offline.htm at the root of the web application. When this file is present, all requests are routed to the static html page. SharePoint Offline extends this ASP.NEt 2.0 feature to SharePoint, and enables you to schedule when an application will be online/offline as well as the ability to set a custom offline message for each web application.

SharePoint feature activation problem.

If you are one of those who are having problems with feature activation even when you made sure that the dll is in the GAC and everything is looks good while SharePoint gives the following error:

Failed to create feature receiver object from assembly "xyzzyFeatureReceiver_0", type "Conchango.xyzzyFeatureReceiver" for feature b2cb42e3-4f0a-4380-aaba-1ef9cd526f20: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: type
at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic)
at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFeatureDefinition.get_ReceiverObject()

In my case the feature activation works fine in the Test environment but not on the Dev Environment.

I don't think its a true statement: "Your feature and it's feature receiver must have the same root namespace or the solution will not deploy."

In my application design, I have a feature receiver and the feature in separate namespaces and it still works.

Solution: It worked when I use the -force option while activating the feature.

STSADM -o activatefeature -n Quintiles.SDMConfigChanges -url http://entportdlb.inet.quintiles.com/SDMMapping -force

Saving an existing word document to Sharepoint

Solution to the following problems:

"while i am trying to save the document using save as dialog box,unable to save it to document library.but instead it is getting saved under my documents folder"

"UNC Path of SharePoint Document library not valid"

"We have a user that is having issues with word documents in document
libraries. When she opens a Word Document on SharePoint site and makes
changes to it and then wants to save it back to SharePoint document library,
she is getting prompted for "MyDocuments" on her personal C drive instead of
being provided the path to the SharePoint document library. The user has
Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003 SP2 installed on her machine. She has also
added the Sharepoint site as a trusted site to IE."

The Solution:
•On Windows Server 2003, set the WebClient service startup to automatic, then start the service. You may need to reboot the server for this to fully take effect.

•On Windows Server 2008, install the Desktop Experience feature, then restart the server.

Problem:
"The Folder is no longer available. The web server is busy. Please try again later."
Solution:
Issue turned out to be the ISA server - if you ensure that your Sharepoint Site is excluded from the ISA, you should find the issue disappears!
The issue could also with users using VPN.