January 2016 – Ryan Schouten

Recently one of my client’s main app servers in production went belly up. We believe there was some corruption in the VM image. No matter the reason it was not a pretty situation to be in. We had to rebuild the machine. As part of this it was decided to re-install the workflow engine and the previous database associated with the engine was not used. First Problem. So the workflow engine was installed and started from scratch. And from testing everything seemed to be working fine, granted testing involved creating a new workflow in SharePoint Designer to make sure it recognized that the scope and engine was configured.

Here is where we ran into a problem. We had a custom workflow definition that we were deploying to the different site collections that were created for different groups. After the recovery was done we started receiving reports from users that the workflows would throw errors and not start. I did some digging in the ULS and found that the workflow engine would throw one of two errors. It would either throw a scope not found exception or a workflow not found exception both with a root error of a 404 coming from the workflow engine (more on this later). So I deactivated the feature that added the workflow and then let the web part that started the workflow handle the activation and setup. The workflow would still fail. Continue reading “Recovering from Lost Workflow Server in SharePoint 2013”

Update(1/20/2016): The company put up their own blog post ITG Becomes ZAACT. In their post they added where the name came from. I think I may still have fun with my Joker moments though. Time will tell.

The company that I work for recently decided, for numerous reasons, to rename itself. Most of these reasons boil down to the fact that using an acronym as your main company name makes it easy to have conflicts. There are several ITGs across the United States, and this can cause problems with brand recognition. The renaming process has been a long one. It is a challenge to try and find a new name for an existing company because all the employees have an interest in what it should be called. After several surveys and some really bad names, thrown out early on, ITG had a reveal party last week where the new name was announced to employees and partners. Continue reading “ITG becomes ZAACT”