Business Portal 6.0 – Your receive “The webpage can not be found” or a page with empty content

We have received a support case recently from one of the clients that is still working on Business Portal – Requisition Management specifically. The client has almost 20 users working on the requisition management with no reported issues since almost a year.

First Issue Reported

The following case has been reported recently in which the users were not being able to create new requests, upon clicking on the “New Request” button , an error message pops up stating “The webpage can not be found”

The result is:

 

Second Issue Reported

When clicking on the requisition under the employee center, the page comes out with no content, as shown below:

 

Solution

Apparently,there are missing web pages and web parts on the SharePoint level which are causing the issues above. Before explaining how to recover these missing objects, it is important to understand the structure of Business Portal as related to the Employee Center and Requisition Management.

This is the overall structure of the Employee Center, it contains three document libraries within each of them, a minimum of one page.

To check the structure above, open the following URL path:

http://ServerName:Port/BusinessPortalSiteCollectionName/Employee/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx

The problem was primarily due to the fact that the content of the “Requisition Management Pages” document library was mistakenly deleted by a power user.

To recover the missing pages, you need to prepare another identical environment with a “fresh installation” of business portal, from which you can download all these web pages and web parts to be uploaded to the live (corrupted) environment.

Once the “fresh” installation is ready, follow the steps below:

1- On the employee center page, click on “Site Actions” > “View All site content”. This will take you the same screen shot above.

2- Go to the Requisition Management Pages document library (shown above in the screen shot) and you will find two sub pages (Purchase Requests and Purchase Request Details).

3- Repeat the step above for the “Purchase Request” page as well.

4- You still need to download the web parts in each of the pages above to be uploaded as well with the pages. To do so, double click on the selected page (purchase requests) for instance to be opened separately in the browser.

5- On the page (Purchase Requests), choose the “Edit Page” option as shown below

6- Now on the edit page, you will find a box at the right corner of the web part, check this box and then choose to “export” the Web Part

7- Now you can upload these missing pages and associated web parts into your live environment to get everything settled again.

SharePoint |  Important Note !

The name of the page and web part does matter, be careful to rename the web page or web part with the exact same name since SharePoint will be looking for the exact same URL path including the name

For example, if the web page name is (Purchase Requests) with a space in the middle, the SharePoint path for this is  /Purchase%20Requests.aspx   .Because SharePoint simply uses a (%20) to indicate a space in the name.

So if you upload the purchase requests with the name (Purchase_Requests) name, it will not work and you will still be encountering the missing web page error.

Happy News !
I have already uploaded the pages and documents for anyone with a similar case. This is Business Portal 6.0 installation and SharePoint 2010.

You can download them from here >> Download link

 

Best Regards,
Mahmoud M. AlSaadi

GP Cards Configuration – Automated Paperless Solution (2 of 2)

 

In the previous post, GP Cards Configuration – Automated Paperless Solution (1 of 2) the proposed solution has been illustrated without digging into considerable details. In this post, practical cases studies on both; Item Card and Vendor Card are illustrated.

Item Card Configuration | InfoPath Form

The following template represents how “Item Card Form” can be automated with InfoPath designer. Rules are validations are built in the form to ensure that only correct data is entered.

The InfoPath form is divided into four basic sections, each of them is dedicated to receive data from a certain node of the approval chain.

1. Item card details: this section should be filled out by any employee in the company who deals with new items. It could be the warehouse keeper, purchasing clerk, production supervisor… etc.
2. First Level Approval: this section is dedicated to retrieve the first level approval.
3. Second Level Approval: in case there is more than one approval to configure a new item on the system, this section is dedicated to retrieve the second approval.
4. GP Item Card Configuration: once all approvals are corrected, GP administrator can proceed with the configuration of the item on the system, and fill out the fields within this section accordingly.

On the form completion, a notification mail should be forwarded to all associated parties within the company including the “new item code” and associated details.

Below, is the illustration of the various rules that can be applied on the form as part of the validation layer.

 

Vendor Configuration | InfoPath Form

In addition to the form above, another template is provided below that represents the automation of the vendor card of Dynamics GP.

 

Following with the same criteria, customer, fixed asset and GL Account template can be created on InfoPath along with the validation layer accordingly.

Once the InfoPath for is designed and created. It won’t take more than a few minutes to publish the form into SharePoint document library.

In SharePoint Designer, workflow steps can be outlined to ensure that the old-fashioned paper base system is replaced with an effective automated solution.

Best Regards,
Mahmoud M. AlSaadi

GP Cards Configuration – Automated Paperless Solution (1 of 2)

 

When implementing an Enterprise Resources Planning System, clients are mostly keen to replace their current paper work with automated solutions which are  fully integrated with the backbone ERP system of the business, in order to  effectively and efficiently manage the Approval Chain.

In Dynamics GP, configuring a new customer, vendor, item, fixed asset or GL account always requires sensitive data to be filled out and approved before being configured on the system, such data will highly affect the quality of the transactions and reports generated.

In this series of two posts, I will try to explain the value of using certain MS products together to provide a very effective automated solution for managing Approvals specifically for GP Cards (customer, vendor, FA, item and GL account ).

Below is a proposal for using three common MS products together to provide the maximum added value to the business with Dynamics GP, these products are:

 

1- Form Management :

The very essential value of InfoPath is to replace the paper forms with elegant e-forms, with a validation layer within to ensure that the data filled out is correct.

2- Document Repository:

elegant e-forms require an online repository for archiving the documents. SharePoint library can be the best mate for InfoPath.

InfoPath forms can be published into SharePoint Library, as shown below;

What’s valuable about Publishing an InfoPath form into SharePoint Library is that “meta data” within the form can be published into a grid view in the document library, which gives powerful filtration and search capabilities.

3- Workflow Management:

Finally and most importantly, the approval cycle can be managed with SharePoint Designer, through which a customized and up to the need workflow can be designed in order to automate the approval collections of the old-fashioned paper work.

When deployed on the top of the solution, the SharePoint designer provides the end-users who are filling out the forms and the approvers an added value through mail notifications on every single step in the process.

All in all, the proposed solution can be outlined as drafted below, to eliminate paper work, ensure correct data to be filled out, approvals to be well managed, forms to be archived and most importantly the “Sensitive Cards” in Dynamics GP to be well configured.

 

Helping Note !

The automated solution proposed above can be further enhanced to automatically migrate the data that has been fully approved to Dynamics GP. Since data of InfoPath is stored in an XML format. eConnect can be considered including the following eConnect Schema:

• Item: IVItemMasterType
• Customer: RMCustomerMasterType
• Vendor: PMVendorMasterType
• Fixed Asset: FACreateAssetIDType
• GL Account: GLAccountType

In the next post of this series, I will apply the concept above on a practical case study through which Item and Vendor cards are designed and well configured in InfoPath.

When integrated, Simple MS products can do such a great job !

Best Regards,
Mahmoud M. AlSaadi