Diagnostics (v 1.0)

If you are having trouble connecting to SharePoint from Confluence or to Confluence from SharePoint, you may want to perform some diagnostics to see what the problem is.

Attached is a tool called CONFEXT:CSI Diagnostics that is a tool written in .NET and must be run on a 32-bit Windows OS. It will test the web services used to connect from SharePoint to Confluence and visa-versa.

Each tab on the tool is described below:

Testing Confluence Connectivity

Use the first tab to test connectivity issues when SharePoint cannot connect to Confluence. For example, the Test Confluence Configuration Button on the Confluence Administrative Settings page within SharePoint gives an error or the SharePoint Web Parts give an error.

For the most realistic diagnosis, run this tool on your SharePoint server when trying to diagnose Confluence connectivity. If your SharePoint server is not running on a 32-bit OS, then run this tool on any 32-bit Windows OS in your network that is "close" (with regards to network hardware) to your SharePoint Server.

If you are using version 1.0.4 or earlier of the SharePoint Connector, use the "Glue" buttons at the bottom of the tab for testing the license and get spaces since those Glue APIs are used in those versions of the SharePoint Connector. However, you may find that if you are running version 2.10 or later of Confluence that you get errors such as:

The request failed with HTTP status 404: Not Found.

If this is the case and the non-Glue buttons for testing the license and get spaces work, you will need to upgrade to version 1.0.5 or later of the SharePoint Connector. See CSI-399 for more details.

The bottom "Test Confluence Settings" button uses the helper API built into the SharePoint feature to test the settings to Confluence. To run this test you must be running this tool on the SharePoint server with the SharePoint Connector features installed.

Testing SharePoint Connectivity

Use the second tab to test connectivity issues when Confluence cannot connect to SharePoint. For example, the Test Confluence Configuration Button on the SharePoint Admin page within Confluence gives an error or the sp-list macro gives an error.

For the most realistic diagnosis, run this tool on your Confluence server when trying to diagnose SharePoint connectivity. If your Confluence server is not running on a 32-bit Windows OS, then run this tool on any 32-bit Windows OS in your network that is "close" (with regards to network hardware) to your Confluence Server.

This tool is not the best at diagnosing problems with SharePoint connectivity because the tool uses .NET libraries (web service proxies) to communicate to SharePoint whereas the plugin uses JAVA libraries. So, you may find that the tool can communicate fine with SharePoint, but the plugin still has problems.

Testing SharePoint Search

Use the third tab to test search issues. There is a lot of documentation around Troubleshooting SharePoint Search. Some of this can be expedited using this tab, but please review that documentation if this tool does not help.

In the first field, enter the URL to your SharePoint search site (e.g., http://mysharepoint/search or http://mysharepoint/sites/search) then click the "Test Connectivity" button. It should bring up a browser to the Confluence Administrative settings page for that search site where you can hit the "Test Confluence Configuration" button. It is important that the URL in your browser contain your search site URL to ensure that your are testing connectivity to Confluence from this search site to verify that the security trimmer works properly. If there is no connectivity the search security trimmer will fail and no Confluence search results will be shown.

In the second field, enter your URL to Confluence. After you have done that along with the SharePoint search site URL you can click the "Check Crawl Logs" if you are running this tool on your SharePoint server. This shows crawl logs that match your provided Confluence URL. If you have a lot of successful crawls within the crawl logs then your crawl configuration may be fine.

The next four fields are used to test the permission checker web service within Confluence. All search results within SharePoint that reference Confluence go through this permission checker web service to make sure that the current user has view rights on each search result URL. If you are not getting search results, it could be that they are being security trimmed out by this permission checker web service. To test this capability, first make sure that Confluence URL field is filled out. Then fill out a Conluence service user name and password. This is typically the same account used in the Confluence Settings screen within SharePoint and is typically an administrative account. Then enter a Confluence page URL that you want to test access to. Finally, enter the account (user name) to see if it has access to the page URL you provided and click the "Test Perm Check" button. This test will first log in the administrative user in the same way the "Test Login" button works on the first tab, then test the permission for the second user provided against the page provided.

The final 4 fields are used to try a search query. Enter the search term/query in the "Search Query" box and fill in the user, password, and domain for the user performing this query. The account is important because the search security trimmer will verify that an account within Confluence with the same name (without the domain) has access to any search results before showing them. Click the "Execute Search" button to perform the query and some of the results are shown.

It may be a good idea to be Tracing the SharePoint Feature when you hit the "Execute Search" button to see more details as to what is going on.