SharePoint’s a weird little bugger. It doesn’t really help much that the iSchool’s SharePoint 2007 install is hacked together in the first place (and who knows whether that explains some of the oddities that I’ve run into). One example is how the server handles what are technically known as 404, or “file not found”, errors. All three of the following messages mean that a file can’t be found:

• HTTP/1.1 404
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:59:05 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices: 12.0.0.4518
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
• XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location:
https://portal...
Line Number 1, Column 1:
^(under Firefox only – IE gives me a blank page)
• 404 FILE NOT FOUND

As far as I can tell (and the iSchool’s system administrator agrees), these are all SharePoint-generated errors and not the fault of the Internet Information Services server we’re running SharePoint off of.

Even with the quirks, though, SharePoint 2007 is actually fun to screw around with. I’ve been enjoying the work quite a bit.