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Introduction
After a short hiatus due to a much needed vacation, I’m glad to say we have a bumper collection of new Notes and KBAs to review in this, the latest installation of my monthly KM and WPC blog. Speaking of vacations, if you have not yet had the opportunity to experience Irelands ‘Wild Atlantic Way’, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Without a doubt, some of the most picturesque and beautiful landscapes and scenery on the face of the planet. You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced a nice lunch of seafood chowder, brown bread, and the mandatory pint of Guinness on the side, all while looking out at Irelands beautiful Atlantic coast! Back to business now though and as well as a collection of really interesting notes and KBAs, I’ll also be using this months ‘Hot Topic’ section to take a closer look at the Portal Drive. Whether you’re attempting to install it for the first time or troubleshoot issues in relation to it, I hope you’ll find some useful information within. Enjoy!
New Notes and KBAs
KM – This area outlines a selection of Notes and KBAs which have been released in the general KM component area in the past couple of months (component EP-KM and its sub areas)
2288032 - How To Post Multiple Questions in a Quick Poll
While it’s not possible to include multiple questions in an individual quick poll, Tanush has created this really useful KBA which describes how to integrate multiple polls to achieve the same effect.
2347234 - KMC RidId Service performance optimization
There has been an optimization implemented on the RidId service which up until now could have resulted in a performance impact on the system under High Load. The change is delivered in a patch fix and the note outlines how to spot from the thread dumps if this is indeed occurring.
2329323 - Error while importing Taxonomy
This Note describes a fix for a recently discovered issue which could prevent the import of Taxonomies. The fix is included in the most recent patch for several SP releases (outlined within the note).
2275640 - Issue with collab rooms after SP16 Upgrade
There have been a couple of issues discovered recently regarding the behaviour of role assignments within Collaboration rooms. After having applied the fix for these you may still see this issue arising – basically, after updating the list of roles (eg. Member, Administrator, ProjectLead etc), the changes are not reflected in the Room Member list. It’s due to a coding issue so there’s no workaround available, it will be necessary to apply the patch fix as directed within the note.
2340145 - Force File Download Property Ignored
This KBA was actually created due to an interesting discovery whereby we found that there were several actions which could prevent the ‘Force File Download’ property in the WebDAV protocol from working. As you may be aware, this property was created by SAP to prevent unwanted additional authentication prompts being thrown (for already authenticated users) when opening Office Documents. This KBA describes a couple of the actions which might prevent the setting from working as well as outlining workarounds for these actions.
2345865 - Slow KMC startup in big clusters
In some more recent portal versions, there was the possibility that a slow KMC startup could be encountered, especially in systems where there were a large number of Instances/Servers. This note outlines a KMC-BC patch fix which greatly improves this.
2342421 - How to Regenerate XML Form Projects
I decided to create this KBA as I’d encountered several instances recently of cases where there was some confusion as to how an XML Form Project should be regenerated. There are several reasons that a project might need to be regenerated such as to ensure changes made to the project are reflected at runtime, and also to ensure that projects which were created in an old version of HTML Editor are compatible with the new HTML Editor used in more recent releases. This KBA provides clear instructions as to how you may regenerate your XML Form projects and hopefully avoid any such compatibility issues.
2337752 - EP: KM copy of high data volume & side effects
Troy created this KBA to assist customers who may be attempting to copy large amounts of data and are encountering some issues doing so. While KM does not impose any limit on the size of an upload, there may be some restrictions in the HTTP Provider or Web Dispatcher settings. While these are covered in a separate KBA, Troy has focused here on best practises such as dividing the data into more manageable sections (to avoid impact on portal performance). He’s also included a nice tip about how to set a limit of the size of package that may be uploaded to KM by end users.
2339137 - KM Iview rendering issue with Ajax standards Framework page
This concerns an issue which I’ve been seeing reporting a lot in the last couple of months so I’m really glad to see that Santarshi has created a KBA for it. The main symptoms here are links and dropdown menus not working within KM and the cause is due to browser compatibility issues with the HTMLB used to render this content. Santarshi has described here how to correct such issues which should be of great benefit.
WPC – New Notes and KBAs relating to the Web Page Composer Application
2341075 - Buttons missing in WPC Editor
When using Chrome or Internet Explorer standards mode, you may notice that the buttons in the right hand corner of each WPC container are missing. This has now been resolved with the patch fix outlined in this note.
Forums/WIKI – New Notes and KBAs relating to the KM Forums and KM WIKI applications
2340157 - Error when setting permissions in KM Wiki
This KBA basically describes an issue where an Admin Error might be returned when attempting to assign permissions on a Wiki Space to a specific user group. The issue occurs due to the group not being unique and outlines the steps required to identify if this is the case and how to resolve it.
Monthly Hot Topic – Portal Drive
Portal Drive is a standalone client which can run on a windows machine and provides you with another channel through which to work with documents in the portal. You can connect to any drive or file system (including UNIX) and upload or copy content between the file system and KM. As such, most of the issues encountered with the Portal Drive are related to either the installation, connection issues, or authentication. We’ll be taking a closer look here at some of the most common issues and their resolutions and hopefully the next time you encounter an issue with your portal drive, you might find it a little easier to troubleshoot and correct.
First of all, I should clarify that there are two different portal drive versions – 4.5 and 5.0. PD 4.5 is a 32 bit application and therefore will not run in a 64 bit environment. It will also not run in Windows 7 (or more recent windows releases) and for these reasons it is far more common these days to see the newer PD 5.0 version in use. PD 5.0 on the other hand is a 64 bit application so it will run in 64 bit environments and as of SP05, supports Windows 8 and Java 1.8. You should also note that originally, SAP Notes regarding Portal Drive were in component EP-KM-PDR. This was retired however and now when searching for the most recent notes you should use XX-PART-XYT-PDR. Many of the notes regarding PD 4.5 are in the older component area whereas all the PD 5.0 relevant notes and KBAs are in the newer one. As it is far more commonly used today, most of the information I’ll be providing here will be related to PD 5.0 unless stated otherwise.
Installation
As mentioned previously, Portal Drive 5.0 is a 64 bit application. There is no restriction on the portal version being used but there are some other restrictions. Usually, any installation issues are a result of one of the following prerequisites not being met –
- The OS (ie Windows) must be 64 bit
- A 32 bit JRE must be installed (it does not support 64 bit JRE)
- If using Windows 7 or higher or JRE 1.7 or higher, you should ensure that these are supported by the Portal Drive SP level being installed. The latest version should be installed to ensure that these are supported.
Common Issues
Most often, issues surrounding Portal drive relate to the connection between portal drive and the portal or portal drive encountering authentication issues. The main troubleshooting steps to carry out here are as follows –
In the portal, navigate to ‘System Admin > System Configuration > Knowledge Management > Content Management > Protocols > Show Advanced options > WebDAV Protocol’
Ensure that ‘Enable WebDAV server’ is activated as shown below - 
This might seem like a very basic and obvious setting but you would be surprised at how often it can be the root cause of what initially looks like a complex problem!
Next, you should check which iView is being used to display the content in Portal Drive and verify that the authentication scheme is set correctly. The url being used to access the content could typically look like the following -
http://<hostname>:port/irj/go/km/docs/<repository_name>/<folder_name>/<subfolder_name>
In this example, the section ‘irj/go/km/doc’ signifies that the location /<repository_name>/<folder_name>/<subfolder_name> is being displayed using the KM Doc iView.
If it instead included the section ‘irj/go/km/navigation’ it would signify that the KM Navigation iView was being used instead.
Either way, Portal Drive requires that the authentication scheme of the iView being used should be set to ‘Basic Authentication’. If not, the connection will fail.
Note – setting the authentication scheme of the KM Doc iView to ‘Basic Authentication’ may result in additional unwanted authentication prompts occurring when opening MS Office documents. For this reason, SAP have provided an additional iView called the ‘KM Dav iView’. This iView can be set to use the ‘Basic Authentication’ authentication scheme and used in the portal drive scenario instead of the KM Doc iView. The KM Doc iView can therefore remain unchanged and there will be no impact of the rest of the portal functionality. When calling the KM Dav iView, the url should be composed as follows (note the ‘irj/go/km/dav’ section) -
http://<hostname>:port/irj/go/km/dav/<repository_name>/<folder_name>/<subfolder_name>
See also SAP Note 1773388 - KM Content could not be accessed by WebDAV client for further details of the KM Dav iView.
Single Sign On
While Portal Drive does indeed support systems using SSO, there is an issue with Portal Drive 5.0 whereby Portal Drive cannot connect if there is a different authentication scheme being used between the KM iView (Basic Authentication) and the portal (SSO). Of late, this has been a very frequently reported issue so this tip should be especially useful. In this case, it is necessary to make some changes to the xdconfig_admin.xml file in the location C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\SAP\PortalDrive\configdata
This change requires the replacing of the xdconfig_admin.xml file with the file attached to SAP Note 2186111 - Portal Drive 5 Customizing for Kerberos/ SP Nego authentication
