Identifying Problematic Features After Upgrade

In the course of upgrading my SharePoint 2007 farm, one of the more frustrating experiences was identifying problematic features or items that failed to upgrade properly.

One of the issues I recently dealt with was an error produced when I selected "Site Actions", then "Manage Content and Structure". This would immediately produce an error with a cryptic correlationID message. Searching the internet produced a consensus that I had a corrupt list on the site. Here is how I tracked it down and eliminated it.

The first step was to edit the web.config file to produce a more usable error message. In the web.config, alter it so that "customErrors mode = off", and CallStack = True". Do an IIS Reset and you should now get a more usable error message.

In my case the call stack indicated that the error was because List Template ID 432 was not installed. So, I knew this was a corrupt list, and it was a list on the main page of my site. A quick Google search turned up the fact that that List Template 432 was the KPI List template, which was deprecated in SharePoint 2010. Any list in my production farm built using this template would have to be deleted.

Now that I knew what type of list it was, I went back to my production 2007 farm to identify the lists in my farm built on this template. I used ControlPoint to run a report that identified every site in my farm that had one of these lists on it.

Using this information, I set about deleting the corrupt content on my 2010 farm. Some people have indicated that you can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to connect to the site and delete the content. I was unable to do this, as SharePoint Designer would not display content for pages that contained the corrupt list.

I finally resorted to using stsadm -o forcedeletelist -url to get rid of the lists. Once I deleted the offending content, I was able to open the Manage Content and Structure page and browse site content normally.

One last tip. Once you get Manage Content and Structure working, you can simply click through every site in your Site Collection. If a site contains any corrupt items, it will produce an error rather than expanding the treeview. This is a fast way to check sites for corrupt content.