Manage Content and Structure and File Not Found

I ran into this today and thought I’d share the solution as it wasn’t immediately obvious. Server names and IP’s have been changed to protect the innocent. 🙂

The Problem

A customer was attempting to use the MOSS Manage Content and Structure” functionality but was getting a page that simply said “File Not Found”. Yet, when I performed the same thing from any other PC, the page would work correctly.

The Solution

The problem is, she was using an Invalid URL to connect to the SharePoint site. As an example, the properly defined alternate access mapping was http://servername:23649 but instead, she was connecting to http://192.168.1.33:23649. SharePoint would display the pages of the website in this manner, so everything appeared to be okay, but certain functionality broke, as was the case with “Manage Content and Structure”.

As I couldn’t see what she was doing, it wasn’t immediately obvious. And even after connecting remotely, I was ignoring the URL she was using because of course, the other pages of the site were displaying. In the end, the tip off was that in the Event Logs on the server, there was a multitude of 8214 errors (e.g. A request was made for a URL, http://192.168.1.33:23649, which has not been configured in Alternate Access Mappings. Some links may point to the Alternate Access URL for the default zone, http://servername:23649. Review the Alternate Access mappings for this Web application at http://servername:23646/_admin/AlternateUrlCollections.aspx and consider adding http://192.168.1.33:23649 as a Public Alternate Access URL if it will be used frequently).