Friday 23 December 2011

Problem restoring a PowerShell backup

I had a problem today attempting to restore a backup I had taken using PowerShell.  I received the following error in PowerShell when running thr Restore-SPSite command:

"Restore-SPSite : Your backup is from a different version of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation and cannot be restored to a server running the current version. The backup file should be restored to a server with version '4.1.10.0' or later."

I checked my SharePoint version numbers against the server where I had taken the backup and it all looked fine. I took another backup in case the first one had become corrupt (even though I had already restored it successfully several times before). I rebooted and restarted my VM, but all to no avail.

In a last ditch attempt, I decided to delete 2 empty content databases that were set up on my machine, and created a new one to replace them and tried again.

To my surprise, it worked. So, if you have the same problem, try removing content databases (if you can).

Friday 2 December 2011

Usability Testing

Browsing through some of the SPC2011 conference materials, I came upon a useful website that provides usability testing from the perspective of how a user would interact with your web design. You simply provide a web design image or HTML I believe and a series of tests are run to assess how your design is used by real-world users.

The click responses to questions about the design are grouped and displayed so you can see whether what you thought was a prominent design for something important actually does the job of attracting user interest.

It's not a free site, but a test is only $9 (about £5.70 at today's price) which is possibly well worth the pay-out to get some useful design feedback upfront of any development work.

Check out http://www.intuitionhq.com.