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SharePoint 2010: soap:ServerServer was unable to process request

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Problem

You've created a new website and site collection.  You then successfully connect to the site collection using SharePoint Designer 2010 through the site collection's fully qualified domain name (FQDN).  However, when you then attempt to edit any page (e.g., by clicking the "Edit this page" link), you experience the following prompt:

When you click on the prompt's Details button to learn more about the error, you see the following:

or

soap:ServerServer was unable to process request. ---> Value does not fall within the expected range.

You then try to connect to the site collection (through Designer) using the server name, and this works fine, enabling you to use SharePoint Designer to access site pages and even edit them.  However, when you close out this connection, and then connect using the site's FQDN again, you experience the same error whenever trying to edit a page.  Enabling SharePoint Designer 2010 access to your site collection via the collection's FQDN is critical, in that you cannot connect to SharePoint host servernames when accessing the SharePoint instance from outside the corporate intranet.

Discussion

The problem involves SharePoint Alternate Access Mapping (AAM). The site collection is viewable just fine through a browser, because the browser interacts with IIS (or the web server) in order to navigate among the website pages.  However, SharePoint Designer interacts directly with SharePoint itself.  Setting up a new site collection properly updates the web server with the host header information associated with the new site collection, and this is why you can browse just fine to the site.  However, SharePoint does not yet know how to map this FQDN to the appropriate page, and thus this information must be manually configured in SharePoint in order for Designer to connect to the site collection using the host header.

Resolution

  1. Login to Central Administration.
  2. Navigate to: Central Administration > System Settings > Farm Management | Configure alternate access mappings.
  3. On the Alternate Access Mappings page, in the Alternate Access Mapping Collection dropdown (upper right), select the appropriate website. 
  4. Click the Edit Public URLs link.  The Edit Public Zone URLs page appears.
  5. In the Intranet and Internet boxes, enter the FQDN for the site collection.
  6. Then click OK.

If you still have SharePoint Designer connected to the site collection, close that connection, and then connect back to the site collection using its FQDN.  You should now be able to connect to the site collection from SharePoint Designer 2010 using the FQDN to the site collection.

Summary

Setting the AAM is not critical, when using SharePoint Designer from within the corporate intranet, as you can easily connect using the servername of the machine hosting the SharePoint instance.  However, if you want to enable Designer access to your site collection from the Internet, you will need to configure AAMs appropriately.

References