All About SharePoint – S.S. Ahmed – MVP Microsoft SharePoint

You have installed Office 2010 beta and you are trying to connect to SharePoint 2010 from InfoPath but you get an error.

The internet address is not valid

Figure 1: The Internet address is not valid.

You click OK and you get another error “The operation could not be completed”. Click Show Details >> and you will see error “Unable to connect to the SharePoint site”.

The operation could not be completed.

Figure 2: The operation could not be completed.

You try a little harder to connect to the SharePoint but this time you get yet another error “Network is down or you may not be connected to the network”. What do you do next? You check if the enterprise features are enabled or not. They are enabled. You check DNS settings. Settings are fine. Now what?

It happens if you have not created a top level site collection. Create a top level site collection and then try to connect and it should work. If you are not sure whether you have created a top level site collection or not, try to open the main site URL in the browser. If the site does not open then you have not created a top level site collection.  For example, http://sp2010/sites/spsite opens fine and you can access all areas of the site but http://sp2010 does not open, then you have not created a top level site collection and  in this case if you try to connect to http://sp2010/sites/spsite from InfoPath you will get an error.

To create a top level site collection, go to central admin site and follow these steps:

1. Under Site Collections, click Create site collections link.
2. Select web application where you want to create site collection from the drop down.
3. Give title and description and select “/” from the URL drop down. Front slash stands for a top level site. You will not see it listed in the drop down if you have already created a top level site collection because you can only create one top level site collection per web application. You can create multiple sub site collections by selecting “/sites/” from the drop down and then entering the name of your site in the text box provided.

 4. Select a template for your site and enter primary site collection administrator and click OK.

You are done. Now go and try to access the top level site link in InfoPath. It will work.