The other day I was assisting a client changing the URL to their SharePoint environment.  They are also running PWA under this site.  The name change went very smoothly and I thought everything was running great.  I had removed the old URL from the AAM and set the old site to redirect in IIS so anyone typing in the old URL would be taken to the new one.

My joy at the success was short lived.  Shortly after completing I got an email that user were getting errors when trying to upload files, view/edit file properties, pretty much anything with a file in a document library.  They were getting the error “File not Found”.  I tested it out myself on the root site and it worked fine, I asked for examples and they were only have the problems on the PWA Project Workspaces.  I dug into the SharePoint log files and apparently something in PWA was still referencing the old URL.  I thought to myself, great, do I need to leave the old site running to?  Doing some searching, I found this post that solved the problem.

Apparently PWA puts an absolute URL in the content databases.  If this doesn’t exists you get the error.  The good news, you don’t need to modify the content database (something you should never do anyways).  Even better, the site doesn’t even need to be running, just add the URL back into AAM (even if the site doesn’t exists in IIS..or in my case is redirecting) and everything goes back to working as expected.

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