Corey Roth [MVP]

My team and I have come to rely on SharePoint Workspace for our current project on a daily basis.  Most of us never even open a web browser even and browse project documents solely by using SharePoint Workspace.  It’s a great tool and allows us to grab a copy of the latest documents and view them offline on the airplane or wherever.  Leave it up to us to also find a way to break it.  Back in April our world came crashing to a halt when all of the sudden, SharePoint Workspace would no longer sync our document library.  When trying to sync we were met with the following error.  Here is what you saw when you click on Resolve in the ribbon.

Data in this list references content type "", which is no longer in the list schema.

Doing a quick search on the Internet quickly yielded nothing.  In our case, no changes to the document library occurred.  The schema was the same and the only thing new was that documents were uploaded on a daily basis.  I tried various things but could not come up with a solution.  I finally relented and burned one of my MSDN subscription support incidents.  The support engineer, Patrick Gan, immediately suspected OneNote.  We have used OneNote pretty heavily on this project.  He did some testing on his end and eventually he was able to reproduce the problem.  As a result, I moved all of my OneNote files out of the library and tried to synchronize again and sure enough the issue went away.

Now, it turns out, not all OneNote files cause the issue.  Individual .one files are fine.  There are also OneNote files with an extension of .onetoc2, .onebin and .onepkg.  I believe it to be one of these two file extensions that causes the problem but never narrowed down which one.  It appears that when you make use of the File –> Share menu in OneNote when it published your notes to a document library these files get created and the synchronization errors occur.  The support engineer also mentioned that OneNote creates folders when you share this way that may be the cause of the issue.  In those folders is where the .onebin file is stored so that may be the case.

Another workaround that I have received is to open the offending notebook in OneNote, click the File tab and then click View Sync Status.  From there, click on Work Offline.  This will prevent OneNote from resyncing files to that particular library.  I created a new document library for now that just has my OneNote files in it.  I then used the Change Location button to choose the new document library.  At this point, you may need to go in and clean up the unwanted .one* files in the previous document library.  It should sync at this point, but if it doesn’t, disconnect the existing library from the workspace and recreate it and it should work.

If you receive the above issue, hopefully one of the stated workarounds will resolve your issue.  On the bright side, this is classified as an official bug and there will be a fix “in the very near future” (whatever that means).  Until a fix is available, try these workarounds.  Thanks to Patrick once again for assisting us in resolving the issue.