SharePoint Designer 2010 can no longer connect to SharePoint 2010

I got this error at a client this week: SPD2010 worked really good and I was creating workflows ed.
Then I changed the authentication provider from Windows to Claims based security (via powershell). Since then, SPD will no longer connect to my SharePoint.

IT gives me the following information-level error in the Microsoft Office Alerts event viewer:

Microsoft SharePoint Designer

An error occurred while trying to fetch data from your SharePoint site. Unexpected response from the server. The content type of the response is “”. The status code is “OK”.

The solution is that there can only be 1 binding on a web application. If you have more than 1, it will no longer work and you get this error.
What you need to do, is to extend your web application (central administration – application management – manage web applications)
If you open the site of that extented web app, SPD will connect to that site.

About: Marijn

Marijn Somers (MVP) has over 14 years experience in the SharePoint world, starting out with SP2007. Over the years the focus has grown to Office 365, with a focus on collaboration and document management. He is a business consultant at Balestra and Principal Content Provider for "Mijn 365 Coach" that offers dutch employee video training. His main work tracks are around user adoption, training and coaching and governance. He is also not afraid to dig deeper in the technicalities with PowerShell, adaptive cards or custom formatting in lists and libraries. You can listen to him on the biweekly "Office 365 Distilled" podcast.


3 thoughts on “SharePoint Designer 2010 can no longer connect to SharePoint 2010”

  1. After much searching for a fix, the fix was quite simple.

    Add the loopback IP to the bindings of the SharePoint Web App. Bind port 443 as well to the local cert on each Web server. That resolved the issue for us.

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