How to remove a webpart from a broken page on SharePoint 2010

Image via Wikipedia

 

We started giving other IT personnel SharePoint site collections for them to play with. They only had the Web UI to edit,tweak, and test their SharePoint sites. One person was able to ?break? their site the first day they got it. After talking to them I found out they had added a webpart for SQL reporting services, which had not been configured on the SharePoint farm. But he was able to add the webpart and it broke the page called home. I was able to access the ?All Pages? page and found the home page. I was going to delete it but found the option to edit? properties of the page.

image

 

When you click on the edit properties you get the box below. Its the link called ?Open web part page in maintenance view? that let me fix my issue.

 

image

 

When the page opened in maintenance mode, I was able to delete the webpart causing the error.

This concerns me, when rolling out SharePoint to more power users. If something as simple as adding a webpart can cause the page to error and not load, with only a cryptic error code. Its not very user friendly for the end user. We haven?t even started to get into SharePoint designer or visual studio for power users or designers. We also haven?t gotten into external data sources which I can only guess what type of fun we can get into with those.