SharePoint for Squirrels - by Natalya Voskresenskaya [MVP]

The infamous : Property doesn't exist or is used in a manner inconsistent with schema settings (SharePoint Search and FAST)

2012-01-09T12:24:00.001-08:00

I bet we all have seen this error from time to time. This usually happens when you create new managed properties and try to expose them on the search center, but it can also happen is cases when always. There is a check list:

1. Make sure that the managed property has been added to the managed properties and mapped to crawled properties

2. After adding managed properties start the crawl

After ensuring that the managed property has been created and populated with values, ensure that your web parts are referring to this managed property and the name is not misspelled. if you still get this error, it might be because the SharePoint Query components are not updated. Restart the IIS on the query servers, to resolve this error.

With FAST, there are also additional thing that can go wrong. In some cases you can see this error on OOTB Fast search center as well and in can be inconsistent if you have multiple query servers. This is indicative that the query servers got out of synch.

The Index Schema defined in SharePoint Central Administration at the Query SSA's FAST Search Administration section is stored in SQL Server, and deployed to FAST Search through a timer job. It's possible that not all steps of the deployment occur, leading to a newer schema in SharePoint / SQL than the FAST qrserver is using.

It is easier to restart QR components to get them back in synch than to find the one out of synch and re-synch it.

Here is what you can do to resolve it:

Open up the FAST Search for SharePoint powershell and run the following on each QR server.

(Only do the ones that exist from the list from nctrl status)

nctrl stop qrserver qrproxy search-1

nctrl start qrserver qrproxy search-1

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: SharePoint search 2010,FAST search for SharePoint 2010

The Past, Present and Future of Search: A Round Table Discussion

2012-01-04T10:38:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year! We are excited to announce our next meeting, a Round Table Discussion. Sign up now

SUBJECT
The Past, Present and Future of Search: A Round Table Discussion

Last month, The NY Enterprise Search User Group celebrated its Two Year Anniversary. This month we would like to take a look back at past talks, hear how user group members are currently using Search, as well as the group's vision of the future of Search.
Carlos Valcarcel Technical Solutions Professional at Microsoft, Natalya Voskresenskaya SharePoint MVP & Search Engineer along with Paul Olenick SharePoint and Search Engineer at Arcovis will lead a Round Table Discussion around Search.
Take a trip down memory lane here: Past Meetups

ABOUT THE LEADERS
Carlos Valcarcel has been in software development since the mid-80's working in financial services, insurance and technology....Read More.
Natalya Voskresenskaya has been working in the field of Information Technology for over 10 years. With experience in design, architecture...Read More.
Paul Olenick is a Sr. SharePoint and Enterprise Search Consultant for Arcovis (Gold Partner and Microsoft V-TSP) where he leads projects for large enterprise customers across multiple verticals...Read More.

Leonardo Souza, Senior Technical Instructor at FAST University/Microsoft is a professional with thirteen years experience working with Microsoft...Read More.
Michael McCabe currently works as an Information Architect for Gig Werks and focuses on the SharePoint product. He has 18 years experience...Read More.

Drive with FAST search for SharePoint 2010 installation is running out of space

2011-12-27T10:07:00.001-08:00

On one of the projects I was seeing recurring behavior where “D:\FAST Search\data\ftStorage\sequences” folder quickly fills up with files like storage_6a.data , storage_cd.meta thus causing the drive to run out of space. That location is used to store index (“fixml”) information used for fault tolerance (ft) in a backup indexing row. We have deleted these files at some point since there was an environment health issue as well, hoping that fixing the environment issue was to blame for causing this folder to fill up, but it came back again and quickly filled up the drive. In searching for the cause of the problem here is what was found.

1. It’s likely this is happening if one or more servers are configured as a “secondary” indexing row. See this example from a FS4SP deployment.xml file:

</searchcluster>

The options are to disable the secondary/backup indexer(s), or add more disk space to the backup row.

If the data was deleted in this folder, it’s likely the backup index data is out of sync, and will need to be resynchronized with this procedure:

“Synchronize the primary and the backup indexer servers (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint)” - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg482028.aspx

2. In our case the box that had this issue was not configured as a secondary row, but was a primary row.

The deployment.xml has not used row 0 as the primary row (which is required, ref http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff354931.aspx#element_searchcluster)

This caused the ftstorage files to neither be placed on the intended server, nor rotated and thus eating up the disk space.

Here is an example of the deployment

<document-processor processes="4"/>

<content-distributor id="1"/> <indexing-dispatcher/>

</host>

</searchcluster>

Once the IDs were reconfigured and then I ran Set-FASTSearchConfiguration on the admin box as well as the non-admin. The issue went away

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST Search For SharePoint 2010 reconfigure,deployment.xml

NOINDEX Handling by FAST and SharePoint Search

2011-12-23T09:25:00.001-08:00

Just recently I had to go through troubleshooting of content being indexed by FAST and/or SharePoint Search and wanted to share experience and some collected wisdom.

Here is the case, very common: the client has branded master page that includes menu navigation items, these items were being indexed. Where in case of searching for “Vacation form” would bring every page that is using this master page with menu items, simply because link to vacation form was included into the navigation menu on this master page. After the client included ”noindex”, which works for FAST as well as for SharePoint it seemed to work. Few weeks later when I came onsite, I noticed that the Search SSAs for SharePoint as well as for FAST had their content sources misconfigured and without even knowing the client was using just SharePoint search for everything. At this point I’ve reconfigured the content sources so only “people” search is being server by SharePoint search and the rest of the content is searched by FAST. This is when we have noticed the same problem where menu items were being indexed again without respecting the NOINDEX tag. Once we purged the index and reindexed everything again, it all worked.

Here are the tags and the explanation of how they work:

1) <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> : Supported using both crawlers, although differently. FAST crawler will drop these items. SP crawler will not drop the items, they will be dropped by the FAST pipeline. But the result is the same for both.

2) <noindex> This text will not be indexed </noindex> : Not supported regardless of crawler.

3) <div class =”noindex”> This text will not be indexed </div> : Supported. This is transparent to both crawlers, will be filtered in the FAST pipeline.

4) <span class =”noindex”> : Supported by FAST Search back-end but not SharePoint search.

5) SP crawler fix to ensure that the <meta name="xxx" content="noindex" /> was passed to the FAST pipeline (KB 2276336)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2276336

Part of the August 2010 CU.

Hope this helps to others.

Enjoy Holidays!!!!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint search,fast search for sharepoint,noindex tags

Technorati Tags: Fast search for sharepoint,noindex,sharepoint search

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 administration screenshots (Central Administration)

2011-10-10T15:00:00.001-07:00

Many times I get a question as to how granular can you make the administration of the FAST, what administrative options each level provides and what does it look like.

In the previous post I shared screenshots of administrative interfaces that are available to site collection admins. In this post I wanted to share the screenshots of Administration UI for FAST from the Central administration.

Search Administrators have the ability to control the following settings:

Here are some screenshots with explanations.

Central Administration – Content source configuration

Central Administration – Configure authoritative pages

Central Administration – Content Source overview

Central Administration – Crawl log

Central Administration – Crawled Properties (Metadata)

Central Administration – FAST Content SSA overview

Central Administration – FAST Query SSA overview

Central Administration – Managed Properties (metadata fields)

Central Administration – New Crawl rule

Central Administration – URL Blocking

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST Search Aadministration

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 administration screenshots (Site settings)

2011-09-07T14:20:00.001-07:00

Many times I get a question as to how granular can you make the administration of the FAST, what administrative options each level provides and what does it look like.

In this post I wanted to share the screenshots of Administration UI for FAST from the site collection admin level as well as Central administration.

Site collection administrators have ability to provide administration for:

Best Bets
Visual Best Best
Content promotion and demotion
User context

You do not need to make your business folks (that would be more suitable to customize the search experience) Search Admins and give them access to Central Administration site where they can become quite dangerous. you can get access to the following administration areas through the site settings page on the site collection level.

Here are some screenshots with explanations.

Site collection – Site Settings

Best Bets configuration

Keyword, Phrases and Synonyms configuration

Add site demotion

Add site promotion (boosting content from a site)

Add user context

Manage Use Context

Add visual Best Bet

In the next post I’ll put the screenshot of administrative interfaces that are available for the Search Admins from the Central Administration site

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST Search for SharePoint administration,best bets,visual best bets,user context,site demotion and promotion.

SPC 2011 : Making the Move to SharePoint 2010 - Search First

2011-08-03T16:49:00.001-07:00

I’m speaking at the SPC in Anaheim, California in October. SPC had be always to me THE SharePoint Conference to attend. If you still did not register you might be missing the most important SharePoint event of the year.

If you are there, check out my session that I’ll be doing along side with Mark Stone (Microsoft) and Harry Jones (Arcovis) and learn one upgrade strategy for 2010 that no one told you about.

Here is the session abstract.

Most of us have heard about the enhancements and power offered by SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search, but many do not realize they can take advantage of it before upgrading their 2007/MOSS environment. In this session we will cover how to leverage Search for SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint today as part of your organizations roadmap to 2010. We'll demonstrate the integration of SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint Search 2010 from the end-user perspective and discuss the many benefits “Search First” offers to an organization and their users.

http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/sessiondetailsShort.aspx?sessionguid=90a461cd-d717-45be-b09b-c82a1f9fefdc

Technorati Tags: SPC 2011,Search First,SharePoint 2010 upgrade

Why Social Networking on SharePoint 2010?

2011-08-03T16:32:00.001-07:00

I recently wrote an article on social networking on SharePoint platform and wanted to share it with you.

The SharePoint 2010 platform offers a wide variety of core features including document management, records management, BI, search, workflow and social networking to name a few. Microsoft and its partners have done a great job of showcasing the value of these features and have shared strategies to help organizations take advantage of them. However, of these core features, it is my observation that the Social Networking aspects of SharePoint 2010 are underutilized by customers and therefore the full potential of their implementations are not realized.

The most common objection I have seen to the notion of social networking within the enterprise has to do with a misconception that social networking platforms are not productive in the work environment. I often see is a misguided comparison made to Facebook and other external social networking sites which management views as time-wasters. Other barriers to adoption include uncertainties about allowing uncensored comments by users, a difficulty in justifying the investment and the struggle involved with getting buy-in from the business.

Technorati Tags: Social Networking,SharePoint 2010 Social Networking

Social Sites Demo on next Shoptalk: June 27th, 2011

2011-06-27T07:40:00.001-07:00

Social Sites for SharePoint 2010
presented by: Rich Blank from News Gator

By integrating Social Sites directly into your SharePoint 2010 collaboration deployment, you can focus on delivering value to your users and unifying your technology infrastructure while fully leveraging your SharePoint social network - instead of building custom applications or learning and supporting additional technologies. Increase adoption among stakeholders, streamline communication, improve employee recruiting and retention, and boost overall productivity with Social Sites 2010.
Speaker Bio
For over 15 years, Rich Blank has worked with hundreds of organizations evangelizing, architecting and delivering social computing, collaboration & content management solutions. His passion is helping organizations change the way people connect, share information, and manage knowledge and his expertise includes information & systems architecture, end user adoption, governance, business process improvements, and technology strategy. Rich is a featured MS SharePoint expert and regular blogger on AIIM.org (Association of Information & Image Management) writing about collaboration, ECM, and social business. He's also has been invited as a guest speaker at the 2008 IT & Business Alignment Conference, 2010 SharePoint Summit, and regional SharePoint User Groups. He currently works as a Solutions Engineer for Newsgator and has held past senior technology and management consulting roles at EMC and IBM. Rich obtained his MBA from Babson College and BBA from the University of Michigan, and is a certified PMP and Six Sigma Green Belt. You can read some more of his insights on his personal blog: www.pmpinsights.com, follow him on Twitter: @pmpinsights, or connect with him on LinkedIn: www.richblank.com

SharePoint ShopTalk is a live, dynamic, discussion held weekly amongst SharePoint Professionals. It is an excellent source for users who need to discuss challenges or are looking for answers to pressing contemporary SharePoint questions. All are welcome to take advantage of this forum that features leading experts in the field.
You may register today and join the SharePoint ShopTalk Group on LinkedIn to submit questions prior to the event. You may also tweet your questions to @spshoptalk as well as ask questions live! We encourage participants to send questions in advance so our panel of experts may answer at their highest capacity.
For this event, you may also tweet your questions to pmpinsights & NewsGator.

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010 Social Networking,SharePoint Shoptalk

Error installing FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

2011-06-20T11:29:00.001-07:00

I’ve ran into a lot of installation errors in my experience, but this one definitely deserves a separate blog post. During the installation I’ve got the following error

06/13/2011 11:25:23 AM Warning Utility.Execute - "D:\FASTSearch\bin\ResourceStoreInstaller.exe" StdError - resourcestoreinstaller.exe - C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe SET config "ResourceStore" /section:requestFiltering /verbs.allowUnlisted:false /commit:apphost - ERROR ( message:Unknown attribute "verbs.allowUnlisted". Replace with -? for help. )

06/13/2011 11:25:23 AM Warning Utility.Execute - Return code for binary "D:\FASTSearch\bin\ResourceStoreInstaller.exe" is not 0. This may indicate that binary didn't execute successfully

And the FAST failed to install.

Let me step back a little bit, the installation was fairly simple, just 2 servers. And knowing the FAST hungry for resources reputation we usually recommend to beef up the servers as much as possible. The 2 servers were actually physical machines very powerful with about 16 CPU cores registered. That was the problem!

Christian Holslin shared his experience here, otherwise I’d be chasing the problem for hours. http://www.thesharepointblog.net/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=815f255a%2Dd0ef%2D4258%2Dbe2a%2D28487dc9975c&ID=48

Too many CPU cores, or logical CPUs can produce the failure for the installation as the CPUs compete for access to the web.config file.

TO resolve this problem do the following:

Before you attempt to run the configuration wizard, from the command line, run Mdconfig command:

1. Go to advanced tab

2. Under advanced go to “boot”

3. Select 4 processors

4. Restart the machine. Repeat this process for all servers in the FAST farm.

Once the installation process is done, revert your changes for the number of registered CPUs back to the original amount of registered Cores following the steps above.

You will be all set

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST search for sharepoint 2010 installation

SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search isn’t just for SharePoint 2010–presentation is available

2011-06-10T08:08:00.001-07:00

Most of us have heard about the enhancements and power offered by SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search, but many do not realize they can take advantage of it without upgrading their 2007/MOSS environment. In this session we will cover how to leverage Search for SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint today, demonstrate the seamless integration of SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint Search 2010 from the end-user perspective and discuss the many benefits “Search First” offers to an organization and their users.

Here is a link to the presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/natalyvo/share-pointesug-searchfirst61011

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: Fast Search For SharePoint 2010,Enterprise search,SharePoint 2010,SharePoint Search,SharePoint 2007

Opportunity for Senior SharePoint Consultants

2011-05-26T07:56:00.001-07:00

Arcovis is seeking Senior SharePoint Consultants to join its team of SharePoint and Enterprise Search experts. This position offers the opportunity to work with leading minds in the industry, exposure and access to Microsoft account and technical teams, C-level executives at fortune 100 companies, as well as broad industry exposure. This is an excellent opportunity to learn new technologies, latest trends in the industry, and develop influential relationships. For more information see the full job description.

Technorati Tags: Job Opportunity

SharePoint FEST, Denver–May 19th session: Integration of the SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint 2007 portal

2011-05-15T08:00:00.001-07:00

I’m speaking at the SharePoint Fest in Denver on May 19th. I’ll be presenting on one of my favorite topics, here is the session topic and the abstract:

Integration of the SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint 2007 portal

With the release of the SharePoint 2010, Microsoft had release the true enterprise search solution, FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP). But what about companies who have invested heavily in 2007 implementations and while planning to upgrade in the future want to take advantage of FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 now. This session covers the integration of SharePoint 2007 and FAST search for SharePoint 2010 and benefits from the business and end-user perspective that Search 2010 brings into the 2007 portal solution.

The session is going to be informative to everyone and not just IT Pros and Devs, it will also include demos.

Come and say Hi. I’ll see you there

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Fest 2011

FAST Search: the infamous “Failed to initialize session with document engine: Unable to resolve Content distributor”

2011-04-26T12:06:00.001-07:00

In the numerous FAST configurations the error above is the most common and one that I wanted to share my experiences with. There is a number of issues that might be causing this error and renders FAST Search unable to crawl. This issue can be from the initial configuration of FAST, but can also be introduced later on if you modify the deployment.XML and reconfigure FAST.

Here is the list of the most common ways of resolution and is in the order of :

1. Secure the connector by running

.\SecureFASTSearchConnector.ps1 -certPath "path of the certificate\certificatename.pfx" -ssaName "name of your content SSA" -username "domain\username"

replacing the necessary parameters with the values for your environment. Here are the detailed instructions http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381261.aspx

2. Check if the domain and user name is reflecting the details of the user running the SharePoint Server Search 14 (OSearch14) service. The user account running Server Search 14 service should be the same as the user name used to secure the connector.

3. Make sure that the content distributor URL is the same as in the Install_Info file located within your FASTSearch folder or the same as in the fastsearch\etc\contentdistributor.cfg file – sometime that might be the issue is the value in the install_info file is not the same as the cfg file, use the URL from the CFG file.

Hope it helps.

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST Search Crawl,FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

New York Enterprise Search User Group celebrates its Two Year Anniversary

2011-04-11T16:29:00.001-07:00

The New York Enterprise Search User Group celebrates its Two Year Anniversary by welcoming back the speaker who started it all, Nathan Treloar!
We hope that you will join the festivities, bring a friend as we end the year on high note and a look into the future of Enterprise Search!

DECEMBER MEETING - Wednesday, December 14th 5:30PM

SUBJECT
Video Search and the Rise of Time-coded Metadata
Searching video certainly isn’t a new thing. Youtube has been with us for years now, after all. But when it comes to emerging trends in video search, both on the Web and in the enterprise, there are signs that we are entering a new age. The time-coded nature of video and the ability (or lack thereof) to search and navigate *inside* video content represent a new frontier for search that is only just now coming to light.
In this interactive, demo-rich presentation, Nate Treloar, VP of Strategic Markets for RAMP, will walk through the latest trends in video search and show how the rise of time-coded metadata is changing how people discover and engage with online video.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nathan Treloar, is VP of Technology for Strategic Alliances at RAMP where he is responsible for expanding RAMP’s industry leading Content Optimization solutions into new markets. Prior to RAMP, Nate was the Principal Search Technology Evangelist in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group and held responsibility for the group’s technology innovation and evangelism programs.
Nate came to Microsoft through the acquisition of FAST, where he was Senior Vice President of Technology and a member of the leadership team that took FAST from an entry level player to a leader in the enterprise search market. In a career spanning more than two decades, Nate has held key executive positions for search, text mining, publishing, and knowledge management software and solutions. He has advised hundreds of world’s largest companies and government agencies on applications of search and search related technologies.
ADDRESS
1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104

SharePoint ShopTalk Announces New Video Blog! and new panelists!!

2011-03-21T15:36:00.001-07:00

Join us for the next SharePoint ShopTalk: Thursday, March 24th 12:30PM - 1:30PM EST.

You may register today and join the SharePoint ShopTalk Group on LinkedIn to submit questions prior to the event. You may also tweet your questions to @spshoptalk as well ask questions live! We encourage participants to send questions in advance so our panel of experts may answer at their highest capacity.
Sign up for this month's Panelist Spotlight - "Tips & Tricks" 3.31.11:
Integration of SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint 2007 Portal

SharePoint ShopTalk Announces New Video Blog!
View last week's upload: .NET Developer Learning SharePoint
New Videos are posted every Thursday!

We look forward to hearing from you as well as the continued sharing of SharePoint knowledge.
Audio Call-in Number: (760) 569-0111

Audio Passcode: 724468#

Click here to register for the next SharePoint ShopTalk.

FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS) Deep Dive–April 13, 2011

2011-03-21T15:35:00.001-07:00

I’m happy to announce the Enterprise Search User Group meeting for April. Save the date

This session will provide a technical deep dive of FAST Search for Internet Sites focused on the main components: Content Transformation Services (CTS), Interaction Management Services (IMS) and the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). Learn what the main components are and how they work together to give you one of the most powerful search platforms on the market. We will build an end-to-end experience with a focus on explaining how the different components work and interact.

SPEAKER
Runar Olsen, is a Senior Architect with Microsoft's Enterprise Search Practice. At this time with Microsoft he has been involved with large scale and complex internet site deployments, and recently focusing on the new Enterprise Search 2010 product lineup. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the Norwegian University of Tromsø (UITØ).
In this talk Runar Olsen will provide a technical deep dive of FAST Search for Internet Sites focused on the main components: Content Transformation Services (CTS), Interaction Management Services (IMS), and the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). Learn what the main components are and how they work together to give you one one of the most powerful search platforms on the market. We will build an end-to-end experience with a focus on explaining how the different components work and interact.

MEETING AGENDA
5:30 PM - Networking (Food and Drinks)

6:00 PM - News and Highlights

6:10 PM - A word from our sponsor

6:30 PM - Speaker Presentation

7:25 PM - Wrap-Up and Give-Aways

7:30 PM - After Meeting Social

ADDRESS
1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104

To attend this meeting, REGISTER TODAY!

Security Reminder
Register at least 2 days in advance to secure a building pass, otherwise one will be created at building security which will stall your entry.

Behind the Scenes of the Contoso/ Consulting Search-Driven Application Demo

2011-02-07T16:59:00.001-08:00

This presentation promises to be one of the best “behind the scenes” on developing search-driven applications.

Do not forget to register for our Enterprise Search User Group meeting, held every second Wednesday of the month at:

1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104

FEBRUARY MEETING - Wednesday, February 9th, 2011
SUBJECT
Behind the Scenes of the Contoso Consulting Search-Driven Application Demo
SPEAKERS
Richard Frenkel, CTO Ceonex has 30 years experience in the IT field, initially building systems for mainframes and later for the client/server environment....
Theodore Agranat, User Interface Architect and Design Manager is an accomplished manager of design and user interface architect. He has built the design side of Ceonex from the beginning....
Dimitri Ayrapetov, Senior SharePoint Consultant has seven years of experience in IT, with the past four years primarily working with SharePoint technologies....
Read more about our speakers here

This session will provide a technical drilldown of how the Contoso Consulting Search-Driven Application demo was built. The Search Driven Demo builds on the standard FAST Search for SharePoint web parts to create a "Search Driven Application": in this case a company Knowledge Center. The application includes "visual refiners" that present the information in standard text based refiners visually and allow user interaction, a visual "work area" to which specific items from the result set can be saved, and a power point previewer that allows PowerPoint presentations to be viewed and slides selected within the search results, among other customizations. The presenters will discuss the application architecture and custom development efforts required to build this custom Search-Driven Application.
Included in the drilldown will be:
• Brief run through of the demo to show the features
• Breakdown of OOB functionality, extended configuration, and custom developed controls
• Walk through of the custom graphical refiner controls (architecture and code)
• Customization of rendering components
• Implementation of “My Workspace”
• If time and interest allow we may also discuss the use of PowerShell to fully script the configuration of the demo application on SharePoint Enterprise, and how we customized the OOB visual styling.
As part of the discussion, the presenters will discuss pros/cons to the various approaches and challenges faced during implementation. The presentation will include technical drill down, but could be of interest to anyone interested in what is possible in customizing search or building search applications.
Register Today

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Search User Group,FAST Search for SharePoint 2010,Enterprise Search

SharePoint Search 101:How does an indexer work? What is Lemmatization? What is Tokenization?

2011-01-08T11:29:00.001-08:00

What happens when you index content?

Before the content is indexed the process that content goes through has to ensure that it is normalized and tokenization took place. Before content is tokenized the language of the content is identified and the normalization identifies accented characters and maps it into non-accented to enable phonetic searches. Tokenization process treats characters such as spaces, question marks, commas as word delimiters and splits the content into actual words that should be indexed and processed further. Lemmatization feature adds morphological and spelling variations to the content as well as misspelled or phonetic variants. This allows for search for all morphological and spelling variations as well as misspelled forms or phonetic variants to happen when people execute search queries. Phonetic search for names is available with SharePoint Search 2010 OOTB, more advanced linguistic features are available with FAST Search for SharePoint 2010.

There are several types of lemmatization:

1. Stemming - where the stemma is identified and applied to a word, ex: “doing” has “do” as it’s stemma

2. Lemma - where stemma of the word “worst” would be missed by stemming, but the lemma of the word as “bad” would be identified

3. Verbs - “greeting” may be a form of a noun or can have a verb “to greet” as it’s base, verb or noun dictionaries can provide the right level of lemmatization.

Lemmatization is language specific and allows to provide more relevant search result to end user and enhance the recall of search results.

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,Search 2010,lemmatization

SharePoint Search 101: Why do I need to tune relevancy?

2010-12-16T07:32:00.001-08:00

(Advanced Relevancy Tuning, FAST Rank Profiles)

Concept of relevancy is important to search as it is a direct result of a sorting order in which results that are most significant as answers to the executed query appear first in the result set. For example when you search for a document and the query finds a match in the title of the document vs. the body, the document with the matching title would be better match as an answer to the query. In SharePoint Search 2010 there is a predefined ranking model which cannot be changed, but you can influence relevancy of documents by defining keywords, best bets, synonyms , search scopes, managed properties and sites promotion and demotion.

FAST Search For SharePoint 2010 search engine comes with a rank model that specifies how the relevancy is being calculated, but as the content within the enterprise varies in format, quality and freshness, there is no one-size-fits all model that can be applied throughout the enterprise and produce the desirable search experience. This is why FAST for SharePoint Search 2010 allows you to define your own relevancy models by introducing rank profiles.

Rank profiles are defining how the relevancy will be calculated on a particular query based on where within the document or item the match to the query occurred. For example: If a query term matches to the description metadata of the document this document most likely to be more relevant then the document with the match only in the body of it.

While SharePoint search comes with a preset rank profile which you cannot modify, Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 allows you to create your own rank profiles and apply them on a per query basis, you can also expose these rank profiles as a sorting criteria to end users.

You can create your own rank profiles through PowerShell cmdlets. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff453904.aspx

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Search 2010,FAST Search for Sharepoint,relevancy,rank profile,relevancy tuning

Work With the Experts – SharePoint 2010 Mentor Program

2010-11-18T08:31:00.001-08:00

I wanted to reach wider audience hence I’m posting this on my blog.

Whether you already have SharePoint experience and are looking to take your skills to the next level or if you have been looking for an opportunity get into the SharePoint game, this is your opportunity to work with and learn from experts and MVPs while working closely with Microsoft Account teams, Fortune 500 Company Executives and decision makers. Immediate openings!

Arcovis is a premier NYC boutique firm that specializes in Enterprise SharePoint Implementation and FAST Integration, providing technology-driven, collaborative solutions from mid-size business to the Enterprise. We are technology integrators, solution developers and Microsoft specialists, dedicated to building foundations which support and strengthen the talents and services of our Clients, helping them achieve stronger positioning and a greater return on investment through increased Team productivity and overall experience.

More information

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010 mentor program,arcovis,job

Professional Microsoft Search FAST Search, SharePoint Search, and Search Server Book

2010-10-02T11:36:00.001-07:00

If any of you wandering why I have not been writing as much as I did before, here is the answer ;-)

I have been writing, but most of the effort had been focused on the BOOK, that’s right… this is the first book contribution that I’ve done so far (3 chapters). it would not be possible without awesome co-authors and especially Jeff Fried, Jeff is solely responsible for pulling me into this “project”. I’m thankful to Mark and Miles for seeing me as the right fit (did I mention that all 3 of them are awesome?). And since I’ve started thanking people close to me for their tireless support, I’d like to say special THANK YOU to my husband George, who put up with me during the “book” and another chapter and chapter revision time ;-) I was probably the most unbearable person at that time. George, I greatly appreciate all you have done for me and the support foundation that you have built, thank you.

And now without further delay, here is the introduction for my book. Now go and get it ;-), I'll be happy to sign it. there is a special discount to Enterprise Search User group members, join the group and come to our meetings. More information here

This is one of the first books dedicated to comprehensive coverage on Microsoft's new search technology, FAST Search.

• Features an expert group of authors, including the current VP of Products, Jeff Fried, who has been leading the strategic development of FAST search, as well as additional industry search consultants to provide real world guidance.

• FAST technology currently powers, Bing.com, as well as other notable sites: BestBuy.com, six of the top pharmaceutical companies, CareerBuilder, Reuters, and a host of other top tier knowledge based companies search sites.

• This book will provide coverage for implementing and using FAST search for both SharePoint and general search based services providing the broadest coverage for the reader.

About the topic/technology

Microsoft's largest purchase to date was when they purchased FAST Technologies for over a billion dollars. Now Microsoft is ready to leverage that investment by fully integrating this intelligent search technology into its existing products.

• FAST Search will be added as an option to the following Microsoft based technologies: FAST Search for SharePoint, FAST Search for Internet Business (a Windows and Linux based server), and the revision of SharePoint Server 2010 using Microsoft's in hose search technology.

• FAST Search has been a noted industry leader and is used not to just find a needle in a haystack, but to find out how big the needle is, what color, its chemical composition, where the needle was manufactured, and its current cost

• The big differentiator between FAST technology and other search technology is its robustness and ability to integrate business intelligence with Search.

The books primary audience would be IT and marketing staff in mid to large sized companies who are interested in understanding enterprise search. The core audience is based on those who are responsible for implementing and managing enterprise search. This is typically composed of both programmers who develop search based applications as well as system architects, managers, and planners who help design, deploy, and test search based systems. A large secondary market is based on Microsoft Certified Professionals who help consult and advise customers on search technology.

This book will help professional developers, programmers and administrators learn the key features and functions that are available with Microsoft's new FAST Search. The book will provide real world examples that show how the technology functions and can be used to solve key challenges faced in the Enterprise. Throughout the book key coverage will be provided on the following topics:

• Enterprise Search and the Microsoft Search Product Line

• SharePoint Focused Enterprise Search

• FAST Search for Internet Business

• The Future of Enterprise Search

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION.

PART I: INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS ENTERPRISE SEARCH?

CHAPTER 2: DEVELOPING A STRATEGY -- THE BUSINESS PROCESS OF SEARCH.

CHAPTER 3: OVERVIEW OF MICROSOFT ENTERPRISE SEARCH PRODUCTS.

PART II: IMPLEMENTING SEARCH.

CHAPTER 4: SEARCH WITHIN SHAREPOINT 2010.

CHAPTER 5: FAST SEARCH WITHIN SHAREPOINT 2010.

CHAPTER 6: CUSTOMIZING SEARCH WITH SHAREPOINT 2010.

PART III: IMPLEMENTING SEARCH WITH ESP.

CHAPTER 7: INTRODUCTION TO FAST ESP.

CHAPTER 8: CUSTOMIZATION AND DEPLOYMENT OF FAST ESP 5.X.

CHAPTER 9: ADVANCED TOPICS.

PART IV: ENTERPRISE SEARCH 2.0.

CHAPTER 10: ENTERPRISE SEARCH IS SOCIAL SEARCH.

CHAPTER 11: SEARCH AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE.

CHAPTER 12: THE FUTURE OF SEARCH.

APPENDIX: RESOURCES.

INDEX.

About Authors

Mark Bennett is the co-founder and CTO of New Idea Engineering, Inc. His experience includes programming, senior technical support, engineering and database development positions. Jeff Fried is the VP of Product Management with FAST Search specializing in strategic applications of search technology. Jeff is a frequent speaker on search technology and holds 15 patents. Jeff has also authored more than 50 technical papers and is the recipient of numerous industry awards. Miles Kehoe, is co-founder and President of New Idea Engineering, Inc. Natalya Voskresenskaya, had been working in the field of Information Technology for over 10 years. With experience in design, architecture, development and deployment of Web based applications, since early 2000 her main area of concentration has been the development of portal solutions. She was awarded the prestigious Microsoft MVP award in 2008.

Technorati Tags: Professional Microsoft Search FAST Search,SharePoint Search,Search Server,Book

Microsoft SharePoint MVP !!!!

2010-10-02T11:07:00.001-07:00

Yay, October 1st, 2010 turned out to be an awesome day for me (even though it was raining cats and dogs). I got an email congratulating on getting MVP award for 2010 :-). This marks my third year as MVP and I’m happy to continue being a part of this great community of professionals and just friends and hopefully with more contributions to the SharePoint community we will make it even better.

Hera is a list of some of the community initiatives that I’m working on with many other great people, JOIN us!

SharePoint ShopTalk (web site is under development)

I'm sure you have heard before about the ShopTalk, it’s a weekly call with a of panelists that answer questions posed by the community. It is an hour long, weekly event happening every Thursday at 12:30 EST. ShopTalk is a free form Q&A session, we start off answering questions that have been emailed or otherwise sent to us. The format for this is basically a conference call with a couple of PPT slides shared via a Live Meeting session, but this is mainly people talking out loud. Members of the community will send their weekly questions and before each meeting I circulate the email with questions submitted or just list them in PPT that will be shared with all participants of the event via LiveMeeting.

Questions can be of any kind, deployment, administration, customization and end user/power user.

Let me explain the structure of each meeting in more details:

· 12:30 - 12:45 - introductions, couple of words from everyone on the panel board.

· 12:45 - 1:15 PM - answering the questions submitted via emails

· 1:15 PM - 1:30 PM - free form questions and answers, where participants can ask their questions via the phone or live meeting.

You may register today and join the SharePoint ShopTalk Group on Linkedin to submit questions prior to the event. Though you may also tweet your questions during the event to @spshoptalk and via live meeting, we encourage participants to send questions in advance so our panel of experts may answer questions at their highest capacity.

Enterprise Search User group (web site is under development)

The Enterprise Search User group is a SharePoint based community with a focus on Enterprise Search aimed to provide valuable and timely information to its members. It’s primary goal is to provide a forum that encourages disparate practices and business groups to come together and share thoughts, ideas, successes and failures, to cultivate a borderless body of knowledge. Our meeting location is at MSFT office in New York.

Next Enterprise Search User Group Meeting: Enterprise Search for Large Pharmas - Value Proposition and Lessons Learned

This session will have a focus around the following questions:
How can Search add value to the drug discovery process in the form of innovative and cost effective access to knowledge and information?
How can Search connect people to experts and useful insights?
What are the Search trends and enabling technologies to meet growing and changing business demands?
What are some of the challenges around Search for Pharmas?
Speaker, Lesly Goh will provide the inside scoop detailing her very own experiences from her many Search implementations.
Sponsored by Avanade

Congratulations to all re-awarded MVPs and newly awarded as well!

Next post is about another great news that I’ve gotten yesterday as well, stay tuned!!!

Technorati Tags: Misrosoft SharePoint MVP,Natalya Voskresenskaya,Enterprise search user group,fast search for sharepoint,SharePoint shoptalk

SharePoint Search 101: What can I find on the search dashboard?

2010-06-26T10:19:00.001-07:00

The SharePoint 2010 comes with a wide range of administration, operations and reporting features that aid in deployment, scaling and monitoring the performance of the search application.

The administration interface allows you to quickly see the topology of the search application with all components involved, such as query components, index partitions, administration, crawling and property databases. You can It provides you with a at a glance system status with information on the number of items in the index, crawl and propagation status, query and crawling rate and crawl history with success and failure of the crawl statuses.

Quick menu items provide access to Content Sources, Crawl Rules, File Types and Crawler Impact Rules where you can set the frequency with which each crawler component will be requesting items from specific site. The Queries and Results section of the quick lunch menu provides access points to specify Authoritative Pages, Federated Locations and search scopes as well as Metadata Properties configuration.

The Reports section allows to quickly access a wide variety of Administration and Web Analytics Reports. Administration Reports help to understand the query latency and crawl rate and show the overall performance of the application thus helping administrators to anticipate the necessity of adding new search components or modifications to existing topology based on the performance needs.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint Search 2010,Search Administration

SharePoint Search 101: Why do I need to extract content?

2010-06-18T21:07:00.001-07:00

A while ago, I’ve started writing search vignettes for the MSFT Enterprise Search Product team, but the project got stalled and I’ve decided (with MSFT permission) to start the “SharePoint Search 101” series of mini articles on my blog. All content is related either to SharePoint Search 2010 and/or Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP). These mini articles are intended to be small, easily digestible snippets of content that answer the What, How and Why of a given enterprise search feature of SharePoint Server 2010 and/or FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. The HOW portion is usually covered by the short demo or list of steps.

Why do I need to extract content?

(Entity Extraction, Managed Properties, Refiners)

Entity extraction is a way of pulling out meaningful information that might not be otherwise explicitly defined by end users as metadata. Managed Properties that are created through entity extraction and surfaced in the search interface as refiners are defining alternative structure or visual presentation of structure that can be used to narrow down the search results set.

When you present refiners based on managed properties created from entities extracted from content or metadata, users can easily filter out the result set based on the values of those extracted entities. Refiners can be shallow or deep, where shallow refiners are based on top 50 results brought back by query, and deep refiners is when all results are brought back with exact count of the number of results.

While managed properties are available in SharePoint Search 2010 OOTB, you can only map crawled properties that are exposed in lists and libraries metadata.

In the FAST Search for SharePoint there are built in entity extractors such as People, Companies and Locations. You can define your own list of terms to be extract from the content by building a dictionary or you can create a content processing stage that will extract entities based on a specific business rule or a need as well as extract entities through matching them to regular expressions. For example you can extract client names from document where this information is not available as metadata and expose it as managed property.

Note: Deep refiners are available only in FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint Search 2010,managed properties,crawled properties,entity extraction

ESUG June Meeting - An In-depth Look into FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS)

2010-06-06T10:34:00.001-07:00

JUNE MEETING REMINDER - Wednesday, June 9th, 5:30 PM

REGISTER NOW

SUBJECT
An In-depth Look into FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS)

SPEAKER
Didier Oliver - is a Technical Sales Specialist in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group. His focus includes pre-sales briefings, evaluation support, requirement analysis, architectural design and working with implementation services teams. Didier has been involved in the Search market for over 15 years. Prior to Microsoft Didier has worked at other firms specializing in Search technologies such as Verity and Autonomy.

The session will focus on the new FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS). FSIS provides a new platform for building powerful and compelling online experiences. We drill into the exciting new capabilities including:

Interaction Management Services (IMS)

Content Transformation Services (CTS)

The Search Designer for Visual Studio

The Business Manager Console
MEETING AGENDA
5:30 PM - Networking (Food and Drinks)

6:00 PM - News and Highlights

6:10 PM - A word from our sponsor

6:30 PM - Speaker Presentation

7:25 PM - Wrap-Up and Give-Aways

7:30 PM - After Meeting Social

ADDRESS
1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104

To attend this meeting, REGISTER TODAY!

About the User Group
The Enterprise Search User Group is a SharePoint based community with a focus on Enterprise Search aimed to provide valuable and timely information to its members. Its primary goal is to provide a forum that encourages disparate practices and business groups to come together and share thoughts, ideas, successes and failures, to cultivate a borderless body of knowledge.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Search User Group,FAST search for internet sites,FSIS

How the FBI is using Enterprise Search to improve its law enforcement capabilities: A Case Study on the FBI Sentinel Program

2010-04-08T15:38:00.001-07:00

April 14, 2010

Enterprise Search User Group Meeting in NYC.

Join us for this exciting event and great topic on a case study for FAST Search and how FAST provides:

Automated indexing and comprehensive search capabilities that support both FBI agents and analysts
Manages multiple backend content sources (Documentum and Oracle databases)
Provides flexible pre-index content processing to normalize and enrich content using advanced linguistics

For those who have not heard of Sentinel:

Sentinel is the case management system employed by the Bureau to replace older case management systems.
Sentinel provides Web-enabled information management, workflow management, item & evidence management, records search & reporting across all data.

SPEAKERS:

Erik Franklin

Erik Franklin has been with FAST/Microsoft since 2003, and was the second employee hired to support FAST’s expansion into the US Federal Market. Erik has directly supported the closing of all major accounts in the government space, including accounts in the Civilian, Defense & Intelligence communities. This support includes the pre-sales briefings, evaluation support, requirements analysis, architectural design and working with implementation services teams. Erik has held a large number of roles at FAST, including pre-sales, solution implementation, training and search business consulting.

Jon Padgett

Jon Padgett has almost 20 years of sales experience in the US Federal Enterprise Search market. Jon been with FAST/Microsoft since 2008 and joined FAST with the acquisition of the Convera RetrievalWare search platform where he spent 11 years building a successful practice made up of Federal customers in the Civilian, Defense & Intelligence communities. Before that, Jon spent several years with Adobe Systems and then at a Verity Search reseller helping build their government sales practices. Last year Jon won the prestigious Microsoft Platinum Sales Club Top Attainment award.

Register now!

MEETING AGENDA:

5:30 PM - Networking (Food and Drinks)

6:00 PM - News and Highlights

6:10 pm - A word from our sponsor

6:30 PM - Speaker Presentation

7:25 PM - Wrap-Up and Give-Aways

7:30 PM - After Meeting Social

ADDRESS:

1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor New York, NY 10104

Special thanks to Metalogix for fully sponsoring this event.

I hope to see you there

Technorati Tags: FBI Enterprise Search,FAST ESP,Sentinell,Enterprise Search User Group

Custom workflow step to add user to a security group

2010-04-05T17:24:00.001-07:00

I’m not a developer per say…

It might not be the best way to start a post that is introducing a custom workflow step created by me, step that adds users to a SharePoint security group. But I have to be very honest and confess that the last time I opened up a visual studio and compiled anything was in 2006 for SP 2003.

OK, so here are the requirements I had. This is for a site that is built to facilitate a clinical trials and to be managed by study coordinators. The need for a custom activity step was caused by the need to have multiple study sites that would require the same functionality. A medical study coordinators that are not part of admin group, only contributors for a list in the study site, coordinators need to fill out new user information when a person agrees to participate in a study. Coordinators would fill our the person desired user id and their existing email, submit it and have a workflow to notify the external user to register on the site with the user name that was provided by the study coordinator.

As the next step the study participant would register on the site and once coordinators confirm that the new user registered on the site (FBA) they would go to the New User information list, check “User Registered” field and save this information. Update of this user record triggers a workflow that automatically adds this new user to the correct security group that would allow new users submit different online questioners and forms in a secured fashion once they log into the study site

OK, so that’s it with the overview of the process requirements. Lets look at the workflow step developed here to facilitate the process of adding new users to the right security group. Keep in mind this is running with elevated privileges, but the source code is available for you to modify it as desired. It’s available on the codeplex at http://natalyavoskresenskay.codeplex.com/ for download.

Steps to deploy the custom action:

1. download the DLL and register the DLL in the GAC.

2. Add to your web.config the following line in AuthorizeTypes section

3. Create AddUserToGroup.ACTIONS file with text bellow and save it to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\Workflow folder. this file is also available for download.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<WorkflowInfo Language="en-us">
<Actions Sequential="then" Parallel="and">
<Action Name="Add User to the group" ClassName="CustomAction.AddUserToGroup" Assembly="AddUserToGroup, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=e82442daf6f5df8e" AppliesTo="all" Category="ARC Action">
   <RuleDesigner Sentence="Add %1 to the %2 at site %3">
    <FieldBind Field="UserName" Text="Please put the User Name" Id="1" DesignerType="TextArea"/>
    <FieldBind Field="GroupName" Text="Please put the Group Name" Id="2" DesignerType="TextArea"/>
    <FieldBind Field="SiteName" Text="Please put the Site Name" Id="3" DesignerType="TextArea"/>
   </RuleDesigner>
   <Parameters>
    <Parameter Name="__Context" Type="Microsoft.Sharepoint.WorkflowActions.WorkflowContext, Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions" Direction="In"/>
    <Parameter Name="UserName" Type="System.String, mscorlib" Direction="In" />
    <Parameter Name="GroupName" Type="System.String, mscorlib" Direction="In" />
<Parameter Name="SiteName" Type="System.String, mscorlib" Direction="In" />
   </Parameters>
</Action>
</Actions>
</WorkflowInfo>

Now open up a site and create a workflow in SharePoint Designer, “Add User to a group” step should be available in the list of action.

Add this step and fill in the info, User name, Group Name and the site URL, all fields are mandatory for the workflow action to run.

See example:

Enjoy :-)

SSP Search error (Search application for SSP… is not provisioned)

2010-04-05T16:29:00.001-07:00

On one of our farm we noticed that search had not been working, and the search administration page would give this message: “Crawl status The search application for 'SharedServices' on server [SERVERNAME] is not provisioned. Confirm that the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service and Windows SharePoint Services Administration service are running on the server. “

Even though search had been previously configured there, and required services were running, there was not obvious things that would usually jump out .

To troubleshoot it, I first tried stopping Office search from the UI. The status of “stopping” had been not switched to “Stopped” and kinda hang there for a while.

Trying to stop through stsadm –o osearch –action stop, yielded no result as well.

Running: “Net stop osearch” just gave me the “the service could not be controlled in its present state”, same message was observer when I hit stop the services console.

Kill utility was not available on that server and restarting the server was not an option as it was a production server.

Here is the list of steps that resolved the issue:

End the process it’s self through tasks manager
In central admin the “stopping” message for this Office search disappeared and instead I saw “stopped”
Stopping WSS search was not an issue after these steps
Then go and delete index from the index location.
Start wss search services
Start Office search services
Edit properties of existing SSP –
- this is when I realized that db the SSP was referencing does not exist. And That was the problem all along
I created new ssp, associated mysites with this new ssp.
Changed association of other web apps with the new SSP, made the new ssp default
Started full crawl, a bingo.

Hope it helps :-)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Search,SSP

SharePoint Enterprise Search 2010 & FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

2010-02-26T12:53:00.001-08:00

I’ll be speaking next month on March 3rd at the NYSPUG meeting, come and say HI.

NY SharePoint User Group Meeting, March 3 2010

Abstract:
With the acquisition of FAST Enterprise Search Platform, Microsoft has made enterprise search a centerpiece of SharePoint 2010. Get a first hand comprehensive overview of the major improvements in SharePoint Search 2010 compared to SharePoint Search 2007. Natalya will also provide an understanding of the major differences between SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. This session, full of demos, will cover the following:

New & improved architecture
Sources of content available for out-of-the-box indexing
Crawled properties vs managed properties
What is the entity extraction
Social search & people search
Relevancy tuning & content processing

Agenda:

5:30 PM	Eat & Greet: Networking, Food & Drink
6:00 PM	The News: Breaking SharePoint & NYC SPUG News
6:10 PM	The SharePoint Minute: Quick 3-minute tutorial
6:20 PM	Presentation
7:20 PM	Wrap Up: Announcements/Door Prizes
7:30 PM	After Meeting Social: Continue discussions with Speakers, Sponsors & Peers

To attend this meeting, REGISTER NOW!

PS: Carlos, you already know this stuff :-)

Technorati Tags: FAST Search for SharePoint 2010,SharePoint Search 2010

Understanding the Integration of Search & Recommendations: February 10, 2010 @ NYC

2010-02-04T12:39:00.001-08:00

This is our 3rd Enterprise Search User Group meeting in New York join us to see Tal Peleg to speak on the topic “Understanding the Integration of Search & Recommendations”

Abstract:

While Recommendations provides an entirely new economic model both for the media and entertainment industries (one that is just beginning to show its power). Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in...

This technology is now harnessed for the productivity market as well. Allowing for enhanced social computing around community of interest and allowing LOB owners to better communicate with their fellow workers.

Demo Included.

SPEAKER:

Tal Peleg, has been with FAST/Microsoft since 2007, focused on NY media accounts. This support includes the pre-sales briefings, evaluation support, requirements analysis, architectural design, and working with implementation services teams. Prior to FAST, Tal has been in the telecom world, driving next generation services across the western hemisphere.

Register now!

MEETING AGENDA:

5:30 PM - Networking (Food and Drinks)

6:00 PM - News and Highlights

6:10 pm - A word from our sponsor

6:30 PM - Speaker Presentation

7:25 PM - Wrap-Up and Give-Aways

7:30 PM - After Meeting Social

ADDRESS:

1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor New York, NY 10104

Technorati Tags: Enterprise search,User Group

FAST ESP SharePoint Connector (Part 1)

2010-01-17T12:54:00.001-08:00

Late last year (2009) Microsoft had released the new SharePoint Connector for FAST ESP.

I’m planning on blogging about the installation process for the connector (in Part 2), security trimming support through the installation and configuration of FAST ESP Security access module (Part 3) as well as integration of the FAST ESP search results with SharePoint UI using CodePlex Web Parts (Part 4) and some of the tricks of making it all work together.

But for now, let’s take a look at some major functionality that this connector is providing:

Secures SharePoint content through indexing of SharePoint ACLS.
Supports User and group extraction, AD users and Groups as well as SharePoint Groups
Mapping of SharePoint groups membership to AD through Security Access Module
Besides NTLM it also supports Kerberos authentication.
Indexes all possible meta data in the propertybag SharePoint Property.
Indexes all information as XML in the scopes scenario.
Include/exclude filters that allow you to configure the connector to include/exclude SharePoint webs/lists, you can even include / exclude by the type of the lists, or/and by the title, etc.
Exposes inheritable properties for lists items, such as site metadata (Created by, description, etc)
No need to install anything on WFEs or SharePoint servers, this version of the connector is using SharePoint Web Services instead of it's own as it was in the previous version.
While there is no User Interface for the connector, it does come with installation wizard.
Error recovery and checkpoint.
Connector state can be stored in SQL or Oracle DBs, and these databases are very light weight.
Export of processed SharePoint content into FastXML fields. This is very useful when after initial run of the connector you need to fine tune document processing pipeline and index profile. During testing you will not have to run the connector multiple times against live data, you can just use file traverser to reprocess all the content from XML files.

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: FAST ESP,FAST Search,FAST SharePoint Connector,FAST SharePoint integration

SharePoint Bad Practices of 2009

2010-01-17T12:12:00.001-08:00

Some of the observations that I had in 2009. These thing really surprised me as 2008 and 2009 were all about Best Practices and really left not too much room for these mistakes to be made. But these are the once that bugged me the most.

Branding:

1. Creating site definition just to apply custom branding.

I don’t think I have to go into too much explanation here :-)

Infopath:

1. Not creating site columns up front when you are promoting fields to content type from InfoPath.

Once you promote fields without mapping them during publishing the form to previously created columns, will make those columns virtually un-modifiable in SharePoint site columns later. it means that if you have to republish the form with modifications to these promoted fields, you will end up with duplicate columns and the previously published columns will be orphaned and you would not be able to delete them.

Another one is a scenarios when you would want to publish one more infopath form and promote fields with the same names as previously published form, duplicates again.

2. Managing the state of infopath form from the form its self as well as from workflows.

EX: you have a form where users are filling out their expenses, the form is also being used to accommodate a process when end user submits the form for designated users to “Approve” the form, approvers get “approve/reject” view, and submit the approval status along side with the disposition. Once it is done a field that is promoted to the library (EX: FormStatus) indicates the status of “approved” or “rejected”. This sound simple and clean, but it’s not when you have to also have for example a notification workflow running under the library. Say that the workflow is using form state fields (EX: FormStatus, endUserNotified, etc..) that are managed within the InfoPath to notify users, but what happens when the form is resubmitted for approval, or you have to maintain as most of the time multiple approval or rejection cases and scenarios within the workflow, this is when it becomes VERY MESSY.

The moral is: before you start creating a solution make sure that all processes are mapped out and clear, if a form will not have workflows (read processes) running under it, or if those workflows will not update form state information (fields maintaining the state of the form), then it’s OK to manage it from the form only, but in cases when workflows will rely on updating these fields and the form will rely and update this information as well, you can get your self in trouble. Make sure that state info is maintained only in one place, but is accessible from the form as well as from the process, if it will have to be maintained from the process, it should be maintained only from the workflow.

Do not create content types from infopath publishing process, if you did not plan for those content types. Plan for infopath content types as if you were planning for SharePoint originated CTs, remember the Information Architecture 123 in SharePoint Planning Best Practices. It is very easy to create a content type from InfoPath, but it is very difficult to manage it without deleting and recreating it.

Hope it helps

Technorati Tags: Infopath,Content Types,Best Practices,Worst Practices

How Microsoft and FAST are defining Next Generation Advertising and Internet Business

2010-01-07T07:59:00.001-08:00

This topic will be covered in our Enterprise Search User Group meeting on January 13, 2010 at 5:30 PM.

First of all HAPPY NEW YEAR! and I hope to see you at the meeting.

How Microsoft and FAST are defining Next Generation Advertising and Internet Business

The FAST AdMomentum Platform (AdMo) is a key piece of Microsoft’s Internet Business strategy in helping companies increase top line revenues and maintain full control over their entire advertising business. AdMo is unique in the market as it is the only solution for the management and serving of all ad types (display, performance, and tenancy), ad formats (image, text, video, multimedia, etc), and pricing models (CPC, CPM, and CPA). AdMo is a complete, white labeled, end-to-end solution that also allows for total flexibility and configuration to meet functional and integration requirements of an organization.

In this session, you'll get a first-hand look at how this game-changing advertising technology offers improved opportunities to provide more relevant ads and targeted message improving the user experience and increasing revenue. The presentation will focus on AdMo as a stand-alone advertising platform and also part of a Internet Business strategy utilizing FAST ESP integrated to drive a larger digital strategy.

Speakers:

James Cooper, Solution Sales Professional in Advertising for North America in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group

Tim McKinnon, TSP Lead & Strategic Accounts, Americas in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group

Register now!

Address:
1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor
New York, NY 10104

Event Sponsor: non~linear creations

See you there :-)

Enterprise Search User Group NY – registration window is closing

2009-12-08T06:21:00.001-08:00

The registration for the first meeting is going to close today. This is not to miss even, so register right now, if you do not register today it will make it harder for you to get into the building since the security is very strict there. The meeting will provide plenty of time for networking and we will not leave you hungry as well ;-).

Here is the meeting information:

December 9, 2009

How Microsoft and FAST are defining Next Generation Search

Microsoft made a big bet on enterprise search with its acquisition of FAST in 2008. The powerful FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) is now the centerpiece of Microsoft’s enterprise search strategy and will be the foundation for search in future versions of Microsoft SharePoint, as well as stand-alone enterprise search offerings. In this session, you'll get a front seat view at how this game-changing search technology offers new opportunities to provide better search solutions to both your colleagues and your customers, emphasizing why you should care in the first place (hint – money and productivity). We'll also reveal Microsoft's product plans for search within the SharePoint 2010 platform and beyond, and discuss practical steps you can take in order to take advantage of Microsoft’s new strategy immediately today, whether you’re running MOSS, planning to upgrade to SP2010 or use FAST ESP stand alone. We’ll be sure to leave plenty of time to have an open discussion with user group participants to talk about your specific situation.

Speaker: Nathan Treloar, Principal Search Technology Evangelist in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group

I’ll see you there

Enterprise Search User Group GRAND OPENING!

2009-11-16T19:48:00.001-08:00

This is very exciting for me to announce the grand opening of the Enterprise Search User Group. This is NY based User group, but we are getting technology to record the meeting and make it available on-line.

Here is the “official” description of the group

The site is still work in progress, but we will get there :-)

Out first meeting is on December 9, 2009

Welcome time 5:30 PM.

It is important to register as building security is pretty strict and will not let people that are not on the list inside the building.

Register now!

Topic: How Microsoft and FAST are defining Next Generation Search

Speaker: Nathan Treloar, Principal Search Technology Evangelist in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group

http://www.sharepointgroups.org/enterprisesearch/default.aspx

I will see you there :-)

Technorati Tags: User Group,Enterprise Search,Sharepoint 2010 search

SharePoint Shop Talk Tomorrow (11/12) from 12:30PM to 1:30 PM EDT

2009-11-11T08:11:00.001-08:00

This is a repost form Paul Galvin’s blog.

The next SharePoint Shop Talk takes place tomorrow at 12:30 PM EDT.

This is a free event to anyone that has a telephone. A panel of SharePoint pro’s take questions and do their best to provide useful guidance and advice. We regularly hijack audience members and make them answer questions and try to have a good time.

Send your questions or topics to questions@sharepointshoptalk.com.

Vertical Bar Graph in Data View Web Part (DVWP)

2009-11-09T10:35:00.001-08:00

I recently had to work with the following scenario:

Clinical Trial site for weight loss study, on the site as part of the functionality patients had to track their weight loss weekly. As part of their weight loss dashboard it was a nice touch to add a simple bar graph that would visually help them to see their progress.

End result:

End By clicking on the link on the bottom “Enter New weight measurement” they would get to the following screen (See image bellow):

Entering new weight is pretty obvious, it is Data View Web Part (DVWP) with insert new item functionality. The bar graph is DVWP as well but XSLT was modified so that every row in a “Weight Tracker” list is presented as a column instead of conventional row style.

How does it work?

I have a simple list “Weight Tracker”

Columns:

Title (renamed to Weight) – is used to hold weight value in pounds
Date – Contains the date when the measurement took place.

In SharePoint Designer (SPD) I opened dashboard page and inserted DVWP that uses Weight Tracker list as source.

Selected my title and date columns to show up and sort by date.

Next I have modified the XSL to create a column for each row. I’ve searched on the internet for examples like this one, where you need to create column (in DVWP) for each row in the list and create row (in DVWP) for each column that you display in the DVWP. Unfortunately nothing came up beyond all the stuff that had been copied from Fab. 40 templates.

Here is the code, hope it will help someone.

BTW, it took a bit over 30 minutes to configure that bar graph.

<WebPartPages:DataFormWebPart runat="server" ShowWithSampleData="False" AllowRemove="True" AllowHide="True" SuppressWebPartChrome="False" PartImageLarge="" ViewContentTypeId="" ExportMode="All" Dir="Default" MissingAssembly="Cannot import this Web Part." ID="g_7dec9695_2438_4cbe_94e7_cb233f1c5352" IsIncludedFilter="" DetailLink="" AllowEdit="True" UseSQLDataSourcePaging="True" HelpMode="Modeless" IsIncluded="True" Description="" NoDefaultStyle="TRUE" FrameState="Normal" AllowConnect="True" ViewFlag="0" AllowZoneChange="True" AllowMinimize="True" Title="Weekly Weight Tracker (past 3 months)" PartOrder="1" PageSize="-1" FrameType="Default" HelpLink="" PartImageSmall="" ConnectionID="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" ExportControlledProperties="True" IsVisible="True" __MarkupType="vsattributemarkup" __WebPartId="{7DEC9695-2438-4CBE-94E7-CB233F1C5352}" __AllowXSLTEditing="true" WebPart="true" Height="" Width=""><ParameterBindings>
                   <ParameterBinding Name="ListID" Location="None" DefaultValue="{D399E205-25E8-4A13-A076-CBDF2B1CB76D}"/>
                   <ParameterBinding Name="dvt_apos" Location="Postback;Connection"/>
                   <ParameterBinding Name="UserID" Location="CAMLVariable" DefaultValue="CurrentUserName"/>
                   <ParameterBinding Name="Today" Location="CAMLVariable" DefaultValue="CurrentDate"/>
               </ParameterBindings>
<DataFields>@Title,Weight;@Date_x0020_Submitted,Date Submitted;@Date,Date;@Chart_x0020_Bar,Chart Bar;@ID,ID;@ContentType,Content Type;@Modified,Modified;@Created,Created;@Author,Created By;@Editor,Modified By;@_UIVersionString,Version;@Attachments,Attachments;@File_x0020_Type,File Type;@FileLeafRef,Name (for use in forms);@FileDirRef,Path;@FSObjType,Item Type;@_HasCopyDestinations,Has Copy Destinations;@_CopySource,Copy Source;@ContentTypeId,Content Type ID;@_ModerationStatus,Approval Status;@_UIVersion,UI Version;@Created_x0020_Date,Created;@FileRef,URL Path;</DataFields>
<DataSources>
<SharePoint:SPDataSource runat="server" DataSourceMode="List" SelectCommand="<View><Query><Where><Leq><FieldRef Name="Date"/><Value Type="DateTime"><Today/></Value></Leq></Where></Query></View>" UseInternalName="true" ID="dataformwebpart1"><SelectParameters><WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListID" ParameterKey="ListID" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="{D399E205-25E8-4A13-A076-CBDF2B1CB76D}"/></SelectParameters><UpdateParameters><WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListID" ParameterKey="ListID" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="{D399E205-25E8-4A13-A076-CBDF2B1CB76D}"/></UpdateParameters><InsertParameters><WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListID" ParameterKey="ListID" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="{D399E205-25E8-4A13-A076-CBDF2B1CB76D}"/></InsertParameters><DeleteParameters><WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListID" ParameterKey="ListID" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="{D399E205-25E8-4A13-A076-CBDF2B1CB76D}"/></DeleteParameters>
    </SharePoint:SPDataSource>
</DataSources>
<Xsl>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dsp" version="1.0" exclude-result-prefixes="xsl msxsl ddwrt" xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ASPNET/20" xmlns:__designer="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/designer" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:SharePoint="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" xmlns:ddwrt2="urn:frontpage:internal">
    <xsl:output method="html" indent="no"/>
    <xsl:decimal-format NaN=""/>
                            <xsl:param name="dvt_apos">'</xsl:param>
    <xsl:param name="Today">CurrentDate</xsl:param>
                            <xsl:variable name="dvt_1_automode">0</xsl:variable>
                            <xsl:template match="/" xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dsp" xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ASPNET/20" xmlns:__designer="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/designer" xmlns:SharePoint="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls">
                                            <xsl:call-template name="dvt_1"/>
    </xsl:template>
                            <xsl:template name="dvt_1">
                                            <xsl:variable name="dvt_StyleName">2ColCma</xsl:variable>
                                            <xsl:variable name="Rows" select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row" />
                                            <table align="center" border="0" class="ms-vb">
                            <xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.body">
                                            <xsl:with-param name="Rows" select="$Rows" />
                            </xsl:call-template>
                                                                    </table>
                            </xsl:template>
                            <xsl:template name="dvt_1.body">
                                            <xsl:param name="Rows" />
                                            <tr valign="bottom">
                                            <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
                                                            <xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.rowview" />                                                    </xsl:for-each></tr>
                                            <tr>
                                            <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
                                                            <xsl:call-template name="dvt_2.rowview" />
                                            </xsl:for-each>
                                            </tr>
                            </xsl:template>
                            <xsl:template name="dvt_1.rowview"> 
        <td valign="bottom" align="center">
            <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><table height="100%" border="0" valign="bottom" width="20"><tr> <td></xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="@Title" /><xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"></td></tr><tr><td valign="bottom"><div style="background:#FF9900;height:</xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="@Title" /><xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">px;width:20px;font-color:white;"></div></td></tr></table></xsl:text>
                            </td>
                            </xsl:template>
                            <xsl:template name="dvt_2.rowview"> 
        <td valign="bottom" align="left" width="20" bgcolor="#CCCCCC" class="ms-vb">
            <xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:FormatDate(string(@Date) ,1033 ,1)" />
                                            </td>
                                </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet></Xsl>
</WebPartPages:DataFormWebPart>

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: Data View Wep Part,vertical bar graph,xsl,dashboard

It is a flue season. Is you SharePoint farm “healthy”? SharePoint Health check

2009-10-29T13:30:00.001-07:00

The best scenario when you can say “ I know my SharePoint Farm” is when you actually just set it up, not months after. Giving your environment a health check is a good idea, especially in environments that do not have on staff people 100% dedicated to SharePoint.

This week I was at a client to do exactly this, the “health check” of their farm. There were no complains about the performance or bugs, but because there was no SharePoint monitoring or maintenance set up they thought it would be a good idea to take advantage of our “Health Check” offer. The company also wanted us, based on the findings, to give them recommendations on how they can better use and utilize SharePoint features.

Here are some notes from the “Health Check”, and pointers on what to look for during the process if you decide to do it your self:

Infrastructure Architecture.

analysis and documentation of the existing physical structure of the farm can help to determine at a glance where possible performance issues might happen as well as points of failure.

Infrastructure architecture includes, but not limited to:

Hardware configuration
Topology setup for the farm
Server roles.
SharePoint Server and SQL server storage.
Patching and Updates level on all servers
Virtualization
Event logs on all servers in the farm

Analysis of this will also greatly help in evaluation of the existing backup and D/R strategy as well.

Logical farm setup:

IIS setup on all WFEs

Application pools
Web applications
Hostheaders
logs location

SharePoint Architecture.

General farm settings

Incoming, Outgoing eMail settings
Quota Templates.
Web Applications and their content databases

Web Application Policies
Managed Paths

AntiVirus

Shared Service Provider

User Profiles
- Schedule
- Source
Search
- Content sources
- Rules
- Schedules
- errors log
- Security settings on the content sources for the crawl account

Security

Administrative and Service Accounts
- app pools
- web apps
- Search content access accounts
SQL
- SQL Database accounts

Site Collections

Site Directory Settings
Site Collection Features
Portal Site Connection
Site Collection Audit Settings
Output Page Caching
Security
- Brocken inheritance
- Security groups management

As the result of the discovery process, besides the documentation of the existing environment along with all other findings, there should be a good recommendations document produced with information on how to and best practices.

For example: event viewer application log was full of Even ID 6432, 7076, 6398 which was indicative of necessity of the following patch http://support.microsoft.com/?id=946517, along with this we have provided the whole guide on application of patches and their verification process.

There were no incremental backups on the farm, instead there were nightly full, granular (Third Party) backups that sometimes would take more than 12 hours to finish up and would have to be interrupted. And no OS or file level back ups was happening as well :-(

There were app pools in the IIS that were not used, some app pools that were used should not have been created in the first place. SQL server and WFE all had farms admin account as local admin account, number of other “sharepoint” logins were created on the SQL side, but in reality were not used.

Part of the Findings and Recommendations also outlined some of the general performance monitoring for SharePoint server, including SharePoint and SQL specific performance counters and what to look for.

I’ll post some of the best practices and recommendations at some point, but now I’m back to 2010 content :-)

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint health check

Document management Sharepoint 2010

2009-10-29T08:19:00.001-07:00

Document center

Document libraries now allow end-users to select multiple document, upload documents with drag and drop option. Tag documents with tag such as "I like it" which will make them easily available on MySite, this way you can always refer to them later. At the same time users can be more specific about tagging by means of tagging with taxonomy and view suggestions for taxonomy.

Documents rating provides social tagging of the documents with comments provided by end-users.
Hierarchical Taxonomy can be shared not just across site collections but across entire Farm.

Documents are now identified by their respective document IDs. With custom setup for ID mapping, ex: you can specify that document IDs in a library can be mapped to "HR_Policies_2009_XXXXX. At the same time if needed existing documents IDs can be reset to specific ID schema.

Reach client application for editing documents (most popular office formats) directly from the browser, perfect in scenarios when users access environment form kiosk computers or from the road.

Records Management features.

Documents can be declared as records from within the doc libraries. Compliance details can be viewed from the document edit drop down menu. Granularity of the complience goes down to the folder level.

·"send to" menu option can be set up to send documents to multiple records management centers, not just 1 as it is in 2007. You can also "Send To" by means of Move the document, copy the document, or move it and leave a link to it so it is still accessible from within the document's original library.

Retention policies can be set up:

per content type
per libraries and folders

Folders are being looked at as means of security and retention policies granularity. Nested folders can either inherit policies from parent or have their own.

Retention policy consists of retention stages. There can be multiple stages set up for policy, stages that can fire off after specified period of time, ex: after 90 days move document somewhere, then after a year another stage might delete the document.

Taxonomy

Managed metadata

auto complete from managed term set
managed term sets are taxonomy
taxonomy is geared towards foxonomy
terms sets can be managed by individuals or by owners of the part of the taxonomy
Central taxonomy
Create your own taxonomies
Taxonomy structure tree view
Taxonomy store (centralized service)
Taxonomy term store
Multi language support for taxonomies

Modifications that can be done by end users to the taxonomy, depending or rights.

copy term sets (taxonomy branch)
move branch or term
deprecate term
merge terms
reuse term sets
specify owners and security for term sets that will control governance for taxonomy
specify terms that are available for tagging or make them just grouping categories for term sets.

Document sets

Folder like structure for grouping multiple documents together with advanced capabilities, almost like folder with special meaning

Provision multiple content type docs in one doc set
Add Web Parts on the landing page of the doc set, ex: description or instructions, or even dashboard
Automate repetitive content creation – EX: response to RFP
Allows consistency and process insight
Foundation for document assembly

Content Types

Content types Syndication
Sharing across site collections and across forms
Content type hub site- central management location for CTs

Content organizer

Automatic routing of documents appropriate place in SharePoint. This is true Document management System feature, end users don’t even have to be aware of SharePoint and think which document library this document should go into. now they just work in word or office and SharePoint moves documents that were submitted by users to appropriate place, based on:

Rules for content rerouting
Metadata
Content Types
Property based conditions
Can apply multiple rules

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: document management,sharepoint 2010

SharePoint Saturday Phylli, November 7th

2009-10-25T14:08:00.001-07:00

This is another SharePoint Saturday even in the area.

This time it is put together by Dave Mann.

Join SharePoint architects, administrators, developers, and other professionals who work with SharePoint for a special 'SharePoint 2010 Themed Saturday' on November 7th, 2009. The day will be filled with educational and informative SharePoint 2007 and 2010 sessions and provide you with an excellent opportunity to network with Microsoft MVPs and other SharePoint professionals in Philly area. SharePoint Saturday is FREE and is open to the public.

REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED. But you can get added to Event’s waiting list.

I’ll be there speaking on Search for SharePoint 2010, come and learn about new Microsoft Enterprise search offering built on FAST ESP technology.

See ya there :-)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Saturday,Enterprise Search,FAST,FAST ESP,Search for SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 overview for IT Pros

2009-10-20T09:47:00.001-07:00

Great session at SPC 2009 by Simon Skaria, Lead of Customer Advisory team, Microsoft.

In short, this session was oriented around 3 main topics:

Flexible deployments
IT Pro productivity

From the flexibility of deployments stand point, Skaria was highlighting the following features of SharePoint 2010, such as:

Installation:

Installations of the Sharepoint is simplified by server preparation feature such as, one click prerequisites install. this alone is a great time saver, isn’t it? it also provides Progress Reports. this is not available in the Sharepoint 2007. this report notifies you of the progress and steps that are happening during the installation and upgrade. you don’t have to stare at the Config Wizard for hours without knowing where you in the process.

Predictable upgrade:

Pre upgrade checker.

Checks for best practices, configuration and farm setup settings.

Visual Upgrade

Allows to preview upgraded site in the new UI before flipping the switch

Resumeable upgrade

Provides an ability to resume upgrades that were previously aborted without the necessity or rerunning the upgrade from the very beginning.

Parallel DB Upgrades

These feature provides support for read only upgrade, meaning that while the upgrade is running, your farm is still available to end users but in read only mode. Unlike previous version upgrade, this feature provides availability of services during the upgrade it's self.

From the IT Pro productivity stand point….

LEARN POWERSHELL! Powershell, as the name implies is powerful scripting language that will make your IT Pro life easier. It does not mean that stsadm is going away, it’s not, but ….

Consider the following, 500 OOTB commands are available in 2010… and you can extend these to suit your needs and your deployments

Logging, monitoring, and alerts.

Gathers info from all kinds of counters from servers in the farm, including SQL.

Logging info is pushed to open schema SQL DB, use it the way you want.

OOTB reports

Beyond just troubleshooting, rich web analytics provide detailed usage reports, reports on slowest pages load where you can trace the root of the performance degradation with details on these pages through the developer dashboard.

Developer Dashboards

Developer dashboards provide call stack, operations, queries, web part events offsets information(analysis of load time for each individual webpart)

Integrated Health analyzer

This provides the info that SP best practices analysis tool provides with SP 2009… and some more :-). This built in tool analyses security, storage, orphaned items in content DBs, etc.

Business continuity management

High availability servicing
No down time on servicing SharePoint
Lights out recovery
Fail over is managed by the SharePoint

Scalable Infrastructure

hosting

Supports multi tenancy
SP online standard
SP online dedicated

On premises deployments
Services “a la carte”

Lists are highly scalable!

Support for blob storage

Large document libraries

Support for more than 1 million documents in one library.
Performance on large lists and document libraries - is a promise with sub-second response time
OOT library view comes with the flexible navigation, filtering and refining views by metadata, taxonomy, other defined filters on the fly
Automatic routing of documents to a drop off library with rules on automatic creation of folders

Content organizer rules, that allow to create manageable IA

Easy configuration of library navigators
Automatic column indexing for lists (where IT pros do not have to worry about the technical side of the set up of lists) instead they can just concentrate on the end user experience

Security and governance

support for automation of password changes management
Addition of servers in the farm can be secured by pass phrase
7.3 APIs for permissions reporting
APIs are very rich to provide great starting point for custom reports on security and governance

Information governance

ediscovery – records management
search for documents that are subject for records center, preview search results, and without moving them in to records center apply a “hold” on them. The docs are remaining in their original location but become records.

Application governance

Control over consumption of resources and ability to terminate processes that are running over the limit

IT governance

block and track sharepoint processes – very useful for sandbox solutions
AD recognizes Sharepoint machines within environment
Enabling automatic password change from the Sharepoint
Apply AD group policy to prohibit implementation of SharePoint servers other than SPs existing in your Farm.

Enjoy :-)

SPC SharePoint 2010 features highlights, key note sessions.

2009-10-20T09:26:00.001-07:00

The first 2 sessions of the conference were key notes with speakers such as: Steve Bulmer, Tom Rizzo, Arpan Shah, and many others. Some of the key highlights from the session are here.

So let’s start with..

Business Connectivity Suite

The concept of external content types makes it easier to connect external data sources from within SharePoint designer and to surface this info in familiar interface like office, with ability to edit / insert / delete data.

One of the examples that Tom Rizzo used was connecting sql "contacts" SQL table, map SQL fields to office properties, and managing these contacts from within outlook as if they were originated there.

SharePoint Workspaces allow you to take data off-line and work with it within SP workspace (previously Groove), with enhanced UI.

Rich mobile client for SharePoint, windows mobile 6.5 also supports SharePoint Workspace. There is no special SP implementation needed for the Mobile support, it's all based on MicroBrowser technology for mobile.

New Administration capabilities.

Easier to navigate UI

Better scripting capabilities with Power Shell.
1. Up to 500 commands OOTB
2. Ability to create fully scriptable environments
3. Managing farm remotely
Proactive monitoring of the SharePoint farm from within SharePoint admin interface.
Analytics capabilities of SharePoint pages performance.
Central admin includes SharePoint Health analyzer.
1. check security
2. configuration
3. performance
4. databases

Usage analysis database that allows you to write your own custom reports.

Better upgrade experience, with the new model of upgrade “visual upgrade” providing an ability to preview pages with new UI before flipping the switch (remember 2003 to 2007 upgrades? :-)

In between releases of CUs, Service Packs, etc. new upgrade features allow for much less down time during upgrades and patches.

Visual Studio 2010

First of all it becomes available to the public... TODAY! Go and download it, explore all the new features and support for development for SharePoint platform. The new enhancements are, but not limited to:

1. New templates, from workflows to Visual web parts development.

2. Explore SharePoint objects with server explore window

3. Solution explore, customized for features, packages, web parts. No more writing custom XML :-)

Visual web parts development.

Drag and drop controls
Productivity enhancements
Mapping folders to SharePoint that allow you to use relative urls images, ex: _layouts/.....
Support for threading
Support for debugging natively from within the Visual Studio
ONE CLICK DEPLOYMENT!
- insight into what is happening during one click deployment
developer dashboards, if enabled on the page, they allow you to take a look into the processes that are being run on the background during the rendering of the web part on the page
- look into db queries
- call stack

Sandbox solutions

Track and/or block server resources usage for sandbox solutions
- Specify rules and granular development permissions
Even ability to upload written in Visual studio solutions to Sharepoint online
Solutions that are controlled and governed by IT

Cloud, SharePoint Online - this is one of my favorite topics. Not all companies can afford to be hosting their own SP environment for many reasons: licensing cost, support and maintenance resources, hardware investment. Or sometimes companies just cannot afford to put certain information onto the cloud. There are several scenarios available with SP 2010 online:

Mix and match on premises hosting and online
Internet sites hosting in the cloud - is a completely new offering
SP environment fully hosted in the cloud

SP 2010 Online is offering much greater depth of features in the cloud, even though it does not support full trust APIs, but is still offering a very robust development environment.

In general the are over 1 million users right now in the cloud, 7000 partners

This will revolutionize the Microsoft’s online offering.

I’m off to the next session :-)

Enjoy

SharePoint Shop Talk – October 7th

2009-10-08T06:05:00.001-07:00

Join us for our weekly SharePoint Shop talk.

We have been thinking about introducing the idea of group questions into categories and addressing them one category at the time. In this case all workflow questions could be answered in Workflow SharePoint Shot Talk, or something like that.

For today and future Shop Talks send your questions to:

Send an email to questions@sharepointshoptalk.com
Twitter me (@natalyvo)
Leave a comment here.
Just dial in on the call and ask it there.

And Just dial in on October 7st, at 12:30 EST.

Talk to you there

MVP again!

2009-10-02T06:55:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I have received email notifying me that I’ve been awarded the Microsoft SharePoint Most Valuable Professional (MVP). this is exciting second time in the row.

Congratulations to all newly awarded, and re-awarded MVPs.

SharePoint Shop Talk – October 1st, 2009

2009-09-30T11:09:00.001-07:00

Another one in our series of SharePoint Shop talk.

Harry Hones is back from vacation, last week he did not participate on the call.

Send your questions to:

Send an email to questions@sharepointshoptalk.com
Twitter me (@natalyvo)
Leave a comment here.
Just dial in on the call and ask it there.

And Just dial in on October 1st, at 12:30 EST.

Here is a photo that I snapped during our SharePoint Shop Talk on September 17th.

On Photo: Paul Galvin and Harry Jones (your can see his back)

Enjoy

SharePoint Saturday in New York

2009-09-04T06:04:00.001-07:00

SharePoint Saturday is on the road again, it is coming to NY on September 12th.

SharePoint Saturday NYC is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of topics focused on Microsoft SharePoint technologies.
SharePoint Saturday NYC is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

Location:

Learning Tree New York
One New York Plaza-31st Floor
New York, NY 10004
Tel: 917-206-0500
Fax: 917-206-0521

Please stop by to say Hi.

I’ll be speaking on one of my favorite subjects, FAST ESP.

Why you might be interested in this subject?

Read sessions description…

Search: Next generation of search – Raise your expectations. Part1

SharePoint 2010 is coming soon, but what do you know about its search offering.
File shares, database records, document libraries, tons of information that is only useful if you know what you have. Do not loose you intellectual property, discover and organize it through search. Apply multiple layers of information architecture and start treating search as your business Intelligence tool.

Search: Next generation of search – Raise your expectations. Part2

This session offers a technical dive into FAST enterprise search engine. Walk through content sources, document processing pipelines, index, and query results processing. As well as tips on tuning documents ranking based on the data extracted from documents. Exploring lemmatization features, entity extraction, and dictionaries. As well as fine tuning search to speak you company language.

I’ll see you there :-)

Business Case - SharePoint in the Cloud

2009-08-24T13:00:00.001-07:00

In addition to our regular SharePoint Shop Talk webinars, I’d like to invite you this Thursday, August 27th at 12:30 PM EDT

for a webinar where we will talk about SharePoint in the Cloud.

The world is talking about Cloud Computing and moving IT infrastructure out of corporate data centers and utilizing the services of an organization that is better suited to providing reliable service cost effectively. Microsoft is aggressively moving to provide businesses with a choice in running business applications on premise or hosted "in the cloud". During this 1 hour webinar, being presented by ISS Group with Strategic Partners Cloud Strategies & Arcovis, learn about the following:

The Cloud Computing Value Proposition: When to Consider Moving to the Cloud
Microsoft's Online Services: Business Productivity Online Suite Overview
SharePoint™ Online Spotlight
Live Demonstration: Empowering your Business using SharePoint Online
How to Get Started with Cloud Computing

Join Us This Thursday, August 27th at 12:30 PM EDT

For Audio, dial: (800) 914-3395
For Toll/International Users, dial: + 1 719-867-7628
When prompted, enter your conference ID: 2779234
Register today for complete login in details, including link to web access.

SharePoint Shop talk – Open Q&A Session

2009-08-18T09:17:00.001-07:00

This is another webinar in our series of “SharePoint Shop Talk” sessions. This is open to everyone and it is a free Questions and Answers session.

Show up with your SharePoint questions and we’ll do our best to entertain you.

This week’s “official” panel includes yours truly, my Arcovis partners (Paul Galvin and Harry Jones) and Laura Rodgers (of twitter & EndUserSharePoint fame). Hopefully Bil Simser will join us again, he is very good when it come to specific development questions. Last time, we had a great level of audience participation which blurred the line between panelists and attendees and I expect the same will happen this Thursday, August 20th at 12:30 PM EST.

You can also email your questions to us

Here is the Registration Link: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=xnddgb0b7zh5w9xs

Audio Information:
Toll free: +1 (800) 914-3395
Toll: +1 (617) 475-0117
Participant code: 3655555

Explaining SharePoint

2009-08-14T10:48:00.001-07:00

Have you tried explaining what is sharepoint to … let’s say your mom.

If you’ve ever tried to do this, you may want to check out a new Common Craft video that explains “SharePoint in Plain English”.

As far as I’m concerned, my mom sais “my daughter works with computers”, … SharePoint what?

Check out this video

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=241

SharePoint Shop Talk // open Q&A session August 13th 12:30pm EDT

2009-08-12T07:30:00.001-07:00

Arcovis will be hosting our second “SharePoint Shop Talk” session this Thursday at 12:30 PM EDT. This is the second even of it’s kind, it is a free form Q&A session, we will start off answering questions that have been emailed to us, but you can post your questions here in a form of comments.

Questions can be of any kind, administration, customization and end user/power user.

Just show up and ask your question!

Presenters are: ….Me, Paul Galvin and…join and you will find out :-)

Registration Link: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=9xrzxfs9x34sb0sm

Thursday, August 13th at 12:30pm EDT

Audio - Toll Free (800) 914-3395 Passcode 2779234

Talk to you there :-)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Shop Talk,SharePoint Event,webinar

Scalability issues with SharePoint - Poll

2009-07-29T10:43:00.001-07:00

New poll had been posted on the ISPA site

The working assumption is that reliance on SQL Server database mirroring/log shipping leaves some big gaps in terms of availability (due to failover time, potential loss of data with async mirroring, inability to allow online db maintenance etc.) and scalability (no scale-out for site collections that grow big and live in a single SQL instance).

Are these real pain points for SharePoint users?

Cast your vote here http://www.sharepointpros.org/Pages/Default.aspx

Microsoft SharePoint and the FAST Enterprise Search Platform article

2009-07-23T06:30:00.001-07:00

In this article, I have given an overview of the current state of search in SharePoint and how it will be affected when FAST is added to the mix.

FAST ESP is an enterprise search engine that provides an extensive content processing and indexing functionalities. FAST search for SharePoint is going to deliver high end search capabilities to enterprises. The ease of use of SharePoint Server with FAST Search high-end filtering and navigation features creates a new enterprise search, collaboration, and publishing solution. FAST search is highly customizable and configurable product that allows to index structured as well as unstructured content and impose multiple layers of Information Architecture.

Windows 7 RTM’d

2009-07-23T05:55:00.001-07:00

With a slight delay, Windows 7 just RTM’d!!!!

I’ve ran Windows 7 Beta since January 2009 as my main OS . If I have installed it on just VM, I would probably use it once or twice, not more.

When I had upgraded to RC…. let me tell you, I’ve never been so excited about windows OS as I am about Windows 7.

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Windows 7 RTM

Ensuring SharePoint Success – Mentoring Workshop

2009-07-22T08:01:00.001-07:00

You may have seen the buzz about upcoming “Ensuring SharePoint Success” workshop. Running in the D.C. area the week before the Best Practices Conference, Andrew, Dux, Paul and Ruven are getting together for three days to deliver a collection of workshops on Organizational Change, Project Management, Requirements Development and Agile Methodology. The goal is to have an intimate group (less than 30 attendees) so that they can give lots of time to answering specific issues in small groups and one-on-one.

This is the link to register for this event

http://www.innovative-e.com/pages/workshopspa.aspx

Hotfix for the SP2 issue is available now

2009-06-25T19:05:00.001-07:00

Service Pack 2 Update.

The public update for the Service Pack 2 expiration date issue<http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx> is now available for download.

Whoo-hoo, I hope that you caught this one!

The update can be applied before or after Service Pack 2 installation. If the update is applied prior to installing Service Pack 2 it will prevent the expiration date from being improperly activated during installation of Service Pack 2, if it is applied after Service Pack 2, it removes the expiration date incorrectly set during installation of Service Pack 2.

Installation instructions and download links for x86 and x64 are available in this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971620

For 32 is this link: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/F/5/2F51AB71-1325-49D2-9CB9-18DEC4780E99/office2007-kb971620-fullfile-x86-glb.exe

For 64, this one: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/B/B/5BBD34A9-C528-42B0-8A5F-9A8997B25C32/office2007-kb971620-fullfile-x64-glb.exe

Profile properties import through BDC connection to Oracle SAP

2009-06-25T13:02:00.001-07:00

Interesting fact was uncovered during our enterprise deployment project, and I wanted to share it.

The client has Oracle SAP that they are using across the globe, and we were supplementing user profile properties that have very limited information in AD through BDC to Oracle. Import through BDC was very slow, I mean VERY slow.

If AD full import was taking 1 1/2 hour to import 70,000 user profiles, then BDC part would take around 20+ hours. with this numbers, there was no way for us to meet SLAs.

After Oracle team, Microsoft team, and us started investigating the issue, some interesting things were uncovered.

Apparently in our ADF we were using simple select statement, to oracle side our “identifier” or record ID (ex:“win_no”) field was being passed from SharePoint as a numeric field. In the world I know, this is how you treat record ID.

But on the Oracle side this field was defined as a character. In this scenario, Oracle disabled the use of the index because the field types do not match. With the index disabled the process of retrieving records was slow.

The issue was solved by the “to_char” we put in select statement to make sure that BDC “does not lose anything in the translation”. Final testing showed that BDC import was brought down from 20+ hours to under 2.

When I was at NY User Group meeting in June, I have heard someone saying that their BDC import was taking about 8 hours to finish, and for a while, I thought that it was normal. Well… It is, if your field types do not match! :-)

Enjoy

Converting Hyper-v VHD to VMware

2009-06-25T11:31:00.001-07:00

Real bummer. I had to power off my server that was running Hyper-v and the whole bunch of VMs. Until I get the hyper-v host back, I decided to continue my development on one of the machines by converting it into vmware. The general VMware converter that allows you to convert from VHD is not working with POWERED OFF hyper-v VHD. apparently you can convert it only as a physical machine by giving the IP address, which in my case is not possible as I do not have another Hyper-v host. I guess I have to be patient and wait for the server to get back

:-(

Publishing Search Results in MOSS

2009-06-25T11:05:00.001-07:00

Never noticed it before, but after checking it on several installations of MOSS, it appears that the search is “ignoring” “start Date” on publishing pages and includes all documents that had not been published yet.

If you create for example an article and set publish date one week from now, you have to modify your search not to include these articles into search results until this date had been reached.

New York SharePoint User Group meeting June 3, 2009

2009-06-02T16:04:00.001-07:00

It is a short notice, but I urge you to attend this meeting.

Jim Kane will present on "Challenges and SharePoint Enterprise Deployments (& a few solutions)"

This presentation will focus on the many and varied challenges of implementing SharePoint on an enterprise level, whether for a small company or for a large company. Enterprise deployments present unique issues; from expectations through politics, from infrastructure decisions through going out-of-the-box or customizing. Deploying SharePoint across an enterprise can get messy quickly once more than a few people are involved in decision making.
We'll look at some real-life examples of challenges, and some ways to meet those challenges. Be prepared to participate in the discussion!

I’ve known Jim for quite a while and the first time I met him it happened at one of the New York User Group meetings. Jim and I are currently working on the same project (enterprise deployment), but from different side. Sides do not really matter form the project point of view, but I’m curious to find out how the challenges that we all are facing are being viewed from a different perspective.

I’ll see you there :-)

FAST ESP 5.3 Installation trick

2009-05-26T19:44:00.001-07:00

The installation is not that cumbersome, but the trick here is to install the right prerequisites especially java JDK(Java SE Development Kit with JavaFX (JDK 6u13 / FX 1.1)), you can find it at http://java.sun.com

If you do not have the right version of JDK, your installation will fail on Windows ( never done it in other OS), unfortunately you can’t really find it in documentation, so you can spend sometime struggling with it.

One of the great features of the FAST installer is that once installation is done, FAST generates installation profile XML document that can be reused in the future to perform that same type of installation scenario, this is especially useful in multi-node scenarios.

FAST search engine for SharePoint PART 3 (Content Sources and Connectors)

2009-05-04T09:17:00.001-07:00

Each “content source” is represented as a “Collection” within FAST ESP. Data is being fed into Document Processing Pipelines for refinement through the use of “Connectors” that are defined for a specific collection.

There are three types of connectors for FAST search engine:

FAST OOTB connectors
Third Party (proprietary) connectors
Custom connectors, using FAST API

YES! FAST allows you to go against APIs

FAST OOTB connectors

Enterprise Crawler: used to feed content from Web Pages. Content sources, and many other settings for this connector are easily configurable through the Admin UI, including: Content Request rate, Start URIs, Include and exclude host name filters, content crawl interval, etc. Enterprise Crawler allows you to crawl unlimited number of start URIs, detects deleted content, and removes it from index, and retrieves both: static and dynamic content.

ESP File Traverser: traverses and submits files from file system to content pipelines in batches via Content API. Files that this connector serves can be in any binary or text format, as long as this format can be handled by processing pipeline (PDFs, TXT, XML, DOC, and many more).

JDBC Connector or FAST Smart Connector for JDBC: This connector uses database data or structured data for feeding into pipelines (Oracle, SQL, MySQL, DB2, etc). This connector uses JDBC driver that must be registered on the server prior to establishing a connection to the database. It extracts data to be indexed on a column level through the use of SQL query that you supply, this connector is managed through command line and through Web Interface as well.

Connectors mentioned above support content modification detection through the use of checksums as well as timestamps that are kept either in FAST built-in db or some other MySQL db.

Third Party Connectors

There is not much I can say about these connectors except to list some of them: Lotus Notes, WebSphere, Exchange, Documentum, Hummingbird, and of course SHAREPOINT. So even if you are not looking to upgrade to the SharePoint 2010 when it becomes available with FAST, you still can integrate with SharePoint without reinventing the wheel :-)

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: FAST,FAST connectors,search,database search,web pages search,sharepoint

FAST search engine for SharePoint PART 2 (Overview of FAST)

2009-04-27T18:10:00.001-07:00

The right way to introduce FAST would be to give an overview of how the indexing and search is really done and what processes take place.

I’m sure it’s not the best graphic you have ever seen, but I’m not a designer for a reason.

This picture provides a VERY simplified overview of processes, but it is a start.

FAST terminology: document is not a Microsoft Word document per-say (even thought it can be), document is data entity that is subject for indexing. Document can be a file, db record, web page, etc. XML docs are a bit different story, but I’ll talk about it later.

Content: Content can be in many formats, structured and unstructured. Content sources are defined at a “collection” level, collection has to be created as a very first step that you take when defining a logical grouping of searchable content.
Connector is assigned to a “Collection”, and is used to feed documents in batches to document processing pipelines.
Document processing pipelines refine your documents, apply entity extractors, matching process and business logic. Only one pipeline can be associated with a “Collection”. There are many stages that document goes through within the pipeline, but they all can be split into three groups: pre-processing, document manipulation, post-processing.
If the document is not discarded within pipeline it gets indexed with all appropriate attributes that were assigned to it within the previous step, original content is also being stored in FXML format (FastXML)
Query Processing pipeline comes into play when end-user submits query, it provides additional analysis to content retrieved from index and further refines the result set.
Finally, end user interface renders results and provided further ways of drilling into search results.

In the next post I’ll cover Content sources and connectors in more details.

Enjoy :-)

Why FAST?

2009-04-24T19:45:00.001-07:00

So what is all the fuss about? Why do we even want to consider FAST as a search engine? What FAST does that other search engines fail to do and why?

As we all remember in early 2000 it was all about data, collecting data, “information is the power”. Almost all companies jumped on “Data collection” wagon. Few years later they were forced to collect data in the light of all laws and regulations that were imposed by government. At around the same time and even earlier wave of data analysis, and data mining became incredibly strong. Companies realized that the data they have is an unknown mass, potentially incredibly valuable, but the value of it was obfuscated by the quantity and often poor quality of the data.

SharePoint “age” started educating companies about true meaning of “garbage in, garbage out” concept. I personally often tell clients that SharePoint deployment stage should be treated as “Spring Cleaning” and reorganization of content.

But is “Spring Cleaning” approach always valid and feasible? No.

Can large enterprises afford such undertaking? Most likely not. Because hiring an army of temps to tag documents will not cut it, since they are lacking subject matter expert’s knowledge and business insight.

Properly configured FAST can impose multiple layers of information taxonomy structure on already existing content, thus providing unparalleled insight and access to information.

When FAST “bug” bit me, I tried to be devil’s advocate for myself and started researching FAST competitors in the enterprise search market, such as: Autonomy, Endeca, and Google appliance. Unfortunately ns my FAST competitors research journey, I could not pass through sales reps, who had troubles answering even basic questions, to more “techy” people (and I’m so far drinking sales reps cool-aid). I had to resort to comparison of the type and level of influence or administrative intervention you have on the search engine, in terms of content relevance, analysis, ranking… and you name it. FAST had prevailed on many levels over other guys.

If we take the analogy of apple trees in an orchard. (ha-ha-ha, my Russian really comes through here) Companies say: I want Google quality search within enterprise.

Google is famous for Internet search, but this is the same as you going to a free range farm and shaking an apple tree. Then using the fruit that falls to the ground where you have no control over what apples fall first, and their pattern of falling and arrangement on the ground does not clue you into their quality of “fruits”.

Using FAST Search is like going to a farm which specializes in cultivating the best apples. So you get the best fruit all the time. It is presented to you in ways that you need by the ton, baskets, 5 pound paper bag, raw, or processed into apple cider, puree etc. (even by colors)

In conclusion, I just wanted to add couple of facts about FAST (in no particular order):

FAST can handle 40,000 Terabytes/ or 40 Petabytes of data
10 billion documents
2,000 queries/second

And expansion of it all through Federated installations!

And according to Dstar – Data News company:

1,000 terabyte is about one-hundred times the contents of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, with more than 18 million books, 2.5 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.5 million maps, and 54 million manuscripts

According to Answers.com

Approximately fifteen thousand terabytes of data will be generated each year in particle physics experiments using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, launched in May 2008
As of November 2006, eBay had 2,000 terabytes of data
In 2007, NOAA maintained approximately 1,000 terabyte of climate data. NOAA expects that their Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS) library will hold 20,000 terabytes of data by 2011, 140,000 terabytes by 2020

Isn’t it alone impressive?

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: FAST ESP,fast search

FAST search engine for SharePoint PART 1 (Dictionaries)

2009-04-24T11:40:00.001-07:00

In this post I’d like to introduce you to FAST ESP dictionaries and their benefits.

FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) has many prebuilt dictionaries. Dictionaries that support basic entity extraction such as: locations, people names, and company names. Dictionaries that help to facilitate a context recognition through the use of lemmatization, synonyms, spelling variations, stop words elimination, etc…

Lemmatization: generally speaking, lemmatization means the mapping of a word to its base form or its other inflectional forms. Ex: searching for “to do” will bring “doing”, and “done”.

Dictionaries also support advance phrase recognition, but this feature and lemmatization do not go together, they are mutually exclusive. Phrase recognition provides you the following: If I’m executing query on “SharePoint for Squirrels” Fast will immediately recognize that “SharePoint for Squirrels” is a PHRASE and will not bring absolutely irrelevant results with “Count of squirrels in SharePoint”, or “maintaining squirrels database in SharePoint” mentioned in the source documents.

Dictionaries as almost any feature of FAST is a big topic that can fit into a small book, but I’ll try to cover at a high level some of the OOTB dictionaries (index and/or query side):

Phonetic search
1. Used for detection of sound-a-like words
Spelling
1. Within spelling dictionary each word has a weight value which might be used to influence ranking value. Weigh value is based on the frequency of the word in specific language. Lower values mean more frequency of usage.
Synonyms
Tokenization
1. Detection of characters that might be irrelevant in the query, ex: “-“, white spaces, etc.
Character normalization
1. Used for characters with accents that are not commonly supplied by users
Locations and Proper Name recognition
1. Used to identify locations, addresses, and names of people and companies.
Anti-phrasing and stop words
1. used to eliminate irrelevant words or often repeated words

FAST also provides automatic language detection in 70 languages, and dictionaries are language specific.

Custom FAST Dictionaries

Now a days almost every company is using their own terminology, or industry, or department specific jargon, and abbreviations. When searching for information people are using keywords in their queries, keywords that make sense to them, ex: If I’m searching for “PTO”, I’ll get results with documents where “PTO” is mentioned, but not “vacation”, or “personal day”. While entering “PTO” in my search query, I simply wanted to lookup my company’s vacation days policy. When people are searching for information it is very important for search engine to understand what they REALY are looking for in the context of their keywords.

Dictionaries can be used on the content processing side (document pipelines) before document even gets indexed, and supply more information about a document into the index.

Though it will contribute to index growth, but will make query results serving a bit faster, since less work will have to be done there.

Also they can be used on the query processing side, which might directly affect query performance.

Keep in mind that almost all updates to index side dictionaries will require re-indexing of the content.

Just an idea on building custom dictionary: I’ve heard this idea at the first FAST Forward Conference 2008 in Orlando.

What is we start using internet to built our dictionaries. Internet is the biggest data repository in the world, and data on the Internet is often contained in tables. Table structure can be easily recognized in the document Pipeline of FAST.

Example of FAST indexing a web page with cars table:

Make	Models
BMW	X5	SUV
BMW	X3	SUV
BMW	325 XI	Sedan
Acura	MDX	SUV
Acura	RL	Sedan
Acura	TL	Sedan
Acura	RSX	SUV
Acura	TSX	SUV

By utilizing GetAttributes() method in document processor, FAST can return this document as a dictionary, it will populate your custom dictionary based on values from the above table. Just think about all the opportunities WWW opens for you :-)

When I say “document”, do not confuse it with MS Word document, document in FAST vernacular is any type of information entity: DB record, web page, file, etc.)

How will it help? let’s say that someone goes to my FAST Search engine and decides to find a car by entering “Acura sedan” into the search box. While documents in my index do not have “sedan” keyword, but they do have make and model names. Without dictionary based on the above table, search results would bring everything on “Acura”. But with this dictionary through the matching stage in my document pipeline, FAST will identify relevant documents in my index by matching “RL”, and “TL” models to “sedan” in the dictionary. And return both sedan models in result set as opposed to the whole bunch of irrelevant content where “Acura” keyword is mentioned.

FAST dictionaries are created, populated and viewed using Dictionary manager from command line script dictman. You can use this utility in interactive mode for manual population of dictionary and in non-interactive mode, to populate dictionary through a batch file.

Dictionaries are used to improve relevance and can drastically improve search results if properly deployed.

There are pros and cons to deploying different dictionaries, so there is a pre-planning process that has to take place. Considerations must be given to what dictionaries to deploy based on the content that you want to serve and business requirements, when to deploy index side dictionaries and when to deploy it on the query end. This is more of a “Best Practices” talk, I’ll try to cover it in some other posts.

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: FAST,SharePoint search,FAST dictionaries,Search,FAST ESP

FAST as SharePoint search engine

2009-04-21T07:44:00.001-07:00

While I was in UK at the beginning of this month, I had a very interesting conversation with one of SharePoint MVPs (no names, but he knows who he is :-). The conversation was mainly revolving around FAST and the fact that most SharePointers don’t have a clue what FAST search engine is and what it does. The common knowledge is that FAST is going to be tightly integrated with SharePoint and will make search better….. That’s it!

As a result of the above mentioned conversation, I’ve decided to start series of blog posts about FAST features and the value they bring to the enterprises. Stay tuned, in the next post, I’ll start unveiling some of my favorite features. Posts will be titled “FAST search engine for SharePoint PART 1,2,3….etc”

Enjoy

UK Best Practices Conference

2009-04-13T12:15:00.001-07:00

The European Best Practices Conference just passed and it was one of the biggest SharePoint Conference that UK has seen. First of all I’d like to thank Combined Knowledge for inviting me to speak at 2 sessions, and 1 “ask the experts” panel. The Conference gave lots of opportunities to learn and to network with other people in the industry. Organizers of the conference did show what it is to take “Best Practices Conference” to the next level. Steve Smith and Zoe Watson from Combined Knowledge took a lot of care in personally making sure that all speakers and attendees felt very welcomed in London and at the conference itself. The only sad part was that great weather stayed only for the duration of the conference, since I took the rest of the week to enjoy my little vacation in London I did need an umbrella afterwards :-)

Once the conference was over, Eric Shupps has dedicated all his time to show us (Bob Fox, Stacy Draper, and George) the beauty of London, and all the great places to visit. Eric, Thank you!

To wrap up this post I urge you to become a regular attendee of this great event, as it provides deep insight into the technology and the community. It was great seeing old friends and meeting new ones along with all the attendees that came to the event and my sessions as well.

As they say…. Cheers!!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,best practices conference

My Site web application root site collection

2009-02-19T19:04:00.001-08:00

Scenario: root top site collection for My Site web application got deleted (don’t ask how :-).

All my sites are still in tact as each of them is a separate site collection on it’s own, but if the top site collection under /">http://<mysitesURL>/ is deleted then people will not be able to create new my sites, this root site collection servers as provisioning mechanism for new MySites and also hosts Person.aspx page where end-users can view other people profiles.

So some of the things that you will notice right away:

1. No new My Sites can be created, instead people are getting “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”.

2. When people search result set is displayed, clicking on the person’s link to profile will bring to the “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” as well.

3. Your SharePoint search will not crawl people profiles anymore. This is because the top level site collection does not exist.

At this point you can recreate this mysite root site collection from Central administration under my sites web application, but only if you have the option to recreate it in the root. If you don’t have this option (I did not), you might have to recreate the whole web app, but backup all existing “my sites” firsts. For the first site collection that you will create use “My sites host” template under “enterprise” tab. After this create a managed path named “Personal”.

After you have done all of this restore all "”Mysites” that you have created backups for but not under the root URL :-), under /pesonal">http://<mysites>/pesonal

And you should be all set.

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: My Sites,web application,site collection,my sites host template,people crawl

BP 2009 - Educated approach for selecting third party products and Vendors presentation

2009-02-06T06:51:00.001-08:00

The conference is over and I enjoyed it very much. I’ve met a lot of great people “Hi all!” and as promised here is my presentation on third party products.

Educated approach for selecting third party products and Vendors

Description: SharePoint has become the platform that companies and businesses are turning to in search of solutions for their business needs. Windows SharePoint Services also provides a foundation platform for building Web-based business applications that can easily scale to meet the changing and growing needs of business, as a result there is plethora of 3rd-party suppliers. In some cases third party applications and add-ons add some flexibility or more functionality to the basic feature set offered by SharePoint, and in others they enable powerful administrative capabilities and allow integration with critical business applications and databases. The number of third-party SharePoint applications and Web Parts is growing at a remarkable rate. This growth brings a lot of confusion on how to select the right vendor and product to customers that are looking to supplement their SharePoint environment. In this session, you will learn to identify difference categories of third party products available on the market and their value, select the right product and vendor that would fit their budget and business needs, and understand implications of introducing different products into their SharePoint environment

Technorati Tags: third party products,best practices conference,sharepoint,sharepoint applications

BP 2009 in San Diego – Training your SharePoint staff presentation

2009-02-06T06:49:00.001-08:00

Just Got back home from the conference and even though I greatly enjoyed the conference and people attending, but home is home :-)

As promised here is the presentation on Training Staff Responsible in the Various Roles and Responsibilities

Description: The SharePoint implementation can be very complex, involving many types of roles and responsibilities within an organization, it’s critical that all groups involved are competent enough to take advantage of its functionality. Even if your portal solutions are state of the art, but when end users don’t use it, the implementation is a waste of time and budget. This session will cover all roles and role based training approach. This presentation covers the identification of the key roles involved in the usage/development/maintenance of the SharePoint Portal, describes the type of training each role is required to receive based on their responsibilities, and how to deliver more focused and relevant training. It is hoped that audience members walk away with enough understanding of the importance of delivering training to all roles involved and with concrete and useful information that help them to develop the right training strategy.

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: training,best practices conference,sharepoint

User Profile Properties do not synchronize

2009-01-26T16:47:00.001-08:00

I’ve come across this issue a while ago, but after seeing this issue surfacing several times, I’ve decided to blog about it :-)

This problem might appear very deceiving almost like some user profiles are being ignored while other profiles are getting their properties updated just fine.

The problem is fundamentally within the way SharePoint is handling profiles updates :-)

SP finds a profile based on profile’s account name and matches it to AD account, but synchronizes properties by matching profile’s SID to the AD SID. Which means that if the profile had been recreated or corrupted this is not going to synchronize because this profile when it comes to AD does not exist anymore. SharePoint will first try to see if the profile exists based on the account name, and surely enough it will find it, this is why it will not recreate it, but it will not update any properties since SIDs will not be the same.

Delete this profile in SharePoint and do the import.

And refer to the following Thing that should or should not be done to SharePoint admin account

Preview or play Video files in library

2009-01-10T15:52:00.001-08:00

There are many ways of displaying video in a sharepoint site, my personal favorite is by Manoj Iyer from http://www.sharepointkings.com/2008/05/play-video-into-sharepoint-page.html blog. But I often heard that the requirement is to have a video player almost imbedded into a video library. Something that would allow to pick a video file without leaving the list of files and start playing it. something similar to the following picture.

Well, it's very easy to create with Sharepoint designer

Let's start:

1. Create a Web part page, I’ve chosen the one with left column and body and named it Preview.aspx.

2. Open this page in the edit mode and insert Content Editor Web Part. Once you inserted the Content editor Web Part and pasted the code from http://www.sharepointkings.com/2008/05/play-video-into-sharepoint-page.html blog... I modified this code, but this modification does not change any functionality only height and width of the viewer, here it goes:

<div id="Player"> </div>
<script type="text/javascript">
function getParameter(szName)
{
// Get value out of supplied parameter
var szUrl = window.location.search;
szUrl = szUrl.toLowerCase();
szName = szName.toLowerCase();
var szValue = "";
var nBegin = szUrl.indexOf(szName);
if (nBegin != -1)
{
szValue = szUrl.substring(nBegin + (szName.length + 1));
}
var nEnd = szValue.indexOf("&");
if (szValue != "" && nEnd != -1)
{
szValue = szValue.substring(0, nEnd);
}
return szValue;
}

3. Open this page in SharePoint Designer.

This is where the fun part begins.

4. Into the left column insert DataView Web Part with the “media” library as the source.

5. Select all columns that you want to have displayed from the "media" library.

6. Insert a column at the end of the table and create a hyperlink there. Name of the hyperlink that I've chosen is "Preview"

In the address field paste the following string.

javascript: {ddwrt:GenFireServerEvent(concat('__redirect={Preview.aspx?url=http://srv1/media/media/',@FileLeafRef,'}'))}

Let's see what it does:

This script is redirecting to this same page Preview.aspx, but adds a parameter called url with the url reference to the media file, so replace "http://srv1/media/media/" with the url to YOUR media library. @FileLeafRef will simply imbed actual file name at the end.

As soon this redirection happens the content editor web part with the player will take the url to this file and start playing it.

Now every time you click the preview link next to the file name, the player will start playing this video.

Enjoy

Thing that should or should not be done to SharePoint admin account

2008-12-04T16:57:00.001-08:00

Here is a short list of most common scenarios that people should be aware of regarding SP admin account on AD:

1. When the account initially is created, set "Password never expires" account property to true. This is not a regular user account hence it should comply with service account settings rules. If the password changes, reset passwords to reflect the new password in the Application pool identity.

2. If you are not happy with you "spappadmin" or "spadmin" (fill in the blanks) farm admin account name, DO NOT DELETE IT AND CREATE NEW ONE with the desired name. just rename this account in AD, this will make sure that the SID remains the same and the security settings do not have to be recreated for this account EVERYWHERE.

this applies to any other account in AD, but admins do know it.

3. if your farm admin account without password change suddenly looses connection to the DB and in the log you see account "[blank]" could not be authenticated to the SQL. most likely your account got corrupted in AD.

Another scenario, Farm is still functioning fine, but when you try to connect to the SQL remotely using farm admin account connection fails.

You will still be able to access you farm since the trusted connection had been established before the AD account got corrupted, but you will not be able to establish any new connections with it.

In this case just recreate admin account in AD and go through the pain of recreating security settings or changing SIDs.

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: SharePoing administrator,Farm administrator account

Shared Services Provider app pool

2008-12-04T16:39:00.001-08:00

When you create Shared Services provider in your SharePoint Farm and want to assign already existing app pool make sure that the name of this application pool is exactly the same as SSP name. If the name is not the same then Sharepoint will create new app pool with SSP name even though the new SSP will use the app pool that you assign to it. Why I think it's important is the amount of app pools will directly impact the performance of system.

Just examine you IIS and delete this unused app. pool.

Technorati Tags: SSP application pool,sharepoint,IIS

Customizing SharePoint with third party applications

2008-11-29T12:24:00.001-08:00

Solution provider takeaway: Advise your clients on how to choose among the proliferation of third-party products available for customizing SharePoint.

As a powerful tool with document management capabilities and workflows that automate manual processes, Windows SharePoint Services has become the platform that many companies turn to as a solution for changing business needs. SharePoint also provides a foundation for building Web-based business applications that can easily scale to meet business growth. As a result, there are a plethora of third-party suppliers of custom SharePoint products.

In some cases, these third-party applications and add-ons add flexibility or more functionality to the basic feature set offered by SharePoint, and in others they enable powerful administrative capabilities and allow integration with critical business applications and databases.

http://searchsystemschannel.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid99_gci1338980,00.html#

Are you smarter than a 6th grader? (continued)

2008-11-18T05:37:00.001-08:00

Congratulations to all the winners:

Ula U

Pedro Miguel

vera73

Thank you all for your participation, You are smarter than 6th grader or maybe on the same level :-)... just kidding.

You all got it right! Some of you were impatient to get the correct answer so I'm doing this post a bit earlier than I should.

All of you that are interested in the answer to the problem that I posted yesterday, click on the following link and read comments.

http://spforsquirrels.blogspot.com/2008/11/are-you-smarter-than-6th-grader.html

Enjoy

Are you smarter than a 6th grader?

2008-11-17T08:02:00.001-08:00

Try your problem solving skills.

Here is the problem I was presented with at the SharePoint Connections 2007. For some reason SharePoint folks did not want to hang out with me, so I've found myself in the company of "SQL Geeks" ... SQL is my OTHER favorite thing...

So here is the thing, one of the SQL gurus tells me the "problem" he had to solve at his job placement interview, he also specifically mentioned that the problem might not have a solution, it is just a way to explore your way of thinking.

Here it is:

1. you have 8 balls. all of them are of the same weight, but one.

2. you do not know if this one ball is heavier or lighter then the others

3. you have the scale to measure the weight of these balls, but you can measure it only 3 times.

I'm opening the competition for all of you to tell me the right answer. Send you ideas in form of comments.

The reason why I want to post it is that I've given this problem to my 11 year old son, who in turn was trying to get away from dong his extra curriculum activities (like vocabulary enhancement).

To make the story short he solved this problem in 1 hour!!!!!!

Hellooooooo, in ONE hour. it took me the whole flight from Orlando to New York to even overcome the fact that this "problem" might have a solution.

Try your self out, I'll post the solution next week.

Free learning resources for SharePoint

2008-11-06T07:14:00.001-08:00

This following site is worth checking out. Especially for some of you that want to take their SharePoint skills set to the next level. It provides "Program Guide" and even "Graduation" :-)

My favorite part about free online training resources is the self paced learning approach that allows you to make your training class available anywhere the Internet is.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/default.aspx

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Free training,sharepoint development training

Moss SP1 upgrade

2008-10-12T10:05:00.001-07:00

After installing binary for WSS SP1 and MOSS SP1 and running Configuration Wizard I’ve received Upgrade failed message on step 6 of 9. Event log had shown Eventid 104 and 100. Inspection of Services had shown that the Timer service has been stopped after trying to restart it "logon failure" was thrown, resetting the identity of this service back to farm admin account has resulted in the successful start of this service. I rerun Configuration Wizard now step 8 of 9 "fails to start SPSearch Service Instance, start it manually" and it followed by the same failure to upgrade message.

Further inspecting logs revealed that search could not start due to logon failure as well.

What solved it all was resetting WSS Search to farm admin account explicitly and rerunning Config Wizard.

I’m not exactly sure why it had to be done so, this was a development environment the was in fairly healthy state and all services had been running under the same farm admin account. The logon failure messages did not make much since since all services were running fine before the upgrade.

But it worked.

Time to upgrade the production environment, oh.. almost forgot … Infrastructure Updates time

Technorati Tags: Service Pack 1

Enjoy

MVP Squirrel

2008-10-02T13:09:00.001-07:00

My dear squirrels readers, I was happy to learn yesterday that I have been awarded the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award.

It's an honor to join the SharePoint MVP team and get in contact with best of the best in the SharePoint community.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint MVP,MVP award

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

2008-09-22T12:56:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Best Practices,training,governance,presentation

The conference is over and it was a great success!

Mindsharp team had organized everything very neatly with great attention to details. I don’t believe they had anticipated such a big success, but they did a good job rearranging some of the sessions and session locations in order to accommodate attendees and speakers.

I’ve attended many great sessions and finally got a chance to meet with some of the people that I’ve been friends with for a while.

By the end of the conference I was very exhausted, the main reason is that it was the first one when I had a chance to speak at my very own session on developing training strategy for SharePoint staff, I also co-presented at this conference with my friend and colleague Paul Galvin on a case study in governance.

To my luck I got severe cold before the conference so I’ve spent the whole time coughing and carrying boxes of tissues. And on Wednesday I even lost one of my contacts so during the whole Training speech I was half blind J But thanks to all support from my friends Bob Fox, Paul Galvin, Spence Harbar, Agnes Molnar and all great people that attended it was a walk in the park. I was very nervous in the beginning, but then I remembered that the audience is there not to see you fail, but to see you succeed and sure enough Todd Bleeker popped in with his cheerful smile and it put me at ease.

If you were unable to attend this conference I urge you to sign up for the next one in February as soon as the registration opens as the number of attendees will be limited and you can’t afford to miss all the great tracks that it will offer.

PS: bellow you will find inks to all slide decks

I'll see you there :-)

"Formula for Success" Training your SharePoint staff

Taming the “Wild West” A Case Study in Governance

Set default date to first day of the current month

2008-09-19T09:02:00.001-07:00

This is small requirement I received to make a date column in a list and make it to

default to the first day of the current month.

I'm sure that for most of you it will not be something difficult to do, but for those struggling here are the steps:

1. create a date type column.

2. In the default value of this column to the following formula

=DATE(YEAR(Today),MONTH(Today),DAY("1-Apr-2008"))

instead of "1-Apr-2008" you might want to use any date that reflects the first day of the month, DAY() function will extract the needed number 1.

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint,date calculation

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

2008-09-07T15:41:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Best Practices Conference,SharePoint,training

I'll be at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in Washington September 15-17. I'll be co-presenting at this even with my colleague Paul Galvin on Tuesday the 16th:

Real World Governance: "Taming the Wild West "

As well as presenting at my very first session on Wednesday 17th:

"Formula for Success" - Training your SharePoint Staff

This session will cover all roles and role based training approach.

This presentation will cover:
- Identification of the key roles involved in the usage/development/maintenance of the SharePoint Portal
- Describe the type of training each role is required to receive based on their responsibilities
- How to deliver more focused and relevant training

Audience members should gain enough understanding of the importance of delivering training to all roles involved in a successfully SharePoint implementation, and with concrete and useful information that help them to develop the right training strategy.

Stop by and say "hi" :-)

I'll see you there.

SharePoint training approaches

2008-09-02T08:31:00.001-07:00

I've just realized that my article had already been published on TechTarget "SharePoint Training".

Let me make something clear, I am not a trainer, the reason I've chosen "training" topic is because in my experience the biggest obstacle in end-user adoption is lack of competence and general basic knowledge of the SharePoint environment and it's functionality. This can be addressed through delivering right training. Take a look at this article, hopefully it will help you to define and customize your training a well as explain different delivery methods.

Technorati Tags: TechTarget,SharePoint,training

Support me and my team (not Technology related)

2008-08-13T12:32:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends,

I will be joining friends of my brother to walk with thousands of other people in AFSP's 2008 Out of the Darkness Community Walk to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide. As you might know this is a very personal issue to me, my brother had been missing for over 3.5 years when he left he also left a note alluding to possibility of a suicide. I would appreciate any support that you give me and our walk team for this worthwhile cause.

Some Basic Facts

In 1996, more teenagers and young adults died of suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia and influenza, and chronic lung disease combined.

In 1996, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among college students, the third-leading cause of death among those aged 15 to 24 years, and the fourth- leading cause of death among those aged 10 to 14 years.

Click here to read my blog dedicated to my brother Arkadiy Tashman http://arkadiytashman.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately the teenage suicide rate is rising dramatically every year, Let's all do something about it.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is at the forefront of research, education and prevention initiatives designed to reduce loss of life from suicide. With more than 32,000 lives lost each year in the U.S. and over one million worldwide, the importance of AFSP's mission has never been greater, nor our work more urgent.

I hope you will consider supporting my participation in this event. Any contribution will help the work of AFSP, and all donations are 100% tax deductible.

Donating online is safe and easy! To make an online donation please click the "Support This Participant" button on this page.

http://afsp.donordrive.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&eventID=634&participantID=9067

If you would like to join or support any other member on our team, you are very welcome http://afsp.donordrive.v b/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.team&eventID=634&teamID=6519

Please remember that there is not minimum donation, anything you can.

Thank you

Secondary workflow

2008-08-12T14:39:00.001-07:00

So what is it and how does it help to have a secondary workflow?

To better depict the picture I'll start with the following scenario: there is a complicated document management system with many approval workflows etc. one of many workflows is triggered by a document upload, the workflow type is determined by some of the metadata of the document. when an approval task is created by "collect data from user" action in the SPD workflow creation, the approval task should indicate the type of the document and some additional metadata of the document such as if approval of the document is urgent, due date for the approval, etc. (you finish the list :-) All of this information is indicated by end-user during the document metadata input. But... when the task is created the next step of the workflow is not executed until user completes the task, even if I put "update item" action in the next step to update metadata of the task with document's metadata, it will do so only after the task is completed, which completely defeats the purpose of this step.

Secondary workflow to the rescue…..

When you create a workflow on the tasks list and start it on item creation. You will update the metadata of this task with the metadata of the document and reference the document by using "Tasks:Workflow Item ID"

In the long run as soon as the task gets created it will update itself with the document metadata by finding the doc based on the following criteria "document library: ID" = "tasks: workflow Item ID"

This is applicable in any scenario where you want to reference the item that originated the workflow that had created the task.

Technorati Tags: Tasks,Document Management,workflow,secondary workflow,sharepoint designer

International Sharepoint Professionals Association (ISPA)

2008-07-16T10:59:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: ISPA,International SharePoint Professionals Association,Sharepoint community

As part of the ISPA board, I'm pleased to announce launch of ISPA web site, it can be viewed at: http://sharepointpros.org

ISPA had been operational for sometime already, but without any web presence it was much harder to get our message across and reach disparate Sharepoint communities all around the world.

You can read about ISPA and it's mission in the following news release.

The International SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole - by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.

ISPA’s first offering to the community is support to user groups around the world through free WSS v3 web sites for any group that becomes ISPA-affiliated. In addition, one of the goals of ISPA is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between user group leaders that helps increase the likelihood of their group’s success. Therefore, ISPA is providing leaders of user groups with access to collaborative spaces where they can interact with other user group leaders, sharing ideas, resources, best practices, guidance, and most importantly - support for one another.

ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists - existing community leaders who have previously exhibited a strong commitment to the promotion of the SharePoint community, and who have pledged to carry the ISPA message throughout their particular region. These evangelists are key local contacts who are available to work with local SharePoint professionals and user groups throughout their region to help promote the community and SharePoint. If you are interested in starting a user group, have an existing one, or need guidance - the ISPA Regional Evangelists are great resources who are available immediately to assist you.

Finally, as everyone knows, no community is complete without a web site, and ISPA is proud to announce the launch of its official site, http://www.sharepointpros.org. While the web site is still in the early stages of development, plans for multilingual support and exciting functionality that will assist anyone involved with SharePoint are on the horizon.

If you have ideas for ISPA, would like to start a user group, or are looking for assistance, visit the new ISPA web site or contact ISPA at contactus@sharepointpros.org. Together, as the community we can achieve what was impossible as individuals - become a part of ISPA today!"

Setting an alternative home page of portal in place of the default.aspx portal home page

2008-06-25T14:09:00.001-07:00

Over time I've heard this request coming in several times, so this is the time to share my idea on how to make it happen. so far I've found this the easiest and quickest way. I'll talk about trade offs at the end.

This technique involves a couple of steps:

1. Add Content Editor Web part anywhere on your Portal home page, this web part will not be visible to end users, this is why placement does not matter.

2. Edit content of this Web Part through the HTML editor option available in the WP.

3. Paste the following script in there

<script type="text/javascript">

var start = document.cookie.indexOf( "MyPortalHome=" );

if (start < 0) {
document.cookie = "MyPortalHome=Something";
document.location.href="[my desired url]";
}

</script>

4. Replace [my desired url] with the url of your alternative home page

5. Save you changes :-)

Lets see what the script does:

var start = document.cookie.indexOf( "MyPortalHome=" );

This way we are checking for existence of the "MyPortalHome" cookie by setting "start" variable to the index location of the "MyPortalHome" cookie.

if (start < 0) {

if the cookie exists "start" variable will be more than -1, it will represent the actual start position of the cookie, if it is -1 then the cookie does not exist, meaning this is the firsts time user clicked on the portal url within this browser session. if this is the case we will execute the code below.
document.cookie = "MyPortalHome=Something";

We are setting the cookie

document.location.href="[my desired url]";

And redirecting users to the alternative Home Page.

If the cookie exists we are doing nothing. It will indicate that user got to this page before. T

he cookie will expire as soon as the user closes the browser, next time the user goes to the portal url the cookie will be set again and they will get redirected to the alt. home page.

Gotchas:

1. if the user opens a new tab in IE and goes to the portal home, the cookie will persist and they will not get redirected, only when the browser is closed the cookie will expire with the end of the session.

2. To set the cookie in the browser you will have to allow to execute the script, you can prevent this behavior by modifying your security settings for this zone, or add this site to a list of trusted sites.

Have fun

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Portal home page,javascript,home page redirect

SharePoint portal implementation approach

2008-06-19T15:32:00.001-07:00

I was very excited to have an opportunity to write an article on the SharePoint implementation approach best practice topic for TechTarget. Unfortunately due to article's length limitation which I absolutely agree with (who has time to read lengthy article) I had to be very concise, but I’ve tried at least to mention the most important points.

The biggest challenge though is initial light weight approach to the SharePoint implementation project by the client. Most of the time companies view SharePoint as just another application to get their hands on. They do not understand that it is a platform which implementation demands a careful planing and design. Hopefully this message will get through to them and we will have to spend less time justifying the cost of the discovery and initial design phase and more time on building the most flexible and reliable platform.

Here is the link to the article http://searchsystemschannel.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid99_gci1317689,00.html

Technorati Tags: SharePoint implementation,taxonomy design,TechTarget

WebDav interface within the SharePoint library

2008-06-19T05:51:00.001-07:00

While the WebDav interface within SharePoint libraries provides a very useful function of opening the library and the whole Site collection structure through the Windows Explorer application, it might be more detrimental to your SharePoint solution then you think. Let me explain one business scenario where you will run into problems when using this;

Let's say your users want to edit PDF files from task view generated by a workflow that provides them only a link to the originating file. You know the outcome... the browser will open the file within it's self without the ability for users to save the document after editing into the source location (which is the SP library in this case), the doc will have to be saved onto their local HD and then re-uploaded into the library. What happens to the original document's metadata??? Yep, it's lost, the document is now a new entity within the library. Or the PDF file will be opened in Adobe Acrobat, but again without the ability to save this file into the source location.

In this case it seems that Adobe is fighting with Microsoft.

I've went around this restriction by opening the link to the PDF using WebDav interface (you can find the description here). You might think this is an answer to your question, if you make sure that all your desktops are OK for this.

After implementing this solution and reading a lot of different forum questions and comments on the usage of (citing) "Open in Windows Explorer" functionality, I've come to realization that people do not understand components involved into this functionality. OK, let's talk about one of the major issues that people are trying to troubleshoot: "why for some users this works fine... the explorer opens quickly and they can manage the documents. For other users it takes up to 5 minutes before the explorer view opens. During this time the browser becomes completely unresponsive."

First of all, it is not an issue on your SharePoint environment but it’s a problem on the desktop

Two words - "Web Folders Client" :-)

The webfolder functionality is implemented by means of MSDAIPP.DLL this is the DLL that is responsible for WebDav interface functionality. It usually resides inside "C:\Program Files\Common Files\SYSTEM\OLE DB" or it's language dependant equivalent (such as "C:\Programme\Gemeinsame Dateien\SYSTEM\OLE DB" for German Windows versions). To find the DLL version, select the file in Explorer, choose "Properties" from the right-click context menu, then select the "Version" tab.

Here is the link to the posting that explains it all. http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webfolder-client-list.html

Do not expect all your desktops to have the same "working" version of Web Folders.

Another one: "when MS Office document is edited users have trouble saving the document back to the library"... well, there are several variations to the errors they are getting, but I'll not list them all, simply because I have not seen ALL of them.

In this case it is directly related to the user's rights to the desktop in relation to the account the user is logged into the SharePoint with (presuming that user logged into the desktop is not the account used to log into SharePoint). If the user does not have sufficient rights to this desktop, than FORGET IT unless you add the user account to the local desktop group. While this is not such a common scenario, because of the ways most of the networks are setup, but the case I'm describing here is when a number of users is relatively small within the company and IT decides that a user account expected to be used at this particular workstation should be added manually into local desktop group.

Before you start using WebDav interface make a number of considerations:

1. Are your desktop images are "STANDARD" (and do not use the definition of "standard image" loosely)

2. Are you ready to maintain the web folders component individually on all desktops if they vary in applications and versions of apps. that are being ran locally.

If your users are local admins on their desktops, may god help you then. J

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,webDav,Web Folders,windows explorer,desktop

Restoring PORTAL site collection from one farm to another

2008-06-18T16:17:00.001-07:00

When you backup portal site collection from Farm1 and try to restore it not as a portal site collection on Farm2, but as a site collection within a managed path, I'm afraid it not possible.

Even after several tries to do it, all I was getting was overwritten portal site collection on the farm that I tried to restore it to. So before you attempt to restore PORTAL Site Coll. into managed path Site Coll. be careful as this action most likely will overwrite your existing Portal Site collection.

And if you found a way to do it without overwriting Portal Site Collection on the existing farm, leave a comment and let me know how.

Thanks

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Backup,restore,portal site collection

Event handler on a document library with custom editform

2008-06-09T07:39:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,event handler,Document library,custom edit form,multiple value lookup field

Even though this is probably a known issue, but I've been looking everywhere to find some information on this specific case and nothing surfaced. Here it is, the ERROR :-) (the big, bad, SP error)I've been receiving "The data source control failed to execute the insert command." after filling out a metadata on a document within the document library with event handler (that fires up upon add item event). Cause: as part of my metadata I have a lookup column that is based on a list within the site and has "Allow multiple values" checked. Why it seemed that the event handler is cosign it? Well, I have another doc library with similar setup but there is not event handler behind it and it works just well. By the way it's not just a combination of Event handler and multiple choice lookup field, I also have a custom EditForm.aspx. Only after deleting my lookup field and recreating this field as a Choice field this problem has been resolved. And no, this is not SP1 environment. Hope it helps

SharePoint, event handler, Document library, custom edit form, multiple lookup field

PDF Saga continues

2008-06-05T14:16:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: PDF support,SharePoint library,document management,Workflows,Adobe Redaction tool

Adobe, adobe...

One of our clients had asked for a very sophisticated library to support their company's legal communication review process. All the audit information is being kept in a version history of a document. The problem started when they started editing PDF document by applying the "Redaction" tool of Acrobat, by design you cannot save the original document, you can only save the edited document using "Save as".

When Redaction is applied to the document, the document is being stripped of all original information and metadata to protect the document’s original information. In order to achieve this level of document protection, the document must be saved as a new document which removes the original document from the SharePoint library and saves the “redacted” document as a new entity.

As soon as the document had been "saved as" within the SP library it gets a new item ID associated with it, this way preventing any already running workflows to be completed and removes all original metadata information. If you try to complete a workflow task associated with this "Redacted" document, it will give this error: "The data source control failed to execute the update command." because the original item associated with this workflow does not exist anymore.

I recommend that you do not to use redaction tool at all within a SharePoint library, resort to the use of “revision” tool, or don't expect this document to have anything in common with the original document.

By the way, the same applies to any Microsoft Office document which is "saved as" even if it is saved over the original doc by replacing it, but at least within Office you have to intentionally choose to "Save as". But with adobe "redaction" tool you are forced into "save as".

I guess people have to be educated on the purpose of "redaction" feature, if it was behaving any differently, it would completely defeat the purpose of “Redaction” tool.

Versions.aspx Unknown Error

2008-05-29T08:28:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint,sharepoint designer,editform,version history

Latest findings :-)

Did you ever receive "Unknown Error" (love these descriptive messages)when trying to view version history on the item? I did. As it turned out it was directly related to the issue I had with viewing properties of an item. Anytime I've opened "View Properties" it would redirect me to the portal home page. Once the Dispform.aspx page was fixed, I had no issues browsing to the version history.

Because my priority was to resolve version issue before display properties redirection, all research was fruitless, If you are doing the same, take a look at your view properties page first.

Enjoy

Native support for PDF and ODF by Microsoft

2008-05-22T11:41:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,PDF support,Microsoft Office SP2

Finally, great announcement from Microsoft

When using SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.

In addition, Microsoft has defined a road map for its implementation of the newly ratified International Standard ISO/IEC 29500 (Office Open XML). IS29500, which was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in March, is already substantially supported in Office 2007, and the company plans to update that support in the next major version release of the Microsoft Office system, code-named “Office 14.”

Read it all here:

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-21ExpandedFormatsPR.mspx

Can't wait :-)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,PDF support,Microsoft Office SP2

Free SharePoint online training resources

2008-05-20T11:36:00.001-07:00

Recently I felt compelled to set up a list of free online training resources, here it is (in no particular order):

1. Advanced lectures and white papers (Microsoft TechNet)

2. The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training, built on the Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit, is designed for server administrators to install on an Office SharePoint Server site to help end-users learn about Office SharePoint Server.

3. Enterprise Search Training over 18 hours of free, deep technical training about Enterprise Search with SharePoint technologies

4. SharePoint 2007 Essential Training with: David Rivers (free demos)

5. SharePoint Server 2007 Courses (17 courses)

Share Excel data with others by exporting it to a SharePoint site Length: 30 min
SharePoint document libraries I: Introduction to sharing files Length: 30 min
SharePoint document libraries II: All about checkout Length: 30 min
SharePoint document libraries III: Work with version history Length: 30 min
SharePoint document libraries IV: Tips and tricks Length: 30 min
SharePoint document libraries V: How to download a library Length: 30 min
SharePoint slide libraries I: Set up a library for your team Length: 40 min
SharePoint slide libraries II: Use slides in the library Length: 40 min
SharePoint calendars I: Make the most of your team calendar Length: 20 min<
SharePoint calendars II: Connect a SharePoint calendar to Outlook Length: 20 min
SharePoint calendars III: Create your own calendar Length: 20 min
SharePoint calendars IV: Tips and tricks Length: 20 min
Workflows I: Basics you should know Length: 30 min
Workflows II: Collect feedback for a file Length: 30 min
Workflows III: Collect digital signatures for a file Length: 30 min
Workflows IV: Include someone outside your company Length: 40 min
Workflows V: Handy tips for tasks Length: 30 min

6. SharePoint Training Tutorials Step by Step How To Instructions. In these SharePoint screencast tutorials, get step by step instructions on all the features included in SharePoint hosting and how to optimize your site. The tutorials cover topics from Alerts and Creating Web Parts to Creating Meetings Sites and Wikis.

7. 2 Free Training Courses for SharePoint Here are 2 free training courses for SharePoint: Getting started with Services and Doing more with SharePoint Services. These are offered by the Instruction Technology Group at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln as part of their Microsoft eLearning Library. These interactive Office application training modules and tutorials were created by Microsoft. Note that to view the main training tutorials, you must be using Windows and Internet Explorer, however, you can use any platform/browser to view the Tutorial How-to Steps for each Lesson.

8. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training Standalone Edition The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training Standalone Edition is designed to help you learn how to use the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

9. Free AppDev training CD-Rom and download

10. WSSWiki - free community driven resource devoted to the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services platform. (not quite training site, but you might find some of the articles helpful)

11. Free Demos from Hyperteach Windows SharePoint Tutorial - Training Videos

12. SharePoint 2007 Training Videos A series of 60 training videos (many of which are free) for SharePoint 2007. Categories include getting started, lists, documents, images, ideas, customization, sites and pages, security and integration. Topics include an introduction to SharePoint services, exploring the SharePoint site (free), user login options, adding announcements and calendar events, adding links (free), starting a custom list, importing lists from Excel 2007, a library overview, uploading documents (free), using version control, working with offline documents, initiating workflows, completing workflows, image web part (free), creating a picture library, using the discussion board, working with wikis (free), posting to blogs, staying informed with RSS, tree view navigation, changing a site theme, modifying web parts (free), advanced web part options, creating a basic page, adding a child site, creating a document workspace, make a meet workspace (free), site templates, security review, creating a custom group, groups permissions, Outlook 2007 calendars (free), Excel 2007 web query, Word 2007 document workspace, and more.

13. Bob Fox Videos more relevant to administrators

Alternate Access Mappings
B2TR2-RTM
Backup and Restore
SlipStream
Personalization_SiteLinks
Setting up a Lab Part 1
SP_Desktop_Shortcuts
VirtualLabSetupPart2

These links come courtesy from my good friends and fellow SharePointers, and Google err I mean Live Search :-D

If you have some other cool online free training resources feel free posting links in the comments section.

Enjoy

PS: some people are not aware of the fact that I have another blog at Conchango, the following came to Conchango blog as comments from Jomit:

1. SharePoint Developer MSDN Web Cast Series starting from 20th May 08

2. Office/SharePoint Developer Screencasts from Ted Pattison :

14 'How to Videos' on WSS, MOSS and Office Development

3. Free WSS and MOSS Online Clinics

WSS Development

WSS Infrastructure

MOSS Development

MOSS Infrastructure

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,free online training,Sharepoint training,video,training audio,workflows training,administrative training

Open-Edit-Save PDF document into SharePoint library

2008-05-14T08:30:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: Workflow,PDF,WebDav,Sharepoint library,adobe,sharepoint

Recently one of our clients had decided not to just preview PDF documents from the SharePoint library, but to edit it and save to the same location.

Because Adobe is not integrated with SharePoint, when you open a PDF file for editing and save it, it will not save to the source location (Document library), but instead it will save it to one of the folders on your hard drive depending on the preferences. In my case, client wanted to open these PDF's from tasks that were created through "Collect" action in SPD (they served to provide additional information on the approver's disposition) as you might know this action creates a content type and associates ASPX page used to collect information. Users expected to open up the task associated with approval of this PDF document, open up the document they were about to review from this Task, provide some comments within the document, save this PDF to the source location and state their disposition in the task Item as well. Through the addition of XSL within the ASPX page associated with this Task content type I've achieved the desired functionality:

Before, the link to the document that triggered associated workflow to create a task looked something like this:

        Document: <a href="{substring-before(@WorkflowLink, ', ')}">
                        <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(@WorkflowLink, ', ')"></xsl:value-of>
                      </a>

This piece of code would output name of the document with link to the document.

I've modified it to open the location (folder) of this document through the Windows Explorer (WebDav interface), luckily I have only one document per folder:

Document: <a href="#" onclick="NavigateHttpFolder('{substring-before(substring-before(@WorkflowLink, ', '),substring-after(@WorkflowLink, ', '))}', '_blank');"> <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(@WorkflowLink, ', ')"></xsl:value-of>
</a >

As soon as you open PDF Document through the WebDav Interface, by default Adobe will save this document after editing it in the same location.

...BUT... yeah, there is always a catch.

When you try to open Office document, such as word document, you will get an error "Your Client does not support opening this list in Windows Explorer".

Here is your answer:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923906/en-us even though it describes this error from the "Actions" menu, but when you dig dipper it all boils down to the problem described here, as limitation of characters in your URL to only 100 characters.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325355/

Yes, it is your answer, if you are running IE 6.0.2.8... or earlier, but what do you do if it is not the case and you are getting this error anyway. I have IE 7 and office 2007.

I personally tried almost every patch, and download, and IE settings out there. We opened a support ticket with Microsoft, no solution. NOTHING WORKED, I've stumbled upon some forum threads that were ended on a hopeless note.

In my case the answer was within the actual XSL, apparently the problem can be resolved by the reformatting the URL used within the onClick command.

if before the HTML output from this line :

was

<a href="#" onclick="NavigateHttpFolder('', '_blank');"> as you can see no URL id being supplied here, what is even stranger is that the URL was always there for PDF documents, but not for the office documents.

If you replace each "/" with "\u002f" within your link variable (in my case it's @WorkflowLink) it will work just fine :-)Once I replaced the previous code it with:

Document: <a href="#" onclick="NavigateHttpFolder('{translate(substring-before(substring-before(@WorkflowLink, ', '),substring-after(@WorkflowLink, ', ')),'\','\u002f')}', '_blank');"> <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(@WorkflowLink, ', ')"></xsl:value-of>
</a>

The HTML output was the correct one, for all types of documents!

Document: <a href="#" onclick="NavigateHttpFolder('http://portal/Documentlibrary/FolderName/', '_blank');">

This work around allowed me to open WebDav for particular folders

lesson learned, before you start looking for patches even though your system should be fine, go into the source code and look at what actually happens there, are you providing all the right values?

This post should have been re-titled though, but....

Enjoy

Note: do not get hang up on this part "substring-before(substring-before(@WorkflowLink, ', '),substring-after(@WorkflowLink, ', '))" It's just a way (in my case) to extract the URL to location of the document. By the way in some instances you might not even need to replace "/" with "\u002f".

Fast Installation of Fabulous 40 templates

2008-04-29T15:20:00.001-07:00

Over some period of time I’ve got tired of installing Fab. 40 templates solutions over and over again.

The time had come to write a script that allows for faster installation. This script will only install solutions associated with Fab 40 package, it’s up to you to upload site templates into site template gallery.

Bob Fox has graciously provided space on his server for this script, Thanks Bob!

Here is how to use this script:

1. Download Fabulous 40 templates from this location.

2. Run the downloaded file, this action will unzip all files into specified location

3. Download the script (right mouse click -> Save Target As), you can probably copy and paste it into notepad from here, but there is a big chance you will have to struggle with some hidden characters and the script will have hiccups J

4. Open this file in notepad and modify the first line

@SET SLNDIRECTORY=C:\Apps\

Change C:\Apps\ to the location where you unzipped your Fab 40 files to (keep the last slash)

5. Save the script with .cmd extension instead of txt

6. Run it from your server

This script will keep your server busy for a while, you might get “Service Unavailable” until the script stops and all timer jobs are finished (which is usually not longer than couple of minutes), but if you have users in your environment, run it during off-hours. This will install all solutions in one shot and globally deploy them immediately.

In your Central Administration, under solutions management check for all 20 solutions.

As the last step upload all .stp files into your site templates gallery.

Here is the source for the script, but you can download it here

Technorati Tags: Fabulous 40,Sharepoint,solution deployment

@SET SLNDIRECTORY=C:\Apps\

@SET STSADM="c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin\stsadm.exe"

Echo Adding Solution ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

%STSADM% -o copyappbincontent

Echo Adding Solution AbsenceVacationSchedule.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%AbsenceVacationSchedule.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name AbsenceVacationSchedule.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution BudgetingTrackingMultipleProjects.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%BudgetingTrackingMultipleProjects.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name BudgetingTrackingMultipleProjects.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution BugDatabase.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%BugDatabase.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name BugDatabase.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution CallCenter.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%CallCenter.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name CallCenter.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution ChangeRequest.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%ChangeRequest.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name ChangeRequest.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution ComplianceProcessSupport.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%ComplianceProcessSupport.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name ComplianceProcessSupport.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution ContactsManagement.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%ContactsManagement.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name ContactsManagement.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution DocumentLibraryReview.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%DocumentLibraryReview.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name DocumentLibraryReview.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution EventPlanning.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%EventPlanning.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name EventPlanning.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution ExpenseReimbursementApproval.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%ExpenseReimbursementApproval.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name ExpenseReimbursementApproval.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution HelpDesk.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%HelpDesk.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name HelpDesk.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution InventoryTracking.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%InventoryTracking.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name InventoryTracking.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution ITTeamWorkspace.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%ITTeamWorkspace.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name ITTeamWorkspace.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution JobRequisition.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%obRequisition.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name JobRequisition.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution KnowledgeBase.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%KnowledgeBase.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name KnowledgeBase.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution LendingLibrary.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%LendingLibrary.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name LendingLibrary.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution PhysicalAssetTracking.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%PhysicalAssetTracking.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name PhysicalAssetTracking.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution ProjectTrackingWorkspace.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%ProjectTrackingWorkspace.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name ProjectTrackingWorkspace.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution RoomEquipmentReservations.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%RoomEquipmentReservations.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name RoomEquipmentReservations.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Echo Adding Solution SalesLeadPipeline.wsp

%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename %SLNDirectory%SalesLeadPipeline.wsp

Echo Deploying Solution

%STSADM% -o deploysolution -name SalesLeadPipeline.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate -force

Workflows do not start on a document library with Custom List Form SharePoint control on edtiform.aspx

2008-04-11T14:37:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint,Custom List Form,workflows,document library

Interesting discovery

If you are using Custom List Form SharePoint control to edit/enter metadata for your document library, documents will not get automatically checked in upon document upload thus preventing workflows to start.

Here is the situation I had to deal with:

A document library is set to "Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited?" to "Yes". under normal circumstances, when you upload a document on the EditForm.aspx you would have two buttons "Check in"(it would save the metadata associated with the document and check the document in) and "cancel" (which would discard all metadata changes, keep in mind that it does not discard the doc it's self) on top of the form as well as on the bottom.

if the library is set "Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited?" to No when the document is uploaded on the editform.aspx you would have instead of "Check in" button a standard OK button.

If you are using a Custom List Form SharePoint control on the EditForm.aspx, and "Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited?" is set to yes, on top of the edit form you will see "OK" button and on the bottom "check in" button alongside with the standard "cancel". One would presume that clicking the "Check in" button would check in the document.

Unfortunately it does not happen, neither clicking the "OK" button checks the doc in, which results to workflows not starting, because the document does not automatically gets checked in.

I'm not sure if it's a BUG, if it is then for some reason I could not find any information of this.

Only setting this doc library not to require document check out fixes the problem. but quite often it's not a desired functionality.

"New" company or "New" employer!!!

2008-04-01T18:40:00.001-07:00

Very interesting day... Something that I thought would be a company-wide meeting turned into a BIG announcement.... I guess, I work for EMC now :-)

Don't get me wrong... I was not looking for a new job, I've been very happy at Conchango. WE are being acquired by EMC!

Exiting times and new opportunities!!!!!!!

Technorati Tags: Conchango,sharepoint,emc

SharePoint for Squirrels - by Natalya Voskresenskaya [MVP]

The infamous : Property doesn't exist or is used in a manner inconsistent with schema settings (SharePoint Search and FAST)

The Past, Present and Future of Search: A Round Table Discussion

Drive with FAST search for SharePoint 2010 installation is running out of space

NOINDEX Handling by FAST and SharePoint Search

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 administration screenshots (Central Administration)

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 administration screenshots (Site settings)

SPC 2011 : Making the Move to SharePoint 2010 - Search First

Why Social Networking on SharePoint 2010?

Social Sites Demo on next Shoptalk: June 27th, 2011

Error installing FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search isn’t just for SharePoint 2010–presentation is available

Here is a link to the presentation http://www.slideshare.net/natalyvo/share-pointesug-searchfirst61011

Opportunity for Senior SharePoint Consultants

SharePoint FEST, Denver–May 19th session: Integration of the SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint 2007 portal

FAST Search: the infamous “Failed to initialize session with document engine: Unable to resolve Content distributor”

New York Enterprise Search User Group celebrates its Two Year Anniversary

SharePoint ShopTalk Announces New Video Blog! and new panelists!!

FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS) Deep Dive–April 13, 2011

Behind the Scenes of the Contoso/ Consulting Search-Driven Application Demo

SharePoint Search 101:How does an indexer work? What is Lemmatization? What is Tokenization?

SharePoint Search 101: Why do I need to tune relevancy?

Work With the Experts – SharePoint 2010 Mentor Program

Professional Microsoft Search FAST Search, SharePoint Search, and Search Server Book

Microsoft SharePoint MVP !!!!

Next Enterprise Search User Group Meeting: Enterprise Search for Large Pharmas - Value Proposition and Lessons Learned

SharePoint Search 101: What can I find on the search dashboard?

SharePoint Search 101: Why do I need to extract content?

Why do I need to extract content?

(Entity Extraction, Managed Properties, Refiners)

ESUG June Meeting - An In-depth Look into FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS)

How the FBI is using Enterprise Search to improve its law enforcement capabilities: A Case Study on the FBI Sentinel Program

April 14, 2010

Custom workflow step to add user to a security group

SSP Search error (Search application for SSP… is not provisioned)

SharePoint Enterprise Search 2010 & FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

Understanding the Integration of Search & Recommendations: February 10, 2010 @ NYC

FAST ESP SharePoint Connector (Part 1)

SharePoint Bad Practices of 2009

How Microsoft and FAST are defining Next Generation Advertising and Internet Business

Enterprise Search User Group NY – registration window is closing

December 9, 2009

How Microsoft and FAST are defining Next Generation Search

Enterprise Search User Group GRAND OPENING!

Topic: How Microsoft and FAST are defining Next Generation Search

SharePoint Shop Talk Tomorrow (11/12) from 12:30PM to 1:30 PM EDT

Vertical Bar Graph in Data View Web Part (DVWP)

It is a flue season. Is you SharePoint farm “healthy”? SharePoint Health check

Document management Sharepoint 2010

SharePoint Saturday Phylli, November 7th

SharePoint 2010 overview for IT Pros

SPC SharePoint 2010 features highlights, key note sessions.

SharePoint Shop Talk – October 7th

MVP again!

SharePoint Shop Talk – October 1st, 2009

SharePoint Saturday in New York

Search: Next generation of search – Raise your expectations. Part1

Search: Next generation of search – Raise your expectations. Part2

Business Case - SharePoint in the Cloud

SharePoint Shop talk – Open Q&A Session

Explaining SharePoint

SharePoint Shop Talk // open Q&A session August 13th 12:30pm EDT

Scalability issues with SharePoint - Poll

Microsoft SharePoint and the FAST Enterprise Search Platform article

Windows 7 RTM’d

Ensuring SharePoint Success – Mentoring Workshop

Hotfix for the SP2 issue is available now

Profile properties import through BDC connection to Oracle SAP

Converting Hyper-v VHD to VMware

Publishing Search Results in MOSS

New York SharePoint User Group meeting June 3, 2009

FAST ESP 5.3 Installation trick

FAST search engine for SharePoint PART 3 (Content Sources and Connectors)

FAST search engine for SharePoint PART 2 (Overview of FAST)

Why FAST?

FAST search engine for SharePoint PART 1 (Dictionaries)

FAST as SharePoint search engine

UK Best Practices Conference

My Site web application root site collection

BP 2009 - Educated approach for selecting third party products and Vendors presentation

Here is a link to the presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/natalyvo/share-pointesug-searchfirst61011