andymay's blog

From Mart, a quick-and-easy picture to help understand which CALs you may need with your WSS/MOSS 2007 architecture.

From Mart, a quick-and-easy picture to help understand which CALs you may need with your WSS/MOSS 2007 architecture.

The long-awaited Performance and Capacity Planning guides for the WSSv3 and MOSS 2007 products have emerged (although somewhat annoyingly they are still carrying the "This content is preliminary content. It might be incomplete and is subject to change" note – come on guys, where are the definitive guides ???)

MOSS 2007

WSS v3

The long-awaited Performance and Capacity Planning guides for the WSSv3 and MOSS 2007 products have emerged (although somewhat annoyingly they are still carrying the "This content is preliminary content. It might be incomplete and is subject to change" note – come on guys, where are the definitive guides ???)

MOSS 2007

WSS v3

The WSS-only deployment (as promoted extensively by Mike Walsh and others) has always been somewhat underused, partially at least because people didn't really understand the features and facilities which were available in WSS as opposed to the full-blown Sharepoint Portal Server product.

Now in the 2007 world with WSS v3 and MOSS 2007 with both products having an enriched function set, Microsoft have released an easy-to-scan guide for checking off your favourite bits of functionality and seing which of the various SKUs it appears in.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/FX101758691033.aspx

The WSS-only deployment (as promoted extensively by Mike Walsh and others) has always been somewhat underused, partially at least because people didn't really understand the features and facilities which were available in WSS as opposed to the full-blown Sharepoint Portal Server product.

Now in the 2007 world with WSS v3 and MOSS 2007 with both products having an enriched function set, Microsoft have released an easy-to-scan guide for checking off your favourite bits of functionality and seing which of the various SKUs it appears in.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/FX101758691033.aspx

Two of the great new things about MOSS2007 are Content Types and the extensibility of the Search function. Put the two together and very quickly you'll come up with the scenario where you've created a nice comprehensive set of metadata which you've now applied to all the sites and libraries in your site collection, and now you want search on those metadata items.

The Advanced Search web part (typically surfaced through the Search Centre) looks like it's going to do the job for you, with a drop down box which lets you restrict your search based on properties, but out-of-the-box it quickly becomes apparent that only a subset of the standard properties are there, not your own site columns. The ones you get as standard are:

Author

Description

Name

Size (MB)

URL

Created Date

Last Modified Date

Created By

Last Modified By

There are a couple of additional steps which you have to carry out to make your own appear there, most of which have been documented in various places but I couldn't find a complete end-to-end walk through for the process, so this is it.

Firstly, I've assumed that you've already set up the site columns, assembled them as content types, and made those content types available within the document libraries of your sites. In my case, I have a set of them which form the core metadata schema for my customer – a mixture of default and bespoke ones.

Contributor                 (multiline)                    default

Date Created               (date/time)                   default

Disposal Action          (choice)                       bespoke

Disposal Date              (date/time)                   bespoke

Disposal Review         (date/time)                   bespoke

Document Type          (choice)                       bespoke

Relation                       (multiline)                    default

Title                             (single line)                  default

Topic                           (choice)                       bespoke

Created By                  (person/group)             default

Modified By               (person/group)             default

Checked Out To         (person/group)             default

The problem comes about because within Sharepoint 2007 there are two types of properties – crawled and managed. Crawled properties are automatically extracted from crawled content, but users can however only perform queries over managed properties. Thankfully Sharepoint lets us map one or more crawled properties onto a managed property and then, after the next crawl, those properties become available.

That description – one or more – is quite important as it permits an element of `fuzzy searching' whereby the metadata category which the user wants to search on may be implemented in a number of different ways across different content types. This lets us hide that from the user.

The place to start is Central Admin – Shared Services Administration – Metadata Poperty Mappings. This is where you can check whether the properties you want are already being managed, or whether you will need to add them. For my list above, the “Created By”, “Created Date” [aka "created"], “Title” [aka "DisplayTitle] and “Modified By” properties are present but the “Contributor”, “Disposal Action”, “Disposal Date”, “Disposal Review”, “Document Type”, “Relation”, Topic and “Checked Out To” ones will need to be added. NB It may also be necessary to check the existing ones and add any additional new crawled properties to the list.

Adding them is really only a case of clicking the “new managed property” button, giving the property name (no embedded spaces allowed), a description, a type (text, integer, date, etc) and then deciding which crawled property (or properties) to map to.

In my case I'm mapping as follows

At this point it would be nice if they all just magically appeared in the advanced search dropdown list, but unfortunatley there's one more step involving evil editing of config files.

Go into your Advanced Search page and select Site Actions – Edit Page. For the Advanced Search Box webpart chose Edit- Modify Shared Webpart. In the “Properties” section there is a `properties' dialogue box which, if you click into it, will give you the [.] `builder' link allowing you to edit the XML string.

This string has four sections, two of which concern us. Between <LangDefs> and </LangDefs> it lists all the languages which can be used and between <Languages> and </Languages> it causes those languages to be displayed in the web part.

We're interested in the bottom two sections however. Somewhere between <PropertyDefs> and </PropertyDefs> we need to insert all of the Managed Properties we added above, following the format of the entries already there. So, for example, for our “DisplayTitle” property, we add the line

<PropertyDef Name=”DisplayTitle” DataType=”text” DisplayName=”Title”/>

Finally, in the section between <ResultTypes> and </ResultTypes> we need to show which result types we want our results to show up in. So assuming we want our new results to show up everywhere, we find the subsection between <ResultType DisplayName=”All Results” Name=”default”> and </ResultType> and add in the line

<PropertyRef  Name=”DisplayTitle” />

Exit the “modify web part” process and publish the page if necessary.

Two of the great new things about MOSS2007 are Content Types and the extensibility of the Search function. Put the two together and very quickly you'll come up with the scenario where you've created a nice comprehensive set of metadata which you've now applied to all the sites and libraries in your site collection, and now you want search on those metadata items.

The Advanced Search web part (typically surfaced through the Search Centre) looks like it's going to do the job for you, with a drop down box which lets you restrict your search based on properties, but out-of-the-box it quickly becomes apparent that only a subset of the standard properties are there, not your own site columns. The ones you get as standard are:

Author

Description

Name

Size (MB)

URL

Created Date

Last Modified Date

Created By

Last Modified By

There are a couple of additional steps which you have to carry out to make your own appear there, most of which have been documented in various places but I couldn't find a complete end-to-end walk through for the process, so this is it.

Firstly, I've assumed that you've already set up the site columns, assembled them as content types, and made those content types available within the document libraries of your sites. In my case, I have a set of them which form the core metadata schema for my customer – a mixture of default and bespoke ones.

Contributor                 (multiline)                    default

Date Created               (date/time)                   default

Disposal Action          (choice)                       bespoke

Disposal Date              (date/time)                   bespoke

Disposal Review         (date/time)                   bespoke

Document Type          (choice)                       bespoke

Relation                       (multiline)                    default

Title                             (single line)                  default

Topic                           (choice)                       bespoke

Created By                  (person/group)             default

Modified By               (person/group)             default

Checked Out To         (person/group)             default

The problem comes about because within Sharepoint 2007 there are two types of properties – crawled and managed. Crawled properties are automatically extracted from crawled content, but users can however only perform queries over managed properties. Thankfully Sharepoint lets us map one or more crawled properties onto a managed property and then, after the next crawl, those properties become available.

That description – one or more – is quite important as it permits an element of `fuzzy searching' whereby the metadata category which the user wants to search on may be implemented in a number of different ways across different content types. This lets us hide that from the user.

The place to start is Central Admin – Shared Services Administration – Metadata Poperty Mappings. This is where you can check whether the properties you want are already being managed, or whether you will need to add them. For my list above, the “Created By”, “Created Date” [aka "created"], “Title” [aka "DisplayTitle] and “Modified By” properties are present but the “Contributor”, “Disposal Action”, “Disposal Date”, “Disposal Review”, “Document Type”, “Relation”, Topic and “Checked Out To” ones will need to be added. NB It may also be necessary to check the existing ones and add any additional new crawled properties to the list.

Adding them is really only a case of clicking the “new managed property” button, giving the property name (no embedded spaces allowed), a description, a type (text, integer, date, etc) and then deciding which crawled property (or properties) to map to.

In my case I'm mapping as follows

At this point it would be nice if they all just magically appeared in the advanced search dropdown list, but unfortunatley there's one more step involving evil editing of config files.

Go into your Advanced Search page and select Site Actions – Edit Page. For the Advanced Search Box webpart chose Edit- Modify Shared Webpart. In the “Properties” section there is a `properties' dialogue box which, if you click into it, will give you the [.] `builder' link allowing you to edit the XML string.

This string has four sections, two of which concern us. Between <LangDefs> and </LangDefs> it lists all the languages which can be used and between <Languages> and </Languages> it causes those languages to be displayed in the web part.

We're interested in the bottom two sections however. Somewhere between <PropertyDefs> and </PropertyDefs> we need to insert all of the Managed Properties we added above, following the format of the entries already there. So, for example, for our “DisplayTitle” property, we add the line

<PropertyDef Name=”DisplayTitle” DataType=”text” DisplayName=”Title”/>

Finally, in the section between <ResultTypes> and </ResultTypes> we need to show which result types we want our results to show up in. So assuming we want our new results to show up everywhere, we find the subsection between <ResultType DisplayName=”All Results” Name=”default”> and </ResultType> and add in the line

<PropertyRef  Name=”DisplayTitle” />

Exit the “modify web part” process and publish the page if necessary.

According to Bink and a number of other sources both Office System and Vista are within a whisker of RTMing.

Hopefully this meanst that we'll be able to get our hands on the RTM code for download over the next few days – I have a B2TR MOSS box which is trembling in antici….pation.

[Edit]
Depending on who you read, this might be a thin whisker or a somewhat thicker one. Cruisng the blogs this morning it seems that people are "predicting" code availability for a range of slots between "end of the week" and "end of the month" – I guess we'll have to wait and see.

What does seem likely is that the pessimists (including, it must be said, me) who were expecting "before the end of the year" to mean late December may just have to eat our words.

According to Bink and a number of other sources both Office System and Vista are within a whisker of RTMing.

Hopefully this meanst that we'll be able to get our hands on the RTM code for download over the next few days – I have a B2TR MOSS box which is trembling in antici….pation.

[Edit]
Depending on who you read, this might be a thin whisker or a somewhat thicker one. Cruisng the blogs this morning it seems that people are "predicting" code availability for a range of slots between "end of the week" and "end of the month" – I guess we'll have to wait and see.

What does seem likely is that the pessimists (including, it must be said, me) who were expecting "before the end of the year" to mean late December may just have to eat our words.