Jenny Everett

So often I come across individuals who presume that the only thing they need to do to implement search on their Intranet is have a keywords box and a 'good' search engine behind this. Sure enough in many cases this works fine, however I believe that much more business value can be achieved but putting a little effort into your search interface. I think the problem stems from peoples belief that searching your Intranet is just like searching the Internet, that is where I think they are wrong, sure enough the user is the same but the way the behave when searching on the Internet (e.g. using Google, Live search, etc) is very different to the way they behave when searching on the Intranet. Let me give you some examples:

1. If you search for a term in an Internet search engine and get no results or none of the results are relevant, you tend to presume that no content on this subject exists – correct? You (well if you are anything like me or the people I speak to) don't tend to go and use a different search engine – it just ain't there, right? However, on the Intranet if you search for a term you often know this content exists before you even search for it, so if you don't find it you a) get cross b) hunt around or try different search terms c) phone somebody who might know where it is d) moan about the Enterprise search. Now this could simply be because the content you were searching for is tucked away somewhere that you don't have access to or that isn't indexed by your Enterprise search.

2. Your Enterprise has an Information Architecture (IA), the Internet doesn't. If you have designed your IA well then users actually understand at least some aspects of it, so how about letting them narrow down by what they know about an item.

3. Closely related to point 2….Users know more about the item they are searching for in the Enterprise, they aren't just searching to see if anything exists but they are searching for something they have probably seen before or know exists from hearing about it. Therefore they know quite a bit about the content or attributes of that item – therefore an advanced search that allows them to narrow down where in the hierarchy, what it is tagged with, who or when was it created or modified would be of far more use in this scenario. Or instead of having an advanced search having some options to narrow down the search results after searching might be more useful – I will blog on this another day!

Before exposing a SharePoint farm to the internet it is important that precautions are taken to ensure that security cannot be compromised. Taking all reasonable steps to secure the environment should minimise the risk of a security breach. I have found the following 3 technet articles useful during this process, but they are not easily located when searching for them this morning.

 Web server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302432.aspx

Application server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302433.aspx

Database server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302434.aspx#c18618429_015

Initially when you install SharePoint, the farm administrators group will contain the group BUILTINadministrators, which is the local group on the server for administration. This in turn will usually include you domain admin group, effectively giving all domain admins full control of your SharePoint environment – in many cases this may not be desirable.

 The group can be updated by going to SharePoint Central admin > Operations > Update farm administrators group

In SharePoint 2003, resolving the domain administrator having access was far more complex as a patch had to be installed.

Two (among quite a few) features that I love about SharePoint are Wikis and the ability to take items offline with Outlook – the "Connect to Outlook" option. So the other day I was working on an internal wiki and needed some of the information included in it offline the next day, so confidently clicked connect to outlook, which of course worked fine. However when looking in Outlook, the files as ASPX pages and therefore are of little use as in my case they try and open in SharePoint Designer and you get to see lots of code. Yuk!

So I have already started thinking of solutions…. {Watch this space}

Quite often I come across a requirement when I have a field on the new/edit item form that I want to hide, usually this has already been populated by some development. In this example we have a link field (which in this case links to another sharepoint item) which we want to hide.

1. Open the list, click 'Settings' the 'List settings'

2. 'Advanced settings'

3. Set 'allow management of content types' to 'Yes', click 'OK'

4. Click 'Item' under the 'Content types' header (may not be called item based on the type of list e.g. might be called 'Task')

5. Choose the relevant field (column) that you want to hide

6. Click 'Hidden (will not appear in forms)' then 'OK'

I always think that navigation does not go across site collections and it general it doesn't. However you can use the Portal site connection option in order to include a link in the breadcrumb. For example, you have an Intranet with team sites and you wish to separate the team sites into a separate site collection, which is sensible because then it can be a separate database.

In this case I have a portal called http://intranet and a site collection called http://intranet/portal/sites. In the Team sites collection I want the Intranet to appear as the first node on the breadcrumb. This can be achieved using Portal site collection.

1. Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify all site settings
2. Portal site collection under Site Collection Administration
3. Enter the address and the name you want to appear as the breadcrumb link

    4. This will then display as the first node in the breadcrumb

NB: This is just a link, so this doesn't have to be to another SharePoint site collection – it could be to your corporate website or intranet hosted on something else.

Many times in an Extranet scenario I see that Clients are having to enter domainusername in the username box, although this isn't a particular problem if often causes a few user error issues which could be easily avoided.

1. Locate your externally facing website in IIS

2. Choose Properties on this web site

3. Choose the Directory Security tab

4. Choose Edit.. under the Authentication and access control heading

5. In the Default domain box enter the domain that users will use and click OK twice

Done! Your users will no longer have to type domainusername just username instead

Yes a common pitfall that people fall into is not allowing enough space on their SharePoint servers. Say you estimate your content database are going to get to 100Gb then you actually probably need 420Gb of space – how so…

 Content databases: 100Gb

 Search Index database: 40Gb (This is usually 20-40% of the size of the content databases)

 You need only a 50% fill factor on SQL drives to allow for SQL maintenance operations to run, so therefore 140Gb becomes 280Gb. And presumably you are going to back all of this up, so that is another 140Gb! Tada we have 420Gb!

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Now you would think that giving a user Farm administrator rights in SharePoint (Central administration > Operations > Update farm administrator's group)  would give them full rights to everything wouldn't you? Well not quite! You farm administrators' may also need:

1. Permissions to Shared Services Provider – By default 'all authenticated users' just have rights to '

     2.   Full Control over all applications – In order to grant a Farm administration account to administer all SharePoint applications. It is necessary to add this per application

NB: both of these accounts can be carried out by the affected farm administrator.  

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