It is a fairly common scenario that people don't want anyone or some groups of people to create My Sites but it always suprises me how few people know the answer to. This can all be achieved through the SSP:
So you are thinking surely this is easy just deleting a SharePoint My Site – it sure is if it is your my site.
1. Site actions
2. Site Settings
3. Delete this site
4. Delete
But if it is another user's my site that you need to delete it is different. E.g. you want to delete the administrator's my site you go to http:\mysitespersonaladministrator
1. SSP
2. User profiles and properties#
3. View user profiles
4. Locate the relevant users profile
5.
When sorting you in a SharePoint Document Library you would expect it to behave as per Windows Explorer and in most cases it does. If you sort by a column (e.g. Name A-Z, Modified date) the Folders appear at the top followed by the Files.
After removing the "New folder" option from New menu on the library it changes so Folders are now in line with files – see illustration below.
My box has SP1 on but no further hot fixes so I can't comment if these would fix this issue.
It has been a long time since my last blog post and about time I started again… The last couple of months have been a tad busy – getting engaged, changing jobs and renovating our house!
Anyway about time I started again…. So here goes…
Content deployment – get lots of errors, use site migration manager
How to delete a my site
Admin rights – not just made a farm add, full control rights on web app and permissions on SSP.
When backing up a site collection and restoring it in the same SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) web application, I received the following error message:
No content databases are available for this operation. Create a content database
, and then try the operation again. To create a content database, click "Content
databases" on the Application Management page, select the Web application to us
e, and then click "Add a content database".
However I had a Content database which was in the Ready state and allowing new sites…
Luckily thanks to Akila's SharePoint blog article I realised this is because the GUID of the Site Collection already exists in this Content database – therefore the Restored Site Collection needs to be in its own Conent database – creating another content database made my restore work.
We had an issue with documents in a Folder within a Document library. We renamed the folder and the Modified date of all documents updated to be the date at which the folder was modified – which for us caused some strange results as the last user to modify the document had left the company!
Anyway Service Pack 1 appears to fix this, I had no problems applying this to my environment – instructions are here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/12/11/announcing-the-release-of-wss-3-0-sp1-and-office-sharepoint-server-2007-sp1.aspx
Today I attempted to setup a View filtering using the contains operator on a Lookup column which allows multiple values – not as straight forward as hoped:
I had 2 lists:
Products has a lookup column to Categories, which allows multiple Categories to be selected. In the Products list I wanted to have a view for each category, I thought I would be able to achieve this using a filter and the contains operator – however upon saving the view I was prompted with
"The filter type you selected cannot be used with this type of column. You can apply the 'contains' operator only to columns that have the type Single line of text, Multiple lines of text, or Choice. Specify a different operator for the filter or change the column type. You can then attempt to create the filter again."
This stumped me for a few minutes, until I tried using the is equal to operator instead, which did what I would expect the contains operator to do. I created a view for Category A and set the filter to is equal to Category A – which seems to pick up Products that are in Categoy A and/or other Categories.
As promised this is a follow up to SharePoint Search is not Psychic, In this article I hope to briefly cover a few of the ways you can start to influence you search. I don't intend to discuss search scopes or managed properties in this article.
Authoratative sites/pages
The concept behind Authoritative sites is making a site more prominent in the search results. For example, you have an Intranet which is a single Web Application and single Site collection; within this you have a site called Processes – this site contains important information about processes, procedures and forms in your business. You find people keep copying these and creating their own versions of them. This means that users searching come across uncontrolled out-of-date copies. By making the Process site an authoritative site it tends to be a the top of the search results. In Central Admin under Shared Service Provider, choose Search Settings and scroll to the bottom, choose Specify authoritative pages, then simply enter the URL.
Keywords/Synomns
The concept behind keywords is to offer alternative words to search for. E.g. If you had a business name ABD and it changed its name to ABCD then you could add a keyword for ABCD to offer ABD as an alternative. This helps with content that has not been update from the original name.
Best bets
Best bets are a quick way of ensuring that a user searching for a specific term, gets a specific result returned at the top. E.g. You specific that the specific term "forms" should return to a specific url. This will offer this result at the top of the search results.
Search result removal
Not something I have used much but if a URL is included that you need to remove quickly. Enter the URL in the search result removal Page (under search settings), it will be removed instantly and a crawl rule will be added so it doesn't appear back in the index after the next crawl. To reverse this action you will need to delete the crawl rule that has been added and start a crawl.
Useful articles
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA100478321033.aspx
This aricle applies to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, although if you want to do this with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 then check out Microsoft's Search Server offering…
I was at the user group today (well actually it is yesterday now), Andrew Woodward gave a great presentation on Microsoft Search Server 2008. One of the questions he asked during the session was how many people reviewed and acted upon the statistics about what users were searching for. To my surprise only myself and one other admitted to this! Out of a room of 70ish people, most of whom had earlier admitted they had MOSS! 
I commonly hear from SharePoint users/admins that they can't find things using the SharePoint search. This used to be a common complaint in our organisation until…..
Using the data from both of the above we were able to analyse where the search was failing to meet users' expectations. We found that:
55% The content was badly named, didn't contain the words the users was searching for, wasn't easily identifiable in search results (e.g. if you have 2 results both called Cafe – which is for London and which is for Manchester?)
30% The content users were looking for didn't exist
10% Users were using wide or strange search terms (why would somebody search for 'google' on the intranet? what exactly did they want to find when they searched for 'form'?)
5% Search wasn't finding appropriate content or ranking wasn't appropriate
So by appropriately authoring content and ensuring it exists to allow it to be found we solved 85% of the problem! That is a lot more satisfied users!
We also use the functionality that MS provide to allow you to influence the search – if you know that a specific page should be the top hit for a term make it a best bet. If something is known as something else – e.g. it has been renamed add it as a synonym.
Watch out for another blog article from me on how to influence the SharePoint search, in which I hope to cover Best bets, synonyms, authoritative sites, etc.
jennye