Blog for Sharepoint Hunter

It is an exciting news that Sysinternal has released the trouble shooting utilities. This suite contains following:

Download Sysinternals Suite

Last couple of days I was spending hell lot of time to fix the crawler issue – For more information on this issue please take a look at the following thread. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsearch/thread/4e339332-3ebf-4886-a92a-c6605145cabc http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Server/MS-SharePoint/Q_23585754.html

Simple solution is to install the WSS 3.0 Post-Service Pack1 Hotfix(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941422)

Symptom:

Error message in the crawl log after you migrate users: "Error in the Site Data Web Service"

You use the Stsadm.exe command-line tool to migrate users. When the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Web sites are crawled and are indexed, the following error message is logged in the crawl log:
Error in the Site Data Web Service. (Value does not fall within the expected range.)

Solution:

Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This update includes updated time zone definitions for daylight saving time (DST) start dates and end dates for New Zealand 2007. This update also includes the above error fix.

wss-kb941422-fullfile-x64-glb.exe

wss-kb941422-fullfile-x86-glb.exe

As most of you aware, Microsoft is conducting a contest to re-design their Conference Site. I wanted to participate on this contest and have designed the following Look&Feel Template. Please feel free to provide comments re.below. Would be appreciate your input.

Last week, I have been working with fixing the search issue. Actually,  the crawler was failed to crawl the large team site which has heavy weight document libraries with lot of folder structures – Some other people were try to fix this issue by deleting the large document library, but no luck. So these guys were planning to restore them back, but unfortunately they could not find that huge document library in both site collection & site Recycle Bin(sounds weird)- Please take a look at Chris Blog, he mentioned this same problem in his blog /cwogle/archive/2009/06/18/large-items-in-sharepoint-recycle-bin-fixed-er-worked-around.aspx. It was very important libray though, so we were planning to restore it from Tape Backup using Symantec Backup Exec. As you may aware, Backup Exec is used to resore the specified file or document library. Using this tool, they were trying to restore the document library(which has 9720 items, and total size would 29GB) from Tape Backup to SharePoint site. But, they could not able to restore it(i.e., 29GB) back using backup exec for various reasons. So, the network administrators have decided to restore it to UNC path. Instead of restoring to C:, they could restore it to the document library.

Symptom:

Not able to restore huge document libary(i.e., 29GB) to sharepoint site

Resolution:

Create a document library and select action->open with windows explorer(please make sure that webclient services have enabled, if not this option wont work). It will open a document library within the windows explorer. Use this UNC path to restore by using symantech back exec.

Regarding the crawl fails issue, Microsoft recommended to increase the Content Database Capacity(SQL back-end)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970196

Last week Intellinet has published an article in technet for publishing performace point server in extranet scenarios. Here are the common extranet deployment and comparison. 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd861515.aspx

Comparison between the common extranet deployments:

and here are the Architectures:

TechNet has posted an excellent guidence regarding Disaster Recovery across sharepoint farms using SQL Server Log Shipping with additional details for SP2 and some excellent coverage of pre-requisites, fundamental planning considerations and performance and it clearly describes how to provide a disaster recovery site that provides current search results when a failover occurs by using this configuration.

Log shipping consists of three jobs. Each job performs one of the following operations:

• Backs up the transaction log at the primary server instance
• Copies the transaction log file to the secondary server instance
• Restores the log backup on the secondary server instance

Log shipping topology with two data centers and two farms configured to use log shipping as a read-only DR data center secondary farm

Worth to read! http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dd890507.aspx

As you may aware, CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) uses web services to provide greater interoperability across multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories. Here is a small introduction about CMIS who doesn't aware of it: CMIS  is a standards proposal consisting of a set of Web services for sharing information among disparate content repositories that seeks to ensure interoperability for people and applications using multiple content repositories. Alfresco, Day Software, Dennis Hamilton, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle and SAP have joined forces to propose CMIS, the first Web services technical specification for exchanging content with and between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Here is the conceptual CMIS architecture

and here is the Service Oriented Content Management architecture from Optaros

When you think about Interoperable Content Management(CMIS), first thing you could have ask: Is (CMIS) the perfect solution? Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact that something has been developed that ECMs and other application developers can work with to provide an integrated view of an organization's content is a step in the direction we need to go. We all know the days of a single, in-house ECM system are pretty much over. SharePoint has already taken care of that. We need something to give us hope that our content is manageable — regardless of where it's located. CMIS does that. Kyle McNabb has answered the lehman question on his prespectives and here is the DRAFT specification which will be submitted to OASIS – and AIIM has shown an excellent CMIS Demo (i.e., "Federator") 

[Update]:

    Attached: CMIS Federated Search Code from AIIM iECM Demo – You can download it from here https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-3771

[From EMC community site] :

• The "CMIS_Project.zip" file has the Visual Studio 2008 project. It was written in C#.
• CMIS_Demo directory has the locally run project
• iECM-CMIS-Expo-Demo directory has the IIS Deployable project
• SecurityMessageInspector handles the Web Services sercurity and is based heavily on code from Craig Randall of EMC.  His original sample project can be found here in the EDN.
• The web.config file lists the existing services definitions and passwords. To change any of the destination URLs, do a global Search and Replace across all the files in the project.
  • Service URLs can be found in the web.config file by search for #AIIM_Services
  • Passwords can be found in the web.config file by searching for #AIIM_Passwords
• The existing hosts are:
  • Alfresco: http://aiim.alfrescodemo.com/alfresco
  • EMC:http://192.168.1.4:8080/emc-cmis-ea
  • Nuxeo: http://tamise.nuxeo.com:8080/nuxeo
• You cannot retrieve content from the Nuxeo repository as this service is unavailable
• The "iECM CMIS POC.dar" file contains an installable Documentum application that installs the aiim_content type and some sample content to search against.
• The "Object Model.xls" file explains the deployed object model.

Today, Most of the .NET Developers/SOA Lovers have been really enjoying the Power of Windows Communication Foundation features. But, the hardest portion of WCF development is Tracing/Logging in Remote System(i.e., Production Server), however Microsoft has recommended to use SvcTraceViewer.exe to analyze diagnostic traces that are generated by WCF. Service Trace Viewer provides a way to easily merge, view, and filter trace messages in the log so that you can diagnose, repair, and verify WCF service issues. But, from my understanding or experience it is hard to find out the exact error log using SvcTraceViewer.exe in svcLog file(WCF Tracing file) and We have been using DebugViewer to trace the WCF log events or exceptions. I would like to describe the power of DebugViewer here interms of tracing/logging the Windows Communication Foundation output in the remote system (i.e., Production Server).

DebugView is an application that lets us monitor debug output on our local system, or any computer on the network that we can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output(i.e., WCF output) so we don't need a debugger to catch the debug output WCF applications or device drivers generate, nor do we need to modify WCF applications or drivers to use non-standard debug output APIs. Simply execute the DebugView program file (dbgview.exe) and DebugView will immediately start capturing debug output. Note that if you run DebugView on Windows 2003/XP you must have administrative privilege to view kernel-mode debug output. Menus, hot-keys, or toolbar buttons can be used to clear the window, save the monitored data to a file, search output, change the window font, and more. Here is a screenshot of DebugView capturing Windows Communication Foundation debug output from a remote system.

Download DebugView (286 KB)

FAST ESP
core platform has been designed to
allow for modification and customization by content owners and rapid integration
with external data sources. At a high-level, FAST ESP does following tasks:

• Retrieves or accepts content from
  different content sources
• Transforms all content into an
  internal document representation
• Analyzes and processes these documents
  to allow for enhanced relevancy
• Indexes the documents and makes
  them searchable
• Processes search queries against
  these documents
• Applies algorithms or business
  rule-based ranking to the results
• Presents the results along with
  navigation options

Lot of people asking about when do we need to consider FAST ESP Search – I would really like to break it up into two structures as follows

Strategic

• Monetizing Search – Visionary Implementation
  
• Information Assets are core to
  your business

Tactical

• Indexing beyond 25M documents or
  Content Items
• Query Performance > 5 QPS
  
      20+ QPS possible with guaranteed sub second response times
• Indexing Extensions from other
  content sources
• Advanced Linguistic Requirements
  
• Highly granualr control of indexing
  and query processing

Architecture of FAST ESP Versus MOSS 2007

Comparison between FAST ESP and MOSS 2007 Search

A downloadable CHM is available in the Microsoft site(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BA006584-711D-4CE7-9E1F-181AEDF6434A&displaylang=en). this is a copy of content in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 technical library. If you are using Windows Vista or have installed Windows security updates MS05-026 or MS05-001, the text in this file might not appear as expected. The messages "Navigation canceled," "Action canceled," or "The page cannot be displayed" might appear.

Kindly follow these steps to avoid this issue.

To open this file to view the text:
1. Click Download.
2. In the File Download dialog box, click Save.
3. Use the Save As dialog box to save the file to your computer.
4. Find the file on your computer and double-click it.
5. In the Open File dialog box, clear the Always ask before opening this file check box, and then click Open.