stop collaborate and listen

When on client sites, i often get asked “What do the Indexing Performance settings actually mean?”

They are relating to the Office SharePoint Server Search service setting for the server running the Index role.

For those that don’t know, this is access via Central Admin >Operations > Services on Server.  Select the Server doing the Indexing and select the Office SharePoint Server Search service.

The Indexer Performance setting affects the number of threads for Server running the Office SharePoint Server Search service in Indexing mode uses when crawling content.

Taken from TechNet, the following Table shows a  what the indexer values actually mean.

Note -  Crawler impact rules override the Indexer Performance setting, so you can throttle te search more if you want.

The setting you choose depends very much on your circumstances. Things like:

• Server farm deployment (Single Server,
• Server hardware Spec (specifically of your Index server)
• Use of SharePoint (Collaboration, Content Browsing, etc.)

I have always took the stance of if you have a dedicated Index server, use it for that, so set it to Maximum.  Single server deployments of MOSS, are more tricky.  I would recommend Reduced, maybe Partially Reduced dependent on the use of your SharePoint server, e.g.  Heavy Collaboration – Reduced, Medium Content Browsing -Partially reduced.

Had an issue on regarding searching on the contents on email messages (file extension .msg). 

Issue

When doing searches on known search terms they were getting varied results. Results were only returned on the contents of the beginning of some emails as if the Indexer was only indexing the first 50/60 words of .msg files.  Results wouldn’t appear for short search terms (less than 15-20 characters). Some .msg files wouldn’t even be indexed.  Was no definitive reason why a certain email wasn’t indexed, had the same search issues with Plain text and HTML formatted emails.

Reason

Looks like its an issue with the Office SharePoint Search Service Indexer being unable to open the .msg file to index the contents as the .msg Ifilter is not activated by default.  This is strange because MOSS 2007 & WSS V3 should support the indexing and searching on .msg files by out of the box.

Solution

Make a Registry change on the Index server.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftOffice Server12.0SearchSetupFilters

Add a new “.msg” Key

Add the following key values

Reboot the server to confirm the registry change.  Restarting the Office SharePoint Search Service from the Services console also did the job.

Result

Following this we saw the search results we would expect to see for the whole contents of emails.

Thanks to Gavin Adams for the information http://blog.gavin-adams.com/2007/10/09/enabling-the-inbuilt-msg-ifilter-on-sharepoint-even-64bit/

Recently I had an interesting error issue with my companies MOSS 2007 intranet.

My marketing department were trying to create a page to redirect to a PDF newsletter.  The answer was the OOTB Redirect Page.  Now this worked fine for all users with edit permissions, the redirect page came up for 5 seconds and then loaded the PDF file in the browser (as configure in Adobe Reader) as expected.  Now all the other users who had read permissions tried to open the redirect page straight away they were displayed with a nice "page cannot be found" error message.

The redirect URL was set the http://intranet/marketingsite/Documents/Internal%20newsletters/Newsletter%20April%202009.pdf

After some investigation I worked out that the Redirect page content type does not like spaces(%20 in HTML encoding) in the file name or url.

Therefore I changed the PDF filename and Folder name to replacing the spaces with underscores ( _ ).  Therefore the new url was

http://intranet/marketing/Internal_newsletters/Newsletter_April_2009.pdf

Problem solved

Remember, always test with the redirect page with a user account with read only permissions.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, been off with my knee operation and updating my Twitter more recently as its just quicker, please follow me at http://twitter.com/shorttom

When configuring the backups for you MOSS or WSS deployment, you need to provide it with a UNC path of a Network File Share with the correct permissions.  When using either the Web Based backup or STSADM command line script, you need to configure the Network file share with the following Share and NTFS permissions:

 I know you are granting “Everyone” change permissions but they will be denied the ability to change anything by the fact they have no NTFS permissions.

Cannot start the WSS Search Service & Office SharePoint Search not working – Same SQL & WSSMOSS Server

Problem

Running SQL and MOSS on the same server, I was unable to start the WSS Search Service and the Office SharePoint Search service was showing errors in the SSP Site.  I had the following errors in my Event viewer:

Event Type:           Error

Event Source:       Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search

Event Category:   Gatherer

Event ID:                10034

Description: Could not access the Search service configuration database.

Context: Application '8f7d4cbe-8cb1-4d32-b406-1737af554479'

Details:The filename or extension is too long.   (0×800700ce)

Event Type:           Error

Event Source:       Office SharePoint Server

Event Category:   Office Server Shared Services

Event ID:                6482

Description:Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance (9d344ee4-eacc-4460-8dc6-bb66bd5ab982).

Reason: The path is not of a legal form.

Techinal Support Details:

System.ArgumentException: The path is not of a legal form.

   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchApi.RunOnServer[T](CodeToRun`1 remoteCode, CodeToRun`1 localCode, Boolean useCurrentSecurityContext, Int32 versionIn)

   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchApi.AddApp(Role role)

   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.InstallGathererApplicationIf()

   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.Synchronize()

   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerJob.ProvisionLocalSharedServiceInstances(Boolean isAdministrationServiceJob)

Reason

If you are running SQL and WSS/MOSS on the same server you will need to specify the Database Server, in the SharePoint Configuration Wizard as the NetBIOS name (Server01) and not the FQDN (Server01.Domain.com).  Seems to be a bug in SharePoint as I always use the FQDN wherever possible

Solution

Disconnect from the SharePoint Farm (by running the SharePoint Configuration Wizard) and reconnect, this time using the NetBIOS name for the DB server.  You will need to set the Indexer for any SSP's you have created and restart some of the Services on the SharePoint Server but you should get back up and running.

As I spend a large amount of time producing wonderfully artistic Network Diagrams and SharePoint Server Farm Configurations with Visio, I decided to produce the following set of Visio Shapes. 

Please feel free to download them

Download Link

Just sat and Passed the WSS Exam 70-631.

Passed it using Micosoft eLearning material and the useful offline player.

Now I am a MCTS, Happy Days

Now onto the MOSS Exam 70-630

Hello,

Finally recoverd my Blog following the SharePoinBlogs disaster of 2007 and my extended annual leave.

New Years Resolution – Share more information

 Cheers Tom

Having been on a few customer sites and needed to remove the default SSP due to an error on the initial configuration, I found

http://laurataverner.blogspot.com/2007/01/deleting-default-ssp.html

 Very helpful

A very useful article on how to create and attach content databases to your MOSS web application with minimal effort.

From my esteemed colleague Matt Groves blog, Nuff respect