daveneedshelp

Visual document search with Ontolica Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:02:00 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of installing some Ontolica products for a client, Ontolica search webparts for SharePoint is a well known product but perhaps not so well know is Ontolica Preview for SharePoint

The product provides a visual search for documents and works in conjunction with the standard Ontolica webparts.

The addition of an Ontolica Preview webpart which can be added to the search results page adds visual search capabilities which include:

1) indexing of the number of pages in a document
2) thumbnail screenshots of the front and all subsequent pages
3) highlighting of the search term in the screenshot
4) ability to zoom into document preview
5) ability to read the content that the search term hit without opening the document

this is very cool, and can save a lot of time where clients have a vast number of documents to wade through in search results. The ontolica webparts with the extra granularity to fine tune search queries helps a lot but he visual context and not having to open the document to check a search hit is really valuable.

Here are a few screenshots of Ontolica Preview in action:

Fig.1. Here you see in the Ontolica Preview webpart a new link to show the document preview, this is configurable, you can opt to show screenshots by default but this has a real performance hit on your search results rendering as you 'd imagine.

Fig.2. Clicking on the "show document preview" opens the preview data window showing thumbnail screenshots of all the pages in the document, this particular document had 42 pages (you can see the scroll bar). Also note the "Most relevant pages:" 5, 7, 19 on the Fig.4 screenshot you'll see on page 7 the search term "document" is highlighted in the screenshot! how cool is that

Fig.3. Here you'll see i've hovered over the thumbnail screenshot to get a slightly larger view this is readable but you zoom too, click on the screenshot and you get the below:

Fig.4. Look how the search term "document" is highlighted in the screenshot. Here i've clicked on the thumbnail to zoom in and read the document (without ever opening the actual document)

Now this is all the great but what are the drawbacks?

Well naturally loading all these screenshots into your search results can be a big performance hit, in these screenshots we've used the Show/Hide feature so that screenshots are only loaded when the user is interested enough in that search hit.

I've not noticed however any reduction in search query response time happily.

When Ontolica Preview is installed it uses a new database and a new content source to gather these results, so they are separate to your existing results, this allows you to setup additional crawl rules for the preview results set.

Be warned, this particular client had 30000 approx documents to index and i found the gatherer service installed to crawl these was using up to 1Gb of server memory to run the crawl and the Preview database quickly grew to tens of gigs so don't forget to provide plenty of resources for this puppy.

Adventures in SharePoint variations - part deux

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:22:00 +0000

So to recap - recently i had problems with SharePoint variations, the client reported that pages weren't being propagated to all child variation sites

after some research see "adventures in sharepoint variations" - i discovered that the client was only running SP1 of MOSS and that SP2 had significant improvements in the reliability of the variations infrastructure and that SP2 also included some powerful new stsadm commands to help debug problems with variations.

This includes the very aptly named variationsfixuptool

Which provides the two functions i used to fix the variations "relationships list" for Compass

stsadm -o variationsfixuptool -scan -url http://server/sites/pub/vhome/source > C:\report1.html

This does what it says on the tin, it scans through the relationships list and outputs the relationships in a nice HTML table as URL to URL relationships. This is much easier to read and understand than the relationships list.

Looking at this you can see which pages have failed to deploy to all the variations and focus on fixing the relationships for these pages.

stsadm -o variationsfixuptool -fix -url http://server/sites/pub/vhome/source/sub1 -recurse

But wait you don't need to fix these relationships, the second cool thing about variationsfixuptool is that it includes a method that will actually recurse through the root variation spot your missing relationships and fix them for you!

I would have been here until the end of time trying to fix relationships without this, i so feel justified for installing SP2.

However this isn't the end of the story......

Although the relationships are fixed there is still a lot of damage to repair not to mention figuring out how this happened in the first place.

When you enable variations on a publishing site template two timer jobs are created to propagate content out to the variation children

I initially suspected these as the culprits for why the variations failed in the first place. On the stage environment these hadn't actually run when i'd published a test page.

running the stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs command seemed to free these up and i was able to publish pages to variations again on staging. However on production the timer jobs seemed to have been running recently.

If that's the case then all i need to do is republish all the pages identified in the initial scan and with their fixed relationships they should propagate out again as intended.

Now what's the problem with that you might think. Quite a lot of clicking to do but hey it's not difficult to republish everything.

Well this client has just been on a translation spree. The idea is that when you publish a page in the root site this page is created in the same place on each child variation in DRAFT mode ready to be translated into the native culture for that variation. If you then republish the same page from the root variation again the same process occurs and a new version of the page is propagated to the child variation in draft mode over-writing the previously translated version. This is not something you want to have to inform the client.

So a lot of hard work ahead assessing which pages need to be republished but any new pages fixed should propagate as normal

As yet i'm still working on how it got into this state in the first place. I only hope the installation of SP2 means it won't happen again...

Adventures in SharePoint variations

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:44:00 +0000

I'm currently dealing with a MOSS 2007 site using variations.

They have 29 variations currently running and are adding new variations at a rate of 3 or 4 a year

Recently on publishing a page to the root site they found the page didn't get published to all the variations. Uh oh.

This isn't going to be a great day.

The workflow that runs to publish the page showed the message "error occurred". I spent some time investigating the logs around the workflow but this didn't really get me anywhere. I checked on disk space and the usual suspects anything that might stop workflows and normal processes running correctly - as they had been upto this point.

Nothing

So i switched the logs to verbose and published a test page from the root site to see if i could track the messaging in the trace log to see what was happening ( i used SharePoint ULS log viewer to track the relevant messages) .

Sure enough SharePoint was happily publishing the said page to a number of variations but then failed and stopped when it reached a variation it couldn't propagate to.

The error was "Cannot create Variation Publishing Page because the target Publishing Web cannot be determined"

Strange because the particular site was seemingly available within "Manage Content and Structure"

But this lead me to a chilling and dark conclusion.

To understand the chill i experienced you need to understand how SharePoint propagates pages from the root site to the different variation sites.

SharePoint maintains a list of relationships between pages in the root site and pages in each variation. This information is stored in an hidden list called not surprisingly "relationships list".

This list has some several thousand items in it. Lots of Guid's and object id's enough to make your vision go blurry trying to read them.

When i checked the relationship list for the variation country that had failed i was immediately suspicious as there were only a few links assigned to that country variation whereby most of the current variations clearly had a link seemingly for every page in the site.

This was telling me i had problems with relationships. (Something my friends have been telling me for years)

I investigated this by installing a tool widely used (as there aren't any others). The SharePoint Variations Editor. This however didn't work for me, most disappointingly it correctly found my site but threw an error when trying to enumerate the sites. I didn't spend too much time working out why as it was a long hopeful shot anyway.

So having now spent the best part of the day investigating the problem i turned to Gary LaPointes stsadm extensions for fixing variations.

http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2008/04/fix-variation-relationships-list.html

I installed the solution ran the command. But again failure.

I got the message "Value out of range" or similar. I knew what was coming.

At this point i'd checked the version of MOSS and found this to be only running SharePoint SP1.

Some googling later i found plenty of evidence that SP2 contained a number of improvements as well as some stsadm commands to help fix problems with variations and the relationships list.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953334

So not sure if this was good news or not but at least if i get the latest SP2 and cumulatives installed i can get help from MS.

So Installing SP2 it is. I hope it works! Stay tuned for Part 2 where i will hopefully be cheerily informing you how i fixed my relationship troubles or alternatively how i will be crying into my tea at taking down a client server for a couple of hours for no apparent reason.

Microsoft white paper on migrating to exchange online

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:43:00 +0000

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=25350815-5c57-441a-b7fb-329ff5fe14b3.

Download the conferencing add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:22:00 +0000

An outlook add-in is available that allows you to schedule livemeetings from outlook

Get it here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102368901033.aspx?pid=CL100605171033

Co-existence between BPOS communicator and on premise exchange

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:05:00 +0000

Office Communications Online integration with on-premises Exchange Server 2007

Office Communications Online will integrate with an on-premise server running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Office Communicator will display presence updates and Out-of-Office information from the on-premises Exchange server. Office Communicator will communicate with your on-premises Exchange server using its external Exchange Web Service (EWS) URLs. For more information about EWS URLs, see How to Configure an External Host Name for Outlook Anywhere.

For more information on EWS click here

Microsoft Online Services release notes

BPOS single sign in tool installation

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:05:00 +0000

Here is a great link on how to install the Single Sign in tool and configure your applications

http://sgwindowsgroup.org/blogs/desmond/archive/2010/04/29/bpos-single-sign-in-tool-installation-and-configuration.aspx

SharePoint 2010 training

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:12:00 +0000

On SharePoint 2010 Admin training this week with Steve Smith of Combined Knowledge, learning about multi-tenancy a very nice feature of 2010

here's a good link to summarise

http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010mt3.aspx

Problem creating hierarchies for a variation in MOSS 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:17:00 +0000

I was getting the error on a client site - No Variation Root Web has been set - Hierarchies cannot be created until the variation root web is set

After a bit of research i found the below link:

http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/10/17/problem-creating-hierarchies-for-a-variation-in-moss-.aspx

The error means that the root web has lost its relationship to the other variations

You need to reset the relationship correctly for the root web.

First locate the hidden relationships list

http://rootsite/relationships list/allitems.aspx

Then you need to find the root web relationship which should always have the guid F68A02C8-2DCC-4894-B67D-BBAED5A066F9

i created a new personal view on the list and set it to view only items with a GroupID containing F68A02C8 and this view found the root web relationship with the above guid

when i found it this relationship had the rootweb set top (http://) i changed this to http://myrootsite and set the title to "Root Web" and saved.

Then i went back to variation labels, created my new label and clicked create hierarchies and no more error!

70-541 links

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:25:00 +0000

Eventid 6482 Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Fri, 21 May 2010 13:55:00 +0000

Argghhh... can anyone please tell me how to fix these.

I have the following errors on my clients WFE

Log Name: Application
Source: Office SharePoint Server
Date: 21/05/2010 11:03:24
Event ID: 6482
Task Category: Office Server Shared Services
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchAdminSharedWebServiceInstance (eaa225c4-6d56-4a76-9b86-aaadf87264e0).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Log Name: Application
Source: Office SharePoint Server
Date: 21/05/2010 11:03:24
Event ID: 6482
Task Category: Office Server Shared Services
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Log Name: Application
Source: Office SharePoint Server
Date: 21/05/2010 11:04:02
Event ID: 5783
Task Category: Office Server Shared Services
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Synchronization for Shared Services Provider 'SKSSP' has failed. The operation will be retried.

Reason: The specified account name is invalid.
Parameter name: account

---------------------------------------------------

these all seem to have occurred after the client performed a P2V backup of the server.

Ontolica 2010 search has also recently been installed.

Remove blocked file types in SharePoint MOSS 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:52:00 +0000

Steps to remove blocked file types

1) navigate to central admin
2) under operations select "blocked file types"
3) select the right web app
4) remove the file extension from the list and click ok

StarCraft 2 beta

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:48:00 +0000

finally released, and i have my free beta key to play the online multiplayer

Forgot i had a blog

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:34:00 +0000

The thing about Blogs are you have to have something to write in them and have time to write it.

Newsflash - Dave passes MS 70-630 exam becomes sharepoint MCTS

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:28:00 +0000

Passed MS70-630 SharePoint configuration exam, with 91%

i rock!

BSG S04E17 - someone to watch over me

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:01:00 +0000

ooooh whats that music all about and who was Starbucks father?!

now bear with me....

starbuck isn't officially a cylon? as far as we know? although she does appear to have died and come back...

as far as we know there was no mention of her hearing the music before she "died"

so its a reasonable assumption to assume she is now a cylon copy...

but the music seems to have far more significance to her because of the link with her father...

so who is her father? this is the real mystery for me.

i keep thinking there maybe a link with Daniel the final five model that was killed permanently - but i can't make that add up.

The link must come before the final five were made as it's engrained in all of them

but the final five came from earth a 1000 years before and starbuck was born on caprica in the colonies. Hmmm

so starbuck must be the daughter of a member of the final five!!! yes that's it... and it must be daniel because he's the only one thats missing, and that would make her the very first human cylon hybrid. So when she died she was able to download

But then how did she end up coming back in a fighter craft that was brand new... almost like she had travelled in time?

i'm going round in circles here. If anyone has a better theory please help my hurting head.

MS 70-630 exam booked

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:24:00 +0000

Booked the exam for 18 March 2009.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2719871/SybexMCTSMicrosoftOfficeSharePointServer2007ConfigurationStudyGuideMar2008pdf

Exams Dave intends to take! .. and possibly pass in the near future

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:27:00 +0000

•

Exam 70-630: TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring (for IT professionals)
•

Exam 70-631: TS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring (for IT professionals)
•

Exam 70-541: TS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Application Development (for developers)
•

Exam 70-542: TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Application Development (for Developers)

Britney for sale

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 22:39:00 +0000

after a good 4 or 5 years of loyal service i've decided to let her go! named after the previous owners left a britney cd in the player, i only did 18K miles i her over 4 years but she cost me pretty much nothing except fuel and tax to run. Really solid reliable and practical car the ford focus. Highly recommended.

Setting up Forms authentiation using ADAM in MOSS 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:22:00 +0000

mental note:

1) install shared services on moss server
2) setup shared services to import your adam
3) on your moss web app setup your authenticated extension for forms authentication and add authentication provider as imported into shared services
4) add authentication provider to web.config for central admin site, windows site and forms extension site

Dave's new toy

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:31:00 +0000

20" screen
4gb ram ( i did the upgrade )
2ghz dual core processor
i know it has a hd dvd drive that i will never use but then i didnt really want that anyhow i was more interested in the screen size, processor and ram.

i needed something more powerful to program on but it is going to sit in the bedroom mostly and also act as a multimedia hub, watching dvds, tv, playing music etc. It will replace my desktop pc, my old centrino dell 8600 laptop which just seemed too slow lately and my bedroom tv screen. So even though it's costing a few quid its saving space and multitasks well. I hope! It's my first acer, i was really impressed with the last acer aspire i handled, so im giving them a go!

Ferrari Challenge!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:09:00 +0000

With all the wierd emotions the last week (leaving Crown and starting my new job) i almost forgot about my leaving present. 3 laps of silverstone in a Ferrari 360! Now you don't get to this very often so im going to have to go into training to make sure i'm able to take full advantage! Of course i don't have a ferrari to train with so i will have to do my training on the xbox! Shame. But hopefully this will be me sooner rather than later.

First challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:10:00 +0000

Ok so my first challenge is going to be adding some custom webforms to a workflow process within Sharepoint.

The guys had explained workflows to me. Essentially its an approval process for a document. I've found a couple of links to help me out

http://weblog.vb-tech.com/nick/archive/2006/09/04/1753.aspx

http://sharenotes.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/add-custom-aspx-pages-or-asp-net-pages-in-sharepoint/

We have a third party workflow designer which outputs the xaml code called Nintex.

Hopefully today i will get my development environment running on virtual server. You can't debug sharepoint code remotely you have to be working on the server! Therefore i need a virtual server, installed with sharepoint and visual studio and all the various components.

So far its taken 3 days to get everything i need together and installed on my desktop !

Left Crown

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:02:00 +0000

Well i've been 3 days at my new employers and i am starting to enter full on regret mode. Whilst working at Crown had it's challenges at least i knew everyone and had the skills to do the job! (well i thought so)

My new job revolves around a huge and complex MOSS 2007 and biztalk installation. Things i've never used before! And i am working in what is essentially a quiet backwater of Essex that most people just drive through!

It couldnt really be more different!