Stop the Presses! Or at least, pause the internet!

Microsoft has finally announced their new Enterprise Search products, going head to head with Google and Google Mini.

In addition to the search capabilities found in MOSS, you can now purchase/acquire just the search without the rest of MOSS (although the rest of MOSS can be extremely useful!).

They are offering two products, Microsoft Search Service 2008 (MSS) and Microsoft Search Service 2008 Express (MSSE). Here's the best part--the MSSE is FREE!

To see a full announcement, click Here.

I'll post more on this later.

It's Movember Time!

I'm taking part in the "Movember" challenge to raise funds to help fight Prostate Cancer, by growing my "Mo" all this month.

Please support me and this cause by going to the Movember website and sponsoring me and my mo.

Thanks in advance your all of your support and pledges!

cheers,
James

SharePoint Planning docs in one place

http://itfootprint.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/sharepoint-planning-worksheets-in-one-place/

Great blog that has links to the most useful planning worksheets for SharePoint installs nicely organized and summarized.

Awesome!

MCT Dinner in Auckland

Thanks to Marie, Mark, Kyle and Greg for coming out last night. I had a good time catching up with Marie, Mark and Kyle. It was great to meet you Greg.

I hope you all have a great rest of TechEd!

Craig--where were you?

Ta
jf

Arrggghhh!

I suspect that an update/patch/sp somewhere along the line has broken SharePoint somehow. I've been fighting all week trying to figure out why certain site settings pages work for a little while and then stop loading, throwing a 403 error (forbidden). If they never worked, then I'd assume that the permissions somewhere needed fixing. But if I do an IISReset, the pages execute fine.

For a little while.

And then they stop. For no obvious reason.

Arrrrggggghhhh!

Finally my boss Ignacio (who was also looking into the problem) found a reference to this MS kb article that doesn't mention this issue specifically but seems to fix the problem. (See here.)

If I get any better information, I'll share ASAP.

Cheers,
James

Browser me this . . .

Not a question I run across a lot, but I do run across it from time to time: What browser can I use with SharePoint?

This link is about a year old and based around betas, but it at least gives a rough indication as to which browsers you can/cannot expect a reasonable experience with.

Thanks to Chris Randall for bringing this to the attention of readers of an MCT newsgroup.

However, as always, mileage may vary.

If anyone has a more current/up-to-date link, let me know and I will happily update this post.

jf

Folder specific search scopes in MOSS

You may have noticed that MOSS automatically generates some dynamic scopes out of the box, what I like to call the context scopes, "This Site:" and "This List:". And these are really really useful.

But what if you want/need to limit a search to a specific folder inside a library?
Unfortunately, MOSS doesn't do that on the fly for you. However, it can be done manually.

Scopes can be set either at a farm or shared service level, or at a site collection level. If you are creating a scope for a single folder in a single library, the site collection level might be most appropriate.

1. Open the Top Level Site Settings for a site in your site collection (Site Actions, Site Settings, Go to Top Level Site Settings) or from your top level site (Site Actions, Site Settings, Modify all Site Settings).
   
2. Find the column labelled "Site Collection Administration" and click on the "Search Scopes" link.
   
3. Click on the button labelled "New Scope" to create your new scope.
   
4. Give your new scope a Title (and description if you so desire), and make sure you tick the box so it is added to the "Search Dropdown" display group (at a minimum, you can put in more if you like). This will make the scope appear in the dropdown lists for the search ribbons that show up on your SharePoint pages. In this scenario, you probably won't require a different results page, so leave that setting alone. Click on "OK".
   
5. This takes you back to the Search Scope pages. Now you will see your new scope listed in the display groups you made it a part of. You will also note that in the "Update Status" column it says "Empty - Add rules". You will need to define what is included in the scope. Click on the "Add rules" link in that column.


6. This brings up the Add Scope Rule page. On this page you will want to set the Scope Rule Type to "Web Address" and then put the url for the folder you want to search. See below for an example. When you are done, click on "OK".


7. This will take you back to the View Scopes page, and now in the Update Status column for your scope, you will see a message that the scope will be ready after the next update. After that update runs, your scope will now show up in the drop-down boxes for searches in that Site Collection.

Cheers,

James

Calling all NZ MCT's

I'm trying to organize an MCT dinner for any MCTs who are either Auckland based or will be in Auckland for TechEd. If you fit either of those categories, can you please go the .Teched.Anz MCT newsgroup, and reply to the thread "Any NZ MCTs going to TechEd NZ".

Details, as far as we have them are there.

Cheers!
Tell you friends (at least those friends that are MCTs!)

James

WSS 3.0 Book

Check out Mastering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This book could be the comprehensive WSS 3.0 reference guide. And it will be an interesting read.

C.A. Callahan (the author) is a friend of mine and she has been working her a** off to get this thing done and do it well. And she didn't have a very big a** to start with. (Sorry C.A.--couldn't resist). If there is something in there, you can bet your sweet bippy that it's in there for good reason and what she says will be right.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I wrote one of the chapters for the book. Nowhere near enough to get my name on the cover, but I think I get mentioned in the credits somewhere. Despite that, this is an awesome book that will be incredibly useful for anyone who has to work with WSS.

BTW--check out her blog for more useful info. It's in my links list on the right hand side, or you can get to it Here.

Fun with Content Types

Here's a little tip for all of you SharePoint fans out there--

Remember that you can reduce the time and effort involved in creating and managing your custom content types by using a custom content type as the parent.

In other words, put all of your common metadata in a single content type, and then create document or task specific content types that are based upon the one you created before.

Also make sure you put your custom content types at a high enough level so you can use your content types everywhere you wish.

Here's a link to a good overview of how to create content types.

Searching MOSS from Office

To add a SharePoint Search Centre service to the list of sources to be searched via Office, you will need to do the following:

1. Open up the Office Application, and then open up the research pane.
2. At the bottom of the Research Pane there will be an option labelled "Research Options". Click on it.
3. In the "Research Options" dialog box, click onthe button labelled "Add Services"
4. This will open another diallog box named "Add Services". In the "Address" text box enter in the URL of your search service.

In SharePoint 2007,this url is http://yoursitenamehere/_vti_bin/Search.asmx

Now users can search MOSS's indexes straight from their Office Application