Optimizing SharePoint
August 30, 2009
Short honk: Quite a useful list of SharePoint tips and insights appears in “My Checklist for Optimizing SharePoint Sites.” The original post appeared in June 2009 when I was out of the country. We found the information about YSlow quite useful.
Stephen Arnold, August 30, 2009
SharePoint Video Explains SharePoint
August 24, 2009
I think I know what SharePoint is—a very complex collection of disparate services, functions, and subsystems. I know that SharePoint can be one or more of these systems: search, content management, collaboration, enterprise publishing, business intelligence, or knowledge management, among others. For those who don’t know what SharePoint is, a video is available to explain SharePoint. The article “New SharePoint 2007 Video” can be located on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog. What I found interesting was that SharePoint 2007 is getting a new video in 2009. Here’s a snippet from the write up:
This video takes a friendly approach to show how SharePoint can help you work together with others in more efficient ways. For example, SharePoint can help you plan and work on a project online instead of sending files back and forth in e-mail.
When someone tells me SharePoint is not complicated, I chuckle. Enjoy the video. Does the video touch upon search? I do not know. I fell asleep.
Stephen Arnold, August 24, 2009
When SharePoint Search Breaks
August 24, 2009
You can get some tips to revivify a dead SharePoint search system by reading “Troubleshooting SPSearch and Good Practices for Moving Large Files”. I worked through the write up and the code samples. The problem was resolved when the author realized that SharePoint pointed the wrong place. Here is the key passage:
It turned out that during our disk reconfiguration, the path of F:\DATA\INDEX no longer existed. So I recreated the path specified in the registry (F:\DATA\INDEX) and copied the contents of the CONFIG folder from my fresh VM install. I then started the search service from Central Administration and… bingo! Search finally started successfully…Wohoo!
If you are experiencing missing data, check out this tip. Life would be easier if there were administrative tools for moving files that implement “best” practices. Obviously “good” practices are not enough.
Stephen Arnold, August 24, 2009
Document Type Query: Okay for Horseshoes, Not for Real Life
August 17, 2009
DotNetMafia.com published a tip for limiting a SharePoint query to a “document type”. The tip was a query string that looked like this: ContentType:\”Company Document”. The result list displays Microsoft Office files from Excel and Word. Okay, this is close enough for SharePoint horseshoes but not for my real life query game.
A document type has to be tagged at a meaningful level of granularity. In the distant past in the commercial databases with which I was involved, we used an explicit field called “File Type”. The idea was that a human initially and then later a software method identified the type of file and plugged in a specific tag for that File Type. The person looking for a specific File Type such as a newspaper article or a monograph could find only those documents using the File Type descriptor in the query.
You can see a more pragmatic way of assigning File Type in Google. There are two methods available to anyone using the free Google.com Web search. The first is navigating to Google.com and picking one of the collections. These categories such as Images and Shopping are, in a sense, narrowing the result set to a File Type. Images with various file extensions such as jpg and structured product data in the form of a product description, image, and price, among other data elements.
A more fine grained method is available from the Google advanced search page.
The Google approach, in my opinion, is superior to the “document type” method for SharePoint. If you poke around in SharePoint you can create more precise queries. For these methods to work, in my experience, life is much easier if you skip the SharePoint internal tools and go directly to a third party system. You can locate add ins and third party tools by navigating to the Microsoft Partner Network. There are lots of options which suggests that some Microsoft partners see the native SharePoint tools as an opportunity.
Stephen Arnold, August 17, 2009
Coveo Discloses Client Wins in Q209
August 14, 2009
Coveo is a technology company with some interesting products. I learned about the firm when I poked into the origins of the desktop search system called Copernic. The firm flashed on my radar with a snap in solution for SharePoint. I saw a demonstration of email search that provided features I had heard other vendors describe. Coveo implemented them; for example, maintaining a complete email archive for the user’s desktop computer so if he or she lost a mobile device, the mail was recoverable.
Getting information out of Coveo has not been easy for me. I received a link to a Marketwire article that provided me with some useful information, and I wanted to snag it before the data gets buried in the digital avalanche that cascades into the goose pond each day.
Coveo disclosed several interesting customer wins:
- Goodrich Corporation, a Fortune 500 company
- Odyssey America, an insurance firm
- The Doctor’s Company, an insurer of physicians and surgeon.
Coveo also formed alliances with New Idea Engineering and a number of other integrators around the world.
A happy quack to Coveo and a wing flap to the person at Coveo who provided this information.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
SharePoint Thesaurus Builder
August 9, 2009
Short honk: want to build a thesaurus. No joy in SharePoint itself. A built in utility like Framemaker’s Table of Contents’ function would be useful. Navigate to “Creating Thesaurus Files” and copy the provided script to your computing device. Perform the normal ballet of SharePoint tricks to create a macro. Knock yourself out. Some Certified SharePoint developers will prefer to code their own for job security or self satisfaction. Not the goslings. We rely on solutions from real SharePoint wizards.
Stephen Arnold, August 11, 2009
Dot Net Clean Up Utility
July 30, 2009
Microsoft SharePoint, Fast ESP, and Dot Net news has been in the hammock resting. The goslings discovered a utility that may provide some sun tan lotion when the Dot Net sun gets too intense. You can download the Dot Net Framework Clean Up Tool 6.0.3790 from Freeware.com files. Use freeware at your own risk. The goslings live dangerously; you might not want our brand of excitement. Have you even seen the creatures that live in our pond refreshed with mine run off?
The tool will remove selected versions of our pal Dot Net. Our thought is that you should run some tests on a Dot Net installation to get a feel for how this buggy handles the curves. When you run the utility, you can kiss shared files and registry keys used by other versions of Dot Net if you have multiple versions installed. Back ups are usually a good use of time and disc space.
Stephen Arnold, July 29, 2009
Content Transformation: Easy, No. Expensive, Yes
July 27, 2009
Content transformation is an expensive proposition. I finished a project and learned that an in house information technology staff did not think about content transformation as a cost sink. The manager assumed that software handled most of the “heavy lifting.” The staff delegated the script fixes to deal with exceptions to contractors. The contractors billed their hours as “programming”. No one looked at the bills. A quick review by my researchers revealed that about one third of the information technology budget was consumed by content transformation; that is, taking information object A in one format and converting it into information object A1 with changes needed to make it indexable, searchable, findable, and updateable. In short, the technical budget was struggling with costs that no one took the time to look at from a bird’s eye view.
You can see why content transformation is expensive. There is a very useful write up from Sys-con outfit called “Processing XML with C# and .NET” with the subtitle “A solution that’s simpler than you might expect.” Yeah, right.
The guts of the article is a rundown of how to convert or transform XML with Microsoft’s tools. The most useful part of the write up is the included code snippets. Very nice. The omission, however, is commenting on how long it takes to adapt this code to handle exceptions from tera-scale information processing flows. There was a question in my mind about the performance of the methods based on the code samples. I also wanted to know, “How can one manage the many different variants of the scripts required to handle the rag tag collection of XML objects that flow through some search and content processing systems?”
To be fair, the write up was aimed at a certified Microsoft professional with a competence in Microsoft Dot Net and C#. The problem is, however, that the cost of this method is a big deal for the chief financial officer who has to budget for code fiddles.
The cost of transformation is a very big deal, and I think economical methods need emphasis. Methods that sell more expensive consulting are likely to run into some rough water.
Stephen Arnold, July 27, 2009
SharePoint Search Versions Explained
July 21, 2009
I have a tough time remembering what version of SharePoint does what. Chandima.Net Blog takes a whack at this subject in his “What Version of SharePoint Search Is Capable of Doing What?” The title promised a great deal, but the write up itself offers several useful comments and a killer link. You can download an Excel spreadsheet that provides a good run down of features and changes in SharePoint search. You can get the Excel file here. If the link doesn’t work for you, try downloading the file fr0om Chandima.net here. There’s a passing reference to Fast Search, but nothing substantive on that front in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2009
SharePoint Certification
July 16, 2009
Short honk: Want to get SharePoint certification. Piece of cake. Check out “70-630 Passed! Do You Really Call This a Certification!” Just the ticket when working with SharePoint.
Stephen Arnold, July 16, 2009
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
