SharePoint Sunday and Its Holiday Sparkles
December 21, 2009
If you read this Web log, you know that on Sunday I catch up with the tips and tricks the goslings and I have explored when we explore the n-dimensional fractal world of SharePoint. Image source: http://www.fractal-recursions.com/files/fractal-04120304.html
First, you will want to navigate to SharePoint Automation. “Creating a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search Service Application using PowerShell” provides information about:
the most difficult PowerShell task you’ll undertake when scripting your SharePoint 2010 install, specifically the search application is the most difficult which is why I’ve chosen to explain it first as I expect it to be one of the most needed and one of the least understood.
You will want to snag both the explanation and the code snippets. Otherwise, you will be a busy beaver getting the default search system to work without quite a bit of manual fiddling. Useful post.
Second, read “Adding Search Refinements in SharePoint 2010.” The defaults for the baked in search in SharePoint 2010 is guaranteed in my opinion to lead to Yellow Sticky Note-itis. A very expensive disease that can consume an employee’s energy. Although brief, the screen shots and the comments will save you lots of time.
Third, organizations may have file types unknown to the SharePoint 2010 filters. If you have file types that end up in the exception bin or that kill SharePoint 2010 content processing outright, you will want to read “ SharePoint Full Text Crawl of Custom File Types.” There is quite a bit of confusion about connectors. Even when you think you have a stable connector, an errant bit can generate an instant migraine. The connector vendor will look into the problem and deliver a fix in most cases. The problem is that your migraine persists until the connector behaves. This write up explains a connector problem and then points to fix in “Adventures in SPWonderland”. This is not a full solution, but it will get you in gear.
These examples make clear the simplicity and engineering attention to detail in SharePoint 2010. Imagine what the Microsoft Fast enterprise search solution will deliver. Google must be shaking in its pointy little boots, the ones with the silver bells on them.
Microsoft Fast PowerShell Cmdlets
December 13, 2009
No, I didn’t know what this cmdlets word meant either. But if you are one of the lucky folks using SharePoint 2010 Fast Search, you may want to read “FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Windows PowerShell Cmdlets Overview (Beta)”.
The summary of the document says:
This document provides an overview of when to use which Windows PowerShell cmdlets in FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint in the functional areas: administration, schema, spell tuning, and security.
There is a hitch. I have not been able to read the document because I see this message:
I did some poking around on Bing and learned that Bing pointed to this same dead link. I then navigated to the Google’s Microsoft search index and learned that its pointer resulted in the same dead end. I sure hope that the Microsoft Fast search engine can find its cmdlets. I couldn’t. Sort of a search mystery.
Stephen Arnold, December 113, 2009
I wish to disclose that no one paid me to write this. Now who is on oversight duty on Saturday at 1800 hours. Oh, I remember. I must report this to the Jefferson Country Animal Protection Agency. Stray dogs, like errant download links, are a nuisance.
Is Another Search Engine Is Struggling
December 9, 2009
Updated: December 10, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to the Danish ComputerWorld story about the break up and planned sale of this property. You can read “Mondo indgiver konkursbegæring” for the basics and get more color in “Kollapset Mondo splittes op i fire dele”. You don’t need much knowledge of Danish to figure out Kollapset. With more than 300 search and content processing vendors in my files, I think it may be difficult for the herd to survive given the available vegetation. Translation: too many hungry wallets, too little money to satisfy their appetites. Stay tuned because SharePoint 2010 may have claimed its first casualty. I can’t figure out who gets what in this business defriending. Once again those with unbounded confidence in their abilities demonstrate that some folks don’t know what they don’t know. Note: the addled goose has conflicting information regarding the ownership and products of Mondo. More info as it flows from the land of the Danes.
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2009
I must report to the United Nations that I was not paid for this fuzzy wuzzy, imprecise, vague news item. Big surprise, eh?
Facets for Everyone: SharePoint and Metadata
December 5, 2009
SharePoint 2010 allows controlled term indexing and user-assigned index terms (uncontrolled indexing). You can find part done of a discussion of SharePoint 2010’s metadata support in “Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010 – A Key ECM”. The method contains a number of different steps. That’s par for SharePoint, a software system designed to keep Microsoft
Certified Professionals busy billing. The more important points emerging from the write up are:
- The facility to make controlled terms part of SharePoint can be useful. I wonder, however, however nested taxonomies can be imported via comma separated files. In my experience, correctly presenting categories and subcategories can be tricky. The sample taxonomy, according to the Web log post, was entered manually, and I will have to run some tests to determine if the CSV approach preserves relationships in the hierarchy of terms.
- The procedure for supporting metadata strikes me as less sophisticated than what is available in commercial solutions and certainly far less robust than the professional tool available from Access Innovations
- The mixing of user assigned terms and controlled terms selected from a list can lead to an indexing mess. Most people work from a small set of terms. Over time, documents are tagged with the limited selection of terms so that the result set is too broad. User selected terms fall prey to a similar problem. Users become habituated to a particular set of index terms. When working under time pressure, terms may be assigned by rote, not as a result of careful thinking about retrieval.
I am not a fan of mixing controlled vocabularies with user assigned terms. Machine indexing has some problems as well. The Microsoft approach, if I understand this write up correctly, is to make any type of term indexing available. That type of promiscuous indexing creates big problems as the corpus grows. How are old terms replaced with more current terms? Not referenced, and this common problem is a deal breaker for some types of enterprise information access. Could this approach be amateurish?
Stephen Arnold, December 5, 2009
Oyez, oyez, African Development Foundation, I was not paid to point out the flaws of indexing without a plan.
.”
SharePoint 2010 Installation References
November 30, 2009
Short honk: We make SharePoint 2010 hum last week. Some folks have not been in hog heaven. SharePoint Buzz collected a useful list of comments about SharePoint 2010. “SharePoint 2010 Beta Installation Roundup” provides quite a few interesting links. The list is worth reviewing. Quite useful.
Stephen Arnold, November 30, 2009
Oyez, oyez, Constitution Center. A freebie.
Atalasoft Identifies a Search Gap in SharePoint
November 27, 2009
Short honk: I know you a playing with the Microsoft Fast search sysetm for SharePoint. But Atalasoft has identified a gap in that Microsoft $1.23 billion technology suite. According to “Atalasoft Releases Vizit SP 2.0 With Visual SharePoint Search,”
The latest upgrade to Atalasoft’s (news, site) Vizit SP adds badly needed search abilities to the integrated document viewer that will enable users search, find and preview SharePoint documents from the Vizit SP 2.0 user interface.
For more information you may want to write or call Atalasoft. I had a tough time finding many details on the firm’s Web site. That just may be my second-rate search skills, of course.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2009
Important news flash for the National Science Foundation Web quality control and anti-fraud unit: This write up was my contribution to ShaerPoint search information. It’s a public service.
Microsoft and Google: Another Wal*Mart and Amazon Type Battle Emerges
November 26, 2009
I missed the Information Week story “Microsoft Drops Prices of Cloud Apps”. The link to that Wal*Mart tactic appeared in “Microsoft Lands UK Cloud Deal”. The intriguing comment in the story about Wal*Mart / Amazon-type price competition. How did Microsoft nail the UK postal service contract? As I read the story, Microsoft worked overtime to retain the contract. The write up concludes with this comment:
Meanwhile, Microsoft has recently stepped up efforts to sells its online applications as Google intensifies its efforts to replace Exchange/Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes on desktops. Earlier this month, it dropped its prices by up to 50% on Exchange Online. Companies using or migrating to Exchange Online include GlaxoSmithKline, with 110,000 seats, and Aon, with 36,000 seats.
Great salesmanship? Price cuts? My hunch is that pricing may have a better sales personality than a professional salesperson. Will the same approach take place in enterprise search? I think it has in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, November 26, 2009
I can’t resist. To the US Postal Service. I was not paid to write this postcard-sized article. Stamp it a freebie.
Microsoft Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
November 22, 2009
Short honk: If you have not downloaded Microsoft Fast 2010, you can do so at http://ow.ly/DH7M. I don’t know how long this link will be live. You must register to download the files. The first step will be to download and install the SharePoint Server 2010 beta. You may want to take a peek at the instructions here before launching the installation. A tip—When you try to print XPS files, we have better luck viewing the XPS documents within Internet Explorer 8.x. You can then print with fewer hassles from that application. Enjoy! Remember: ease of use, high performance, and bells and whistles that once cost $250,000 and up are yours for SharePoint 2010. A good test would be to get a Google Search Appliance and this Microsoft Fast 2010 package. Get two engineers and tell each to “Go”. Keep track of the time required to install, debug, and deploy the test index to one person. Which is better, faster, cheaper?
Some potentially useful related links are:
- Planning and Architecture for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (Beta)
- FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Windows PowerShell Cmdlets Overview (Beta)
- Site Admin and Central Admin for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (Beta)
- Monitoring for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (Beta)
- Search Technologies for SharePoint 2010 Products
The main Microsoft page for enterprise search ping my watcher with the fact that some changes were made. You can explore this splash page which features lots of uses of the word “fast” here. A quick check of the list of add ons reveals that most of the “old” Fast features are now listed. I wonder if some of the more interesting ones have been rewritter? Let me know if this is a cosmetics play or an engineering rebuild. (I hope for the latter.)
Have fun.
Stephen Arnold, November 22, 2009
I want to disclose to the US Department of Education that I was neither paid nor given special instruction to write this news item. However, you may want to make sure your knowledge of scripting is on the above average side before you get too frisky with Microsoft Fast 2010, the SharePoint edition.
Microsoft and the Cloud Burger: Have It Your Way
November 19, 2009
I am in lovely and organized Washington, DC, courtesy of MarKLogic. The MarkLogic events pull hundreds of people, so I go where the action is. Some of the search experts are at a search centric show, but search is a bit yesterday in my opinion. There’s a different content processing future and I want to be prowling that busy boulevard, not sitting alone on a bench in the autumn of a market sector.
The MarkLogic folks wanted me to poke my nose into its user meeting. That was a good experience. And now I am cooling my heels for a Beltway Bandit client. I have my watch and my wallet. With peace of mind, I thought I would catch up on my newsreader goodies.
I read with some surprise “Windows Server’s Plan to Move Customers Back Off the Cloud” in beta news. As I understand the news story, Microsoft wants its customers to use the cloud, the Azure service. Then when fancy strikes, the customer can license on premises software and populate big, hot, expensive to maintain servers in the licensee’s own data center. I find the “have it your own way” appealing. I was under the impression that the future was the cloud. If I understand this write up, the cloud is not really the future. The “future” is the approach to computing that has been here since I took my first computer programming class in 1963 or so.
I found this passage in the article interesting:
If you write your code for Windows Server AppFabric, it should run on Windows Azure,” said Ottaway, referring to the new mix-and-match composite applications system for the IIS platform. “What we are delivering in 2010 is a CTP [community technology preview] of AppFabric, called Windows Azure AppFabric, where you should be able to take the exact same code that you wrote for Windows Server AppFabric, and with zero or minimal refactoring, be able to put it up on Windows Azure and run it.” AppFabric for now appears to include a methodology for customers to rapidly deploy applications and services based on common components. But for many of these components, there will be analogs between the on-Earth and off-Earth versions, if you will, such that all or part of these apps may be translated between locales as necessary.
Note the “shoulds”. Also, there’s a “may be”. Great. What does this “have it your own way” mean for enterprise search?
First, I don’t think that the Fast ESP system is going to be as adept as either Blossom, Exalead, or Google at indexing and serving results from the cloud for enterprise customers. The leader in this segment is not Google. I would give the nod to Blossom and Exalead. There’s no “should” with these systems. Both deliver.
Second, the latency for a hybrid application when processing content is going to be an interesting challenge for those brave enough to tackle the job. I recall some issues with other vendors’ hybrid systems. In fact, these performance problems were among the reasons that these vendors are not exactly thriving today. Sorry, I cannot mention names. Use your imagination or sift through the articles I have written about long gone vendors.
Third, Microsoft is working from established code bases and added layers—wrappers, in my opinion—to these chunks of code that exist. That’s an issue for me because weird stuff can happen. Yesterday one Internet service provider told me that his shop was sticking with SQL Server 2000. “We have it under control”, he said. With new layers of code, I am not convinced that those building a cloud and on premises solution using SharePoint 2010 and the “new” Fast ESP search system are going to have stress free days.
In short, more Microsoft marketing messages sound like IBM’s marketing messages. Come to think of it hamburger chains have a similar problem. I think this play is jargon for finding ways to maximize revenues, not efficiencies for customers. When I go to a fast food chain, no matter what I order, the stuff tastes the same and delivers the same health benefits. And there’s a “solution accelerator.” I will have pickles with that. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, November 19, 2009
I hereby disclose to the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration that this missive was written whilst waiting for a client to summon me to talk about topics unrelated to this post. This means that the write up is a gift. Report it as such on your tax report and watch your diet.
SharePoint 2010 and the Four Gigabyte Gotcha
November 9, 2009
The goslings and I have been trying to figure out some of the implications of migrating from an “old” SharePoint to the whizzy new SharePoint 2010. We ran into a four gigabyte barrier and began the all-too-familiar practice of hunting for explanations, work arounds, and explanations. We found “A Couple of Worrying Changes in SP 2010 Products Compared to the v3 Equivalents” interesting. You will want to read this write up from Mindsharp and then check out the comments to write up.
First, there four gigabyte database size limit is still an issue. Mindsharp point out that “the only slightly bright spot is that it was also confirmed that SPD 2010 and SPD 2007 can be run together on the same client machine. So you don’t need two machines just to be able to work with v3 and v4 sites.”
With regards to this point, Mindsharp reported:
That problem area however fades rapidly into insignificance if you are a WSS 3.0 user using Windows Internal Database. As such you have a free database system which unlike the standard SQL Server 2005 Express it is based on does not have a 4GB database size limit. Well it looks as if people who are running this and have exceeded this figure (non-limit!) or about to do so will have serious problems if they want to upgrade their system to SharePoint Foundation 2010. I don’t have any other explanation that in yesterdays massive batch of over twenty KB articles on the “Pre-Upgrade Checker for WSS 3.0 SP2” two of them are about the Windows Internal Database and both of them are about warnings that you get if you exceed 4GB in the size of a database “The large size of a database can prevent it from being upgraded”.
Second, the comment that caught my attention was:
The second one is not a problem
Within reasonable limits, the second issue is not a problem. Take a look at the following article on Technet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663471%28office.14%29.aspx. Databases larger than 4GB (again, within reasonable limits) will be migrated to SQL Server Express with Remote Blob Storage during the upgrade process. BLOBs stored on the file system don’t count against the 4GB limit of SQL Express. Mike’s comment: Setting up Remote Blog Storage is probably beyond the possibilities of many people who today install the Basic Installation version of WSS 3.0. (Anyway Search databases still have a 4GB limit as they can’t use RBS). But my main objection is that having moved to an unlimited database size in one version, MS take it away in the next. Providing a workaround for some cases mitigates that very poor and unfair decision but doesn’t imo justify it.
We downloaded the Microsoft documents. Lots to think about when upgrading SharePoint. Great for billing clients too. Simplicity not. Hard database limits are very 1980 in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, November 9, 2009
No compensation, not even a wink from a Certified Partner. Too busy billing I assume.
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
