I will be presenting at Tech•Ed 2009 in LA, May 11-15, 2009. SharePoint Search Challenges and Tricks Abstract Many organizations struggle with SharePoint search configuration when it falls outside simple document search. This session presents strategies for handling special search scenarios like large files and images. This session also presents techniques for metadata tagging of files that are outside of the control of the search team. The tips and techniques are presented as patterns that can be used in many different search situations. Read More →

Microsoft’s Office Sustained Engineering blog has announced the release date of Office SP2 including the Office servers. From my perspective I see the importance of the following ECM improvements: Enterprise Content Management (ECM) The performance and stability of content deployment and variations feature has been improved. A new tool has been added to the STSADM command-line utility that enables a SharePoint administrator to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors. Read More →

Join us for the March 11th meeting of the Central Texas SharePoint User Group! Stump the Panel! March Program Description: This month we’re going “Back to Basics” with a Stump the Panel Session. SharePoint experts Matt McDermott, Brad Freels, Coan Dillahunty, Bruce Weatherford, and Janet Taylor will be answering your toughest questions! We will be giving out $10 Starbucks gift cards to the first 10 people who ask questions and if you actually stump the panel, you will be rewarded with a $25 Barnes and Nobles gift card! Read More →

Ever since moving to Vista and Office 2007 and MOSS everyone I know with this same configuration has complained about the constant prompting in Office 2007. Here is the scenario and the fix as detailed by one of our AWSOME Desktop Support Engineers at Catapult, Greg (Awesome-O) Tate: What’s the difference? I found a fix for the annoying Vista prompts in SharePoint, and both work well on domain computers connected internally and externally. Read More →

Vegas anyone? Microsoft has finally announced that the 2009 SharePoint conference will be held October 19-22, 2009 at the Mandalay Bay Events Center. This is your chance to get up to speed on SharePoint “14” (or whatever they are going to call it by then…)! Jump over to http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/spc2009.aspx for all the details. Cheers! Read More →

What do you do when you open your Search Administration site and it looks like this? Or you open your Search Queries Report (SpUsageSSPSearchQueries.aspx) looks like this: Or every time you open the Search Query Report you see the following in your Event Logs: Error Details Event Type: Error Event Source: DCOM Event Category: None Event ID: 10016 Date: 1/30/2009 Time: 2:16:35 PM User: foo\srv_moss_ssp_app Computer: MOSS Description: The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {BA126AD1-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E} to the user foo\srv_moss_ssp_app SID (S-1-5-21-1929346206-854414880-475923621-21603). Read More →

Paul Andrew has just announced that the SharePoint Disposable Object checking tool SPDisposeCheck has been released into the wild. Jump over to: http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2009/01/29/spdisposecheck-v1-3-1-is-released.aspx and have a read. If you are a developer and don’t know about the issues related to disposable objects in SharePoint then have a read of Roger Lamb’s blog post on the topic. Cheers! Read More →

I recently helped a client with a crawl configuration that turned out to be a bit trickier than I expected. The client has a page that generates “hidden” links to a library of PDF documents. The URL to this page was simple enough: http://www.docs.company.com. This page had several links on it that categorized the folders and files to facilitate the crawl process. For example: http://www.docs.company.com/documents/public/documents/resources/getdocs.foo?Division=Monterey%20Coast This page renders another page with links to the actual documents with URLs like: Read More →

I am happy to say that I have been renewed as a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server MVP for another year! Each year begins with looking at my e-mail for the renewal notification. I am pleased and honored to be considered in this great group of talented folks. Thanks Microsoft! Read More →

For all the bashing we give SharePoint Designer, there are some very cool, though poorly documented, features. For example, have you ever found yourself creating a style sheet from a graphic provided by a designer? Did the designer give you every hex color value? Would you like to be able to select the exact color and be self sufficient? Here is how I use SharePoint Designer to solve the problem. Read More →