SharePoint Saturday Austin was terrific! I am grateful for all the speakers that traveled to Austin as well as the attendees (some from as far away as Nebraska!) that came and made it a wonderful collaborative and educational day. We could not have done it without the sponsors and volunteers. All in all an amazing show for our first attempt! SharePoint 2010 No Code Search Center Customization My session was fun, I love it when the audience gets involved and really thinks about what I am presenting. Read More →

Crawl Troubleshooting Every once in a while SharePoint Crawler will behave unexpectedly on web sites that you wish to crawl. You may get error messages that you can understand and help you troubleshoot the problem or you will get just one error that is not helpful at all. Either way, I have found that you can troubleshoot the crawl by using the following technique with Fiddler Web Debugging Proxy (http://www.fiddler2.com). Using Fiddler we are going to configure SharePoint Search to crawl through Fiddler as a Proxy so we can watch the traffic. Read More →

Troubleshooting SharePoint Search When I first started working on SharePoint Search I was troubled by how hard it was to figure out what was actually happening when the crawl was running. The crawler/indexer is a black box that I could not see into. This made it very challenging when I would open the crawl logs and see a cryptic error message. (Often the cryptic message is not the fault of SharePoint Search, the log is just bubbling the error up, often from the iFilter. Read More →

I recently received a question from a client who has been working on improving the quality of their search results. They are crawling their non-Microsoft CMS with SharePoint and wanted to ensure that the Keywords that they entered in the CMS and were finally rendered in the Web pages, would be findable in the search center. The keywords were emitted as META tags in the page. <meta name="keywords" content="Elephant,Giraffe,Lion" /> After crawling the content a search for “Elephant” failed to return the page. Read More →

This is a demo I often do when asked about how I perform Search Center XSL changes to improve the SharePoint Search Center Search Core Results Web part display. This information is buried in a few of my other posts so I thought I’d call it out all by itself for clarity. I usually perform these steps right after I create a new Search Results page and corresponding tab in the process of customizing the tabbed Search Center as I explain in the post Getting Started with Search Results. Read More →

As I have taught, before a document property can be used in search results, it must be promoted to a Managed Property. Many properties are already managed properties out of the box. On several recent SharePoint 2010 Search projects I have used third party iFilters to solve specific document indexing challenges and needed to work extensively with Crawled Properties. For example: I want to extract XMP data from images like Latitude and Longitude I need to promote a particular field for use as Document Keywords I need to troubleshoot a specific iFilter Time and time again I have evangelized the use of supported third party iFilters like the iFilter Shop and their great selection of products to solve indexing challenges (rather than free crap). Read More →

Reposted from AC’s Blog: Next week brings the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in CA. The instructors at Critical Path Training will be in full force as we’re presenting over 14 sessions all week. We are also giving away over 120 SharePoint books at our booth with hourly book drawings and eight book signings throughout the week!!! But wait, that’s not all… we’re also giving away over $25,000 in SharePoint training to lucky winners throughout the week. Read More →

Some of my favorite demonstrations are about how to enhance the Search Results pages in SharePoint. I feel that presenting “actionable” search results can make the difference between a good search center and a great search experience. I am working on some new demos and decided that I need to commit the fundamentals to my blog so that my audience has the necessary resources to apply the guidance from my presentations. Read More →

Microsoft unveiled the SharePoint 2010 and Windows Phone 7 Training Course! If you are looking to create Windows Phone 7 mobile applications that integrate with SharePoint this is the kit for you. This kit was developed by Darrin Bishop, [Todd Baginski](https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Todd, and myself. We also worked very closely with Paul Stubbs, Dave Pae, and several engineers at Microsoft throughout the project. Without their help, guidance and willingness to dive in on problems we never would have finished! Read More →

Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you’re seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals? The SharePoint MVPs are the same people you see in the technical community as authors, speakers, user group leaders and answerers in the MSDN and TechNet forums. By popular demand, we have brought these experts together as a collective group to answer your questions live. Read More →