I attended the Central Texas SharePoint User group the other night and one of my long time friends said “Where have you been? Why aren’t you blogging as much?” To which I could only reply “I have been BUSY!”. In the past month I have been to:

• Orlando for SharePoint Connections
• London for the Best Practices Conference
• Monterey, CA for my Dad’s 80th birthday
• Mountain View, CA to Teach for Critical Path Training
• San Jose for the Silicon Valley SharePoint Users Group
• Back to Monterey (I LOVE it there)

I am also working on some VERY cool projects with my Aptillon friends, Todd Baginski and Darrin Bishop. We should be publishing the results of this work soon, so be patient and you will see the work in print and in sessions soon.

Whitepaper?

Yep, Todd, Darrin and I have been burning the candle at both ends on Windows Phone and SharePoint. One challenge in the different authentication mechanisms that can be used to access the content and stay secure. We took what we have learned and with a LOT of help from great folks at Microsoft figured out the tricks to access SharePoint from Windows Phone through Unified Access Gateway. You can read all about it here: Building Windows Phone 7 applications with SharePoint 2010 Products and Unified Access Gateway (UAG):  http://bit.ly/W7UAGWP 

More Publishing

I received my copy of the May 2011 edition of SharePoint Pro Magazine and was delighted to see that the article that my buddy (and co-founder of Aptillon) Gary Lapointe and I wrote was published. It has been on their web site for a while at the SharePoint Pro site: http://www.sharepointpromag.com/article/sharepoint/monitor-sharepoint-user-profile-changes-129846, but it is so rewarding to see it in print. Gary got the head shot, which I find funny and rewarding at the same time, he drove the article and deserves the credit (plus I have since learned that for all his blogging fame, this was his first print article. Personally, I think he has a great future in the SharePoint world… ) Read the article and you decide.

What’s Next?

I am glad you asked! I am certainly not slowing down anytime soon. Here is what is on the horizon:

• San Antonio, TX May 23rd-25th for SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast – San Antonio
• Austin, TX June 8 for the Central Texas SharePoint User Group
• Online June 13th-17th for the Critical Path Training – SharePoint 2010 Administrator – Webcast
• Houston, TX June 20th –24th for the Critical Path Training – SharePoint 2010 Administrators Survival Camp
• Chicago, IL August 8th-10th for SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast – Chicago

What about…?

Willa and Ruby are doing great, thanks for asking! They are glad Dad is back home for a while.

I am often asked by Human Resource folks about “obscene content” in a SharePoint environment. However the content gets in, they don’t want it to be found. There are utilities like Forefront that will perform content filtering for SharePoint, but most fall short of filtering “everything”. For example, Forefront only filters documents, not list items, publishing pages, content editor web parts, or profile properties.

I got to thinking about this issue while listening to a recent interview with Rob Bogue on the SharePoint Pod Show. In his governance interview he was talking about configuring search in such a way that the act of searching for profanity returns a link to the Employee Code of Conduct.

So, you ask “What words?”. This makes me think of George Carlin’s Seven Words you cannot say on TV. I’ll soften the list for this post. We’ll try to keep this blog rated PG and use:

• Darn
• Dang
• Frick
• Shoot

I created a document with these words in it. I crawl the content and search for “frick” I get the following results.

My goal is to prevent the display of the document and direct the user to the “Employee Code of Conduct”.

Three Steps

There are three steps to this configuration:

1. Edit the noise word file and add the words, one on each line.
2. Edit the Thesaurus file and add a substitution set for the words
3. Create a keyword with synonyms of our words and a best bet to the code of conduct.

Edit the Noise Word file

1. Open and edit the noise word for for your language. In a default installation the files are found in the folder: c:\program files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\data\applications\<GUID>\Config. The GUID is the unique ID of the search application that you are configuring. If you have only one SSP you will probably only have one folder. For US English you will want to edit the file noiseenu.txt.  Add the words, one per line, save and close the file.
   • Darn
   • Dang
   • Frick
   • Shoot
2. Stop and Start the search service. This forces the indexer to read the changes to the file.
3. Perform a full crawl. In my test environment I reset the crawled content but this may be more than you want to do.
4. I tested my changes by searching for “frick”. The result is a “noise word only” query and the results are shown below.

You can get more information on editing the noise word file from this support article: KB 837847

Edit the Thesaurus File

1. Locate the thesaurus file in the same directory as the noise word file. For US English the file is tsenu.xml.
2. Create a replacement set for your words and substitute a unique “key” that you could embed in the target file. Your complete file should look like this:<XML ID="Microsoft Search Thesaurus">
<thesaurus xmlns="x-schema:tsSchema.xml">
<diacritics_sensitive>0</diacritics_sensitive>
<replacement>
<pat>frick</pat>
<pat>darn</pat>
<pat>dang</pat>
<pat>shoot</pat>
<sub>codeofconduct</sub>
</replacement>
</thesaurus>
</XML>
3. Optionally, edit your Code of Conduct file and add the substitution keyword. In my example I just added “codeofconduct” to the document metadata. In my case I only wanted the query engine to recognize the “bad words”. I did not need the document to be returned in the results because I am configuring a Keyword/Best Bet combination. Alternatively I could have added “codeofconduct” to my “Employee Code of Conduct” document. The trick here is that we are telling the query engine to use the string “codeofconduct” in place of our bad words. By adding the string “codeofconduct” anywhere in our document, the indexer will catalog the word and return the document at query time.
4. Restart the Search Service.
5. Recrawl the content

Add the Keyword and Best Bet

1. Determine the URL of your “Employee Code of Conduct” file.
2. Create the new Keyword and add the “bad words” as synonyms. Synonyms are not displayed. Create a Best Bet with the link to the Employee Code of Conduct document or page.
3. Test your configuration by executing a search for your bad words.

Credits

I did not develop this solution on my own. The idea came from Rob Bogue. The solution was aided by the folks on the product team who are always up to the challenge and come up with unique solutions to the problems I pose. Thanks!

Oh…and thanks to Bob Fox SharePoint MVP, before I met Bob I did not know what a bad word was…or how masterfully and poetically expletives could be strung together.

Notes

It must be noted that this solution works on MOSS 2007 after the IU has been applied. I noticed while testing this post that the Best Bet web part appears to behave differently between versions. Be sure that your web part looks like the one in the post or your mileage may vary.

There is a new TechNet blog specifically focused on IT Pro Content for SharePoint. http://blogs.technet.com/tothesharepoint/ provides notification and updates for the SharePoint related TechNet content and a vehicle for you to request topics and provide feedback to the Documentation Team. Next time you find yourself struggling to find content you can bounce to this blog and let them know! The writers on the team are passionate about providing the best content they can to you. They want the quality to reflect their own high standards. Omissions are usually due to "no one asking THAT question", once asked, the documentation will follow. I have found the team to be VERY interested in real-world deployments and scenarios that are not addressed by the doc. Tell the team, they listen!

The folks at TechNet have been busy writing new documentation on SharePoint Governance. There is a lot of great information for organization implementing SharePoint who want to implement a governance plan. The articles and white papers cover tools and techniques to help in your quest for order.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263341.aspx