Introduction

After working on several search projects it is clear that the out of the box search experience for images is, well, less than optimal. I mean look at how cool the Microsoft Live Search Images interface is, then, hover over an image and look at how cool the property display is!

How about the results in SharePoint

OK, I know, SharePoint is a document centric application and it is built for the indexing, searching and display of documents. I agree! What if your company’s documents ARE images, no matter where you store them? You may use file shares, SharePoint Document libraries, SharePoint picture libraries, and SharePoint Publishing Images libraries.

I have been working on a couple search projects lately and have found it very helpful to create a XML Results page in my Search Center.

It is easy enough to do.

1. In the Search Center choose Site Actions | Create Page.

2. Create a new Search Results page and call it XMLResults.aspx

3. Once the page is created, set the “Target search results page URL” property of the Search Box to “xmlresults.aspx”. This will direct any new queries from the XMLResults page back to the page, rather than the default Results page.

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Thanks again to my hosts at the San Antonio SharePoint User Group. I had a great time. You can download my deck and the samples that I demonstrated from my SharePoint Conference post. I have not added the information on image search that I presented last night. I am working on a three part post that will pull all of the necessary information together.

Thanks again to Rackspace, our gracious host, you guys take recycling to a whole new level!

The folks over at AMD have been busy getting their message out and they are using the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition to do it!

The team developed an EBE theme that goes with their corporate brand. No customizations beyond the XSL that you have to write to complete your concept.

I have been spending this week delivering a Microsoft sponsored SharePoint Delivery Planning Services session. If you are a Partner and you don’t know about SDPS you should check it out. If you are a customer and have Software Assurance you should talk to your Partner or Microsoft about taking advantage of this great benefit. In a nutshell SDPS is a service provided by Microsoft to assist customers in the deployment of SharePoint. Qualified Partners present 1, 3, 5, 10, or 15 day programs that include planning and (depending on your level of SA) proof of concept services to assist in the development of your vision for SharePoint.

I struggled with how to title this post because readers may not know that you have this issue (and if they do, how do you search for the issue?)

On the My Site profile page just below the default profile information there is a web part that displays the users availability from Exchange.

This web part connects to the Exchange Auto Discover Service to get the information. If the connection fails the whole web part vanishes. You may notice it for just a moment and then it disappears while the page is loading.

Scenario

A few days ago I knew nothing about SSL Termination, the Cisco ACE load balancer or Alternate Access Mapping. (OK, I lied, I knew enough about AAM to hate it. Mostly because I just don’t get it.) I was struggling with the following scenario. Spencer Harbar and Shane Young lead me down the right path.

SSL Termination and Load Balancing

We use alternate access mapping to handle the routing of requests to the two web applications Intranet and MySite. This configuration is a result of the Cisco Ace Load Balancer that is handling the SSL termination and request forwarding. The end user types in https://intranet.company.com and the load balancer handles the SSL part and forwards the plain old http request to SharePoint. This diagram shows the set up.

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!

Today while working on an SP1 MOSS installation our content editor web part started raising an error on key down. The only difference that we could determine is that this build was part of a slipstream installation of MOSS rather than RTM, then WSS SP1 and MOSS SP1. It appears that the JavaScript files BFORM.JS and FORM.JS did not get updated by the service pack.

Internet Explorer Script Error
An error has occurred in the script on this page.
Line: 3032 Char: 2
Error: Object expected
Code: 0
URL: http://server/_layouts/RTE2PUEditor.aspx

After hours of searching I found this post: http://blog.mastykarz.nl/2008/04/14/javascript-error-while-entering-text-in-the-content-editor-web-part/. So I am re-posting in hopes that it will make finding the info easier for others.

For those of you attempting to use Content Deployment in MOSS there has been a significant effort on the part of the folks at Microsoft to fix the many, many issues with the feature set. Content Deployment or Prime, is primarily used for publishing content from one site to another but has many other uses.

The KB articles are here:

WSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698

MOSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704/