I have been presenting how I provision SharePoint 2013 Search for quite a while and have finally gotten around to publishing my script for provisioning a SharePoint Search Service Application with PowerShell. This script can be used to initially provision SharePoint Search in a multi-server environment. With minor tweaks it can also be used to alter an existing topology. There are a couple things that this script demonstrates:

• How to use a configuration file
• How to provision multiple servers from a script
• How to specify where each search component is provisioned
• How to set initial configuration parameters like Crawl Account and Search Center

Feel free to download and try it out. No warranty is expressed or implied!

As I sit here, back at home, Ruby laying on me, I am still in awe of what the folks at Combined Knowledge accomplished with the SharePoint Evolution Roadshow. The plan was pretty straight forward, take a bunch of speakers on a 12 city tour and present 20 sessions a day in 4 tracks. The logistics and permutations are daunting. Sure, it would be easier if they used the same speakers in every city, but they didn’t, only 5 of us committed to the entire tour. The rest of the speakers were on the tour for one or more days. Next, you had to get us from place to place. Did I mention that one of the places required a plane flight? I’ll try to summarize a few of the high points in this amazing experience.

I struggled with what to title this post. I run across this all the time when evaluating “OPW” (Other People’s Work). If you navigate to a search results page that does not have a query defined and you see a whole bunch of “Default Results” then you know what I am talking about.

The Problem

This is what I mean. In the picture below I am on my “Customer” search page and I have not entered a search term, yet I still get results. My page is using a Result Source that is defined as: {searchTerms} BCSEntityName:DHTCustomer Which applies the search box term and adds the additional filter for my Customer entities from BCS.

One of the chores that I really wish Microsoft would make easier in SharePoint is configuring Forms Based Authentication (FBA). I know this could be quite a challenge and I know that “once you do it a couple times it is pretty easy”. But for us mere mortals who only configure FBA every so often it can be a bit tricky. My biggest pet peeve is copy and paste errors that TOTALLY crash the site. Then the joy of trying to figure out each setting that may have caused the error, only to find it’s caused by a quote that you thought was a double quote but tuned out to be something that looks like a double quote but is really an internet terrorist punctuation mark from hell sent to ruin your day. So, is there a “safer way” to edit your web.config files? Yes, there is.

We had a great turnout for the Austin SharePoint User Group this past week. James Hammonds (@jameswh3) and I presented SharePoint Conference 2014 in Review. This was our take on what was new, improved and “needs to be paid attention to” stuff from the conference. The biggest challenge was whittling down the conference content into 75 minutes! Here is a link to the Slide Deck.

Thanks again to our sponsor HBMG and the rousing and passionate (nearly evangelical) approach Manuel Zarate took to tell us about his company!

I am thrilled to have been selected by the SharePoint Evolution Roadshow to be a presenter. Steve Smith and the Combined Knowledge team never fail to put on one of the best SharePoint Conferences year after year. I have committed to the ENTIRE event, that’s 12 cities over two and a half weeks! The speaker lineup is awesome, I am proud to be counted in this fine group. Since we know some folks will be attending in more than one city I am planning on presenting 4 different sessions based on the location of the event. Here are the sessions I am preparing and freshening up.

Sources close to Microsoft revealed recently that Microsoft plans to combine their commercial chat and telephony client Skype with their enterprise communications server Lync. Though challenges still exist, industry analysts admit that this has been an obvious move on the part of Microsoft for some time.

Consolidation Issues

Insiders indicate that some of the major hurdles faced by the teams have been “internal communication” and “collaboration”, while others pointed to lack of a consistent user interface and “connectivity issues”, a source close to the deal indicated it was something else entirely. “When Satya Nadella was appointed CEO, he asked why this was still a problem, we told him that when the two teams met they tried to use Lync but the meeting attendees kept getting disconnected and we spent half the time troubleshooting Lync.” (Others indicated that no one had enough Skype Credit to host a meeting of that size.)

Do you use Best Bets? In SharePoint 2010 and before? Probably not. Don’t get me wrong, I think the IDEA of best bets is great. It is the implementation that misses on many different fronts. SharePoint 2013 introduces a better approach for Best Bets called “Promoted Results” that is a significant step forward in providing you (as the Search Administrator or Site Collection Administrator) to create a search experience that actually helps your users find the stuff that they seek.

To everyone who is was up to the challenge of attending my Thursday morning SPC14 session on Display Templates and Query Rules, Thank You! Thank You for getting up early on Thursday and most of all, thanks for being the best audience EVER!! I still have a few posts to put together on the details of each demo. If I am missing one you REALLY want to see ping me on Twitter and let me know which one I am missing.

Every so often I need a simple piece of code to make my life easier. Like “back in the day” when we needed an XSL template that belched every property out into the Search Results, so that we could see what we were doing. This is one of those pieces of code.

Create a Diagnostic Display Template

Follow the directions that I detailed for creating a new display template in SharePoint 2013. Once you have that complete, locate the RenderBody code and surrounding div tags. In the Item_Default template it looks like this: