Frequently used Search Terms in SharePoint

Here some of the Search Terms used in SharePoint. I found them very easy to understand:

Content Index: For SharePoint to search any content, the content must first be indexed. A content index combines details on all the information in the content sources. When users perform searches, the index is queried for content that matches the user-entered terms.

Crawl: For a search to be accurate and effective, the system updates the index regularly based on a schedule that you define. A crawl is the process by which the SharePoint index is rebuilt or updated to include new information:
a. A full update is a complete recrawl of all SharePoint content to update the index.
b. An incremental update only reviews items that have changed or been added since the last update.

iFilter: SharePoint crawls a number of file types to include content in the documents, the system does not automatically crawl some file types and requires you to install a special tool, called an iFilter, to allow the SharePoint search service to index the documents. For example, you must install an iFilter to support PDF document indexing.

Content Scope: Searching the entire content index or a content source may be too broad of a search. By way of example, if we lose our ID card visiting the front lobby of a office and go back to search for them, we limit your search to that lobby, not the entire building. In essence, scopes tell SharePoint what sections of an index to search. We may have scopes that represent smaller subsets of data such as user profiles or the human resources site, that allow users to limit their searches.

Managed Properties: We can configure site column as managed properties so that users can search for documents based on specific content in the Advanced Search interface. For example, if we have a customer site column, we can turn it into a managed property, and when users conduct a search from the Advanced Search interface, they can select Customer from a drop-down list. This refines the search and limits it to items relating to a specific customer.

Attempt a Question on SharePoint Search: Question on SharePoint Search

Best Practices Docs for SharePoint 2007

Microsoft has published some best practices for SharePoint 2007. Here are the links for the Best Practices on SharePoint:

1. Best Practices Doc On Operational Excellence

2. Best Practices Doc On Team Collaboration Sites

3. Best Practices Doc on Publishing Portals

4. Best Practices Doc on Search

5. Best Practices Doc on My Sites

6. Best practices for using disposable Windows SharePoint Services objects

7. Best practices while Common coding issues when using the SharePoint object model

8. Best practices: Writing SQL syntax queries for relevant results in enterprise search

9. Developing workflow solutions with SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Workflow Foundation

You may also be interested to see Free Books on SharePoint: http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2008/10/free-books-on-sharepoint-technologies.html

Accessing Multiple Document Control from Application Pages in SharePoint

We got a requirment where user needs to select the Document Library (We have 100's of Document Libraries) and upload multiple documents into the selected Document Library from a page other than OOB Pages. Since SharePoint comes with in built Multiple Document control we decided to use that and call this from an Application Page.

Multiple document upload control is an Active X control.In SharePoint we have “Upload.aspx” page in %\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS. This page contains Multiple Document Upload Control which is used by all the sites in the site collection to upload multiple documents. I copied the content of this file into another file with the name upload1.aspx for safety.

Following are the arguments which this control accepts:

1. List GUID - GUID of the list in which the docs will be uploaded
2. Root Folder - If we need to upload the docs in the folders inside the libraries. Not using this parameters.
3. Source - Not using this.
4. MultipleUpload - 1 indicates to use multiple document upload control

We have put a button in the application pages and redirected it using Response.Redirect with these 2 parameters. This opened the multiple document upload control and while uploding the documents uploaded into the List selected as the first parameter.

Videos on SharePoint

Microsoft has published some new videos on SharePoint Server:

Solution architecture for SharePoint Technologies

Customizing and extending SharePoint Server 2007: appearance and data sources

Configuring the Business Data Catalog

Configuring Forms Services and Excel Services with Office SharePoint Server 2007

You may also find interesting to see:
Videos on SharePoint Desinger: http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2008/04/sharepoint-designer-videos.html
Developer Screen Cast: http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2008/04/developer-screen-casts.html
Demo on SharePoint: http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2008/10/demos-on-sharepoint.html

Free Books On SharePoint Technologies

I tried to consolidated some free books available on SharePoint (MOSS) and WSS. I keep updating this post as I get more free books.

Here are the links:

1. Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007, part 1
(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=79552&clcid=0x409)

2. Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007, part 2
(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=85548&clcid=0x409)

3. 7 Development Projects for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
(http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/2/f/02f0f661-88e1-43c2-b523-88d2e9e6802f/7%20Development%20Projects%20with%20the%202007%20Microsoft%20Office%20System%20and%20Windows%20SharePoint%20Services%202007.pdf)

4. Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007
(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=79589&clcid=0x409)

5.Office SharePoint Server 2007 Technical Library
(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BA006584-711D-4CE7-9E1F-181AEDF6434A&displaylang=en)
Have some issues with Vista.

6. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Best Practices

7. SharePoint Server 2007 Software Development Kit
(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D94E307-67D9-41AC-B2D6-0074D6286FA9&displaylang=en)

8. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Software Development Kit
(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=05E0DD12-8394-402B-8936-A07FE8AFAFFD&displaylang=en)

9. Records Management Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92720)

10. Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007

(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=110087)

11. Web Publishing and Planning Guide with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92330)

12. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Document Management

(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=92638)

Information Type supported for lookup columns

While creating columns (Site Column or Plain Column) in SharePoint list and selecting type of column as lookup column, only the column from the selected list, having type of information as Single line of text or Calculated can be selected. Other columns having information such as Multiple line of text, Choice – Drop down list, Choice – Radio buttons , Choice – Checkbox,
Number, Yes/No, Person or Group and Hyperlink does can not be selected as a lookup column. So need to be careful while desinging the solution.

Interview Questions on SharePoint

Prepare for SharePoint interviews with Multiple questions and with Interview questions on SharePoint on:

http://qmoss.blogspot.com/

Also these questions will help to prepare for SharePoint Certifications.

Getting All the Web Objects URL in a SharePoint farm using PowerShell Scripting

I tried to access the Web Objects URL in SharePoint Farm with the Power Shell. It was really easy to get them. Following are the steps to do so:

1. To use Power Shell for SharePoint we need to log in into the server as the SharePoint object Model does not allow to access remotely.

2. Now we need to add the Microsoft.SharePoint Assembly in the Power Shell environment. To add the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly to the PowerShell environment we need to run the following command in Power Shell:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load(“Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c“)

We can also use the static method LoadWithPartialName on the Assembly class SharePoint. The syntax would be:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
(Although the LoadWithPartialName has been deprecated.)

3. Now created functions and filters. With these we will get different objects and pass them through the Hierarchy. (Check the SharePoint Hierarchy)

function AcessFarm
{
return [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm]::Local
}

This function will return the SPFarm object. We will pipe this object with the next Filter. This will get all the web services on the SharePoint Farm.

filter AcessWebServices
{
$webServices = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebServiceCollection($_)

$webServices
}

filter AcessWebApplication
{
$_.WebApplications
}

filter AcessSiteCollection
{
$_.Sites
}

filter AcessWeb
{
$_.AllWebs
}

Now we need to pipe these functions and filters to get a table of WebURL of the Web objects in the Farm. The command looks like:

AcessFarm AcessWebServices AcessWebApplication AcessSiteCollection AcessWeb format-table -property url

The last format-table will put the output in a table format and the URL property of Web Objects will display only the URL's of all the Web Objects.

PowerShell is very strong feature and SharePoint Admin can do the magic with this. With the above command we can now access all the properties and method of SPWeb Objects. We can do many further advanced tasks with these objects.

You may also find interesting to read:

Getting SharePoint Server Version with PowerShell and Deploying custom SharePoint site collection with the help of PowerShell in Windows Server 2008

Demos On SharePoint

Following Demos are very useful to learn SharePoint (I found these demos on Microsoft site):

1. Configure a SharePoint Server 2007 site to receive e-mail

2. Deploy an administrator-approved form template

3. Simplify collaboration with a SharePoint team site

4. Streamline business processes with forms and workflows

5. Create a presentation from slides in a slide library

6. Create and manage a SharePoint calendar

7. Make it easier to find information with views

8. The new SharePoint Server 2007 Fluent interface

9. Prepare to back up files on Office SharePoint Server

10.Connect people to information with portals

11.Enterprise Content Management with SharePoint Server 2007

12.Different ways to check documents in and out of a SharePoint site

13.Use Word 2007 to post to a SharePoint blog

14.Create a recurring meeting with a Meeting Workspace in a SharePoint calendar and then connect it to Outlook 2007

15.Collaborate using a recurring meeting in a SharePoint calendar

16. Back Up Office SharePoint 2007

17. Using SharePoint to manage your classroom

18. Search for information on a SharePoint site

19. Add KPIs to your SharePoint site

20. Display KPIs in a dashboard

21. Give a user access to a SharePoint site

22. Find just the data you need by using Filter Web Parts in a dashboard

23. Make better business decisions with reports and dashboards

24. Enable Excel Services and data connections for a SharePoint team site

25. Use a Document Workspace to collaborate on a document from a SharePoint library

26. Use an approval workflow in SharePoint Server 2007

27. Create and publish Web pages on a publishing site

SharePoint Trainings and Project Work

We (I and my team. Consist of people certified in SharePoint ) provide the SharePoint Training . We have three kind of courses available in SharePoint:

1. Beginner Level
2. Intermediate Level
3. Advanced Level

All these courses contains extensive case studies and tests at the end of each level. We have defined the course content for these three levels. We can send the course content on request on below email.

We also execute projects in SharePoint involving OOB features or customization of sites with Visual Studio. We can give stand alone code solution on SharePoint.

We also provide consultation on SharePoint Projects. We can also provide solution/feedback to your problems.

You can contact us on mossexperts@gmail.com