Here are the steps to move a site collection (from within a web application) to a different content source. This process has its own pros and cons and you should analyze the impact before deciding to do this step. Scenario:You have one content source (Local Office SharePoint Server sites) with two web application configured inside it (http://webapplication1.com, http://webapplication2.com). You need to move one site collection from this webapplication1 to a different content source so that you ... [More]

SharePoint does not provide an option to export crawl logs from the Search crawl. The following set of queries can be executed in the database to export the list of errors from the crawl logs. select * from MSSCrawlErrorList with (nolock)This query will return the different types of error that can be generated by the search crawl. Keep a note of the ErrorID for the error that you want to exportExample: ErrorID 692 is for "The crawler could not communicate with the server. Check that the server... [More]

The incremental process is dependent on the protocol handler being used. We will first attempt to get changes from the last crawl.  We do this through MSDMN.exe process and hit a webservice called sitedatawebservice.  The URL is: http://servername/_vti_bin/sitedata.asmx How to detect changes before starting incremental crawl: This can all be accomplished by a series of SQL queries. The first table you need to check is the MSSChangeLogCookies table within the Search database. This ta... [More]

User profile import started throwing error all of a sudden. Be it either full or incremental, it always ends up with the following error in the crawl log. This item could not be crawled because the repository did not respond within the specified timeout period. Try to crawl the repository at a later time, or increase the timeout value on the Proxy and Timeout page in search administration. You might also want to crawl this repository during off-peak usage times. OR The server is unavailable... [More]

Adding a rule in the search scope results in the error "The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure" [More]

Sites created in a non-English language are missing the All sites and All people search scope in the search box in the upper right corner of each page. Only the This site: search scope appears in the drop down box. To fix this, follow these steps (the example is for a site created in Dutch): Go to the Site Collection level and choose Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Modify All Site Settings.Click Search Scopes under the group Site Collection Administration.Click New Display Group.The tit... [More]

SharePoint does not offer the requisite technology necessary to comply with the latest regulatory demands. It fails to be forensically sound in several areas: It cannot search for every piece of relevant data because it does not index all critical content due to its lack of connector support. Even fundamental document types like PDF require a third party connector before they will be indexed It enhances performance through “jump out” (process used to achieve performance by stopping... [More]

  I have encountered this issue quite a number of times in my farm. The issue becomes more difficult to troubleshoot if the tracing stops and there are no logs present. But I have been able to fix most issues related to search by following these steps.   Issues I have fixed using these steps are:  Your search cannot be completed because of a service error. Try your search again or contact your administrator for more information. Content index on Portal_Content co... [More]

I had an issue with configuring the Windows SharePoint Services Search Service. There is nothing in the SharePoint logs which suggest any problem. A few lines in the log does not provide any help. 01/08/2009 18:52:53.19  w3wp.exe (0x2C6C)                        0x1AE8 Search Server Common           MS Search Administration... [More]

MSS search has been broken for a few weeks now. One of the issues with the fault has been that MOSS had stopped writing to the error logs so we had no way of finding specific error inforation. I logged a call with Microsoft because of this and they suggested that i recreate the SSPs as they must be coorupt. I tested this by creatiing a new SSP and true enough it did allow search queries and returned results. But, recreating our SSPs is no small job because once you do so you have to recreate al... [More]