SharePoint Strategery

Alternate Access Mappings (AAMs) *Explained

2013-05-27T19:55:00Z

Based on many of the support cases that I've seen, Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) may be one of the least understood aspects of SharePoint and can have substantial impact on Search (both Crawl and Query). In this post, I'll document some of my experiences and insights on AAMs. Note: " Plan alternate access mappings (Office SharePoint Server) " is the best resource I've found for documenting AAMs, which covers both several configuration scenarios and troubleshooting common mistakes. Although listed...(read more)

SP2010: Troubleshooting ServerID Mismatch (Deleting Components)

2013-05-20T03:15:00Z

In a previous post , I described a scenario where removing/re-joining a SharePoint Server that hosts a Search component will lead to an inconsistency in the ServerID being referenced by the applicable Search component(s) and the SharePoint farm Configuration object for the applicable server. If you identify a ServerID mismatch, the recommendation is to remove (or move to another server) any component with a mismatched ServerID, then (optionally) re-add the component(s) to the original server(s)....(read more)

SP2010: Broken Topology and Hung Crawls Can Be Caused by ServerID Mismatch

2013-03-28T19:29:00Z

Removing or re-joining a SharePoint Server that hosts a Search component will lead to an inconsistency in the ServerID being referenced by the applicable Search component(s) and the SharePoint farm Configuration object for the applicable server. Translation you ask? Each Search component object has a reference to the SharePoint on which it runs. The component references its Server by both the name as well as the GUID assigned at the Farm level to identify each Server (e.g. the ServerID). For...(read more)

Beware crawling the non-Default zone for a SharePoint 2013 Web Application

2013-02-20T19:09:00Z

After playing for a while with SharePoint 2013 Search, I thought we were out of the woods regarding crawls of the non-Default Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) zone for a SharePoint Web Application. This caused all sorts of problems in earlier versions of SharePoint (primarily busted contextual scopes, broken social tagging, and workflow emails linking to the incorrect zone) because there is a built in assumption by other components throughout SharePoint that the Default zone is being crawled. I'm still...(read more)

Troubleshooting App Management WCF Endpoint Failures

2013-01-30T04:29:00Z

I was recently setting up federated search for SharePoint 2013 using Result Sources to a Remote SharePoint farm. That has already been extremely well documented by Steve Peschka , but did want to dive into the following error with the App Management service that I encountered along the way because it helps illustrate tactics for troubleshooting endpoint failures. Personally, the message " Get-SPAppPrincipal : There are no addresses available for this application " gives me little indication...(read more)

PowerShell to Rebalance Crawl Store DBs in SP2013

2013-01-29T02:58:00Z

In SharePoint 2013, simply adding a new Crawl Store DB doesn't cause the SSA to rebalance links among stores, and admins are unable to manually trigger a rebalancing process until the standard deviation of links in all existing Crawl Stores exceeds the threshold defined by the SSA property CrawlStoreImbalanceThreshold . Once this threshold is reached eventually, the Search Admin UI displays a control that allows the administrator to initiate the rebalancing process. Specifically, the CrawlStoresAreUnbalanced...(read more)

SharePoint 2010: Crawl process is stuck after SQL Server runs out of disk space

2012-11-02T19:48:00Z

Maybe this is cheating in terms of a blog post, but I wrote the bulk of this Support KB and wanted to share in as many ways as I could... SharePoint 2010: Crawl process is stuck after SQL Server runs out of disk space http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2691203 Consider the following scenario: You initiate a full/incremental crawl of the content source(s) in your SharePoint 2010 environment. Once the crawl begins, you find that the Crawl Store database (e.g. something such as 'SSA_CrawlStoreDB...(read more)

SP2010 Search *Explained: Crawling

2012-10-30T16:43:00Z

In broad terms, SharePoint Search is comprised of three main functional process components: Crawling (Gathering) : Collecting content to be processed Indexing : Organizing the processed content into a structured/searchable index Query Processing : Retrieving a relevant result set relative to a given user query In a previous post, I discussed SharePoint Search Concepts and Terminology and now plan to continue by further exploring aspects of the Crawling process ( Note: although this...(read more)

Troubleshooting the SSP Search Indexer for MOSS 2007

2012-09-10T14:34:00Z

It's time to set aside my SharePoint 2013 farm and get into the way-back machine to troubleshoot the Indexer for MOSS SharePoint 2007 Shared Services Provider (SSP)... (As I mentioned in a previous post on Search Terminology, I try avoiding the term "Indexer" because it has a muddied connotation in SharePoint 2010 & 2013. However, given this relates to SP2007, consider this post one of those exceptions) Isolate failures that occur during a crawl (e.g. problems with the content being crawled...(read more)

Deploying SharePoint 2013 SSA Across Multiple Servers Using PowerShell

2012-08-24T20:31:00Z

Update: Since the release of SharePoint 2013 RTM, I've made some modifications in an effort to simplify things (e.g. removing the unnecessary command line parameters) as well as improving the functionality (e.g. ability to provision multiple index partitions, register a Managed Account, clean up the inactive topology at the end). The core functionality has remained largely the same as the previous script, so it should still work, too. As always, I'm interested to hear your feedback, suggestions...(read more)