Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog : Hotfix

Announcing: Availability of Infrastructure Updates

enterprisesearch — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:08:13 GMT

As announced on the SharePoint Team blog this morning we released to web three new important updates that affect SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Project Server 2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express and Project Professional 2007.

The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) (Download X86, Download X64) is particularly important from a Search and SharePoint Server 2007 perspective as it contains the new Enterprise Search features that were shipped in Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express that were are not already in SharePoint Server 2007; this includes Federated Search capability, a unified administration dashboard and several Search core platform performance updates.

For an overview of the new federation features please check out this short video which covers how to configure a federated location and configure one of the new federated search Web Parts to show results from that location.

There’s also a growing number of articles on TechNet and MSDN that cover configuring and troubleshooting federation and extending federation with Federated Search Connectors.

The screen capture below shows how federated search results show up on a results page – the results on the right hand side and top left are federated results, the ones at the bottom left are from the local index.

The new Search Administration Dashboard consolidates all of the Search related admin activities into a single place – there’s also some new functionality in the dashboard (There’s greater granularity for content source crawl history and a convenient list that shows currently running crawls and durations for example) and it makes the Search Administrators job much easier by keeping everything close at hand.

The UI looks like the screen capture below:

The update leaves the old Search admin pages intact, the links to them stay in Central Admin (Along with a new link to the new dashboard) so if you’ve made any changes to them or just prefer to use the existing admin pages you’re free to do so.

The other changes are all under the hood and improve Index and Query performance as well as fixing a few bugs. Check out the KB articles below for more details.

Description of the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)

Fixes Included in the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB953750)

Please read this post on the SharePoint Team blog and the installation instructions thoroughly before you install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) and the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) on SharePoint Server 2007 or Search Server 2008.

Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Search Server 2008)

Finally, if you’re wondering why the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) and the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) applies to Search Server 2008 then you’re probably not alone!

There’s a very good reason for both – Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express are built on the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 platform (hence the need for the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695)) and secondly the Search features are from SharePoint Server 2007 (hence the need for the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)). The latter update includes a few bug fixes since Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express launched.

We strongly recommend that you install the updates that apply to you as soon as your patching and maintenance schedules permit.

Richard Riley
Senior Technical Product Manager
Microsoft Corp.

New hotfix package for Lotus Notes Protocol Handler

enterprisesearch — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:40:10 GMT

If you're working with searching Lotus Notes with SharePoint Server 2007 or Search Server 2008, you may have hit one of the following problems:

"You configure SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl a Lotus Notes content source. In the Manage Content Sources page, you add a new content source by specifying a database name. When you edit the newly created content source, the database name is not listed in the Database Name list."

"You configure SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl a Lotus Notes content source. You first perform a full crawl for the content source. However, when you click Edit content source for the content source, and then you click OK, you have to perform a full crawl again before you can search the content source. This behavior occurs even if you did not change any settings for the content source."

Although a work around is possible by using administration tools like SharePoint Search Admin (http://www.codeplex.com/searchadmin) we recently released a hotfix to fix the issues – KB950280 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950280 ), it also solves several other bugs including a fix for the German wordbreaker - if you have problems searching compound words like “Riesentorte” and “Baumgarten”, this hotfix should solve the problem.

Remember, if you have not applied Service Pack 1 on SharePoint Server 2007, please apply it before you install this hotfix. There’s no SP1 requirement for Search Server 2008.

Jie Li
Partner Technology Specialist
Microsoft China

Crawling case-sensitive Web content in SharePoint Server 2007 and Search Server 2008

enterprisesearch — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:59:41 GMT

The hotfix for enabling case-sensitive URL's to be crawled with MOSS is pretty well known http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932619 (The fix is also included in MOSS SP1) but what is maybe less well known is that you also need to enable the same registry key in Search Server 2008 to crawl case-sensitive URLs - i.e. it's not switched on by default in MSS. This is also true after installing SP1 for MOSS, you'll need to set the registry key afterwards to enable the fix.

Following the KB article enables case-sensitive crawling, it doesn't enable case-sensitive searching. So for example, MOSS and MSS will be able to successfully crawl and index a URL of http://SERVER/Site/content but a query of "QUERY TERMS" will return the same results as a query of "query terms".

Richard Riley
Senior Technical Product Manager
Microsoft Corp

Crawling Sites Protected by Forms or Cookie-based Authentication with Enterprise Search in SharePoint Server 2007

enterprisesearch — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 22:45:00 GMT

Learn how to use Enterprise Search to crawl sites that are protected by forms or cookie-based authentication, and walk through creating a sample custom security trimmer for trimming the returned search results… Read the full MSDN article here

Related resources.

Read the KB article here

Download the required Hotfix here

Download a required tool here