This article is only relevant for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007.

When there is a requirement to customise the appearance of a SharePoint site, the first consideration is the version being used.

Branding WSS sites

If the SharePoint version is WSS (free to install if you have Windows Server 2003), colour and image changes are possible along with minor layout changes. It is not possible to use WSS to produce an accessible SharePoint site.

The default theme of SharePoint looks like the following

Other built-in themes that have different colours and images only are available

Microsoft released 10 new themes for SharePoint in March 2009 and one of these could be used. Again, the structure of the site is the same and only colour and images have changed.

I recently had to export a site and import it to a different server.  Everything worked well using the stsadm export/import command.  EXCEPT when I tested adding a new content type in a Document Library, the document opened in Word 2007, but I got an error saying the Document Panel will not load and I was not able to add in any metadata for this document.

It turns out that I have two lookup columns on the site which contain metadata for a content type and to resolve this problem, I had to delete and recreate these columns, then add them back into the content type.

Luckily I had set these columns up in a parent content type and was able to push down these changes to the other content types inheriting from this parent.

 The logical architecture of Sharepoint 2010 has changed significantly from MOSS 2007.  From the session I attended yesterday at SPC09 the key improvements were highlighted as follows:

• Flexible deployment model
  • Pick which services in which environment
• Improved security model
  • Claims based authorisation
  • Cross-farm communication via web services
• Simplified administration model
  • Managed via central admin and PowerShell
• Service isolation
  • Each service app uses separate database and optionally different app poll
  • Support for multiple service applications for a service with different accounts and databases
• Multi-Tenancy
  • Some service apps can be partitioned to handle multiple tenants

Also mentioned in the session was the fact that Microsoft have released a set of technical diagrams and models relating to planning logical and physical architectures in SharePoint 2010 and upgrading from MOSS 2007.

Recently I had to create a fixed query page to bring back search results by department instead of searching by Document Library which wasn’t by Department.  I also set up a links web part for quick access to the fixed query results pages 

Step1

Run a full crawl

Step 2

Create a Metadata Property Mapping

Go to Shared Services Administration in Central Admin

Navigate to Search Settings – Metadata property mappings

Select New Managed Property

Enter the Property name

Select Include values from a single crawled property

Click on Add Mapping and select from the list an appropriate crawled property.

Select Allow this property to be used in scopes

Click OK to create the new mapped property.

Step3

Set scopes

In Search Settings select View Scopes

Select New Scope

Enter the title for the scope

Select Specify a different page for searching and enter the url

Click ok when complete

Find the new scope in the view scope list

Click Add Rules

In Scope Rule Type select Property Query

Under Property Query select the new metadata property created, then enter the value to be search

In Behaviour ensure Include – Any Item is selected

Select OK

Step 4

To create the results page

In the site Select Site Actions

In Site Actions Select Create

Under Web Pages Select Web Part Page

Enter the title, accept the default layout and select a document library to store the page (create a new document library for Fixed Query Results Pages)

Select create to create the new page

Add Paging and Search Core Results Web Part as shown above

Click Edit and Modify Shared Web Part for Search Core Results

Under the Results Query Options, select Query 2 for the Cross-Web Part Query ID

Under Fixed Keyword Query enter the managed property name and value eg DepartmentName:”Trauma and Orthopaedics”

Under Miscellaneous enter the scope : Trauma and Orthopaedics Dept

Click Apply and OK to save the changes

Step 5

To add to a links List

In Links List Click Add new link

Add the URL and a description for the link

Click OK

The links should now appear in the list

To configure a Search results page to return a column name in place of the document synopsis, follow the instructions below.  In this case we were required to replace the document synopsis with a custom column called DocumentSubject from the document metadata.

• Add the column name as a mapped property.
• Navigate to a search results page and Edit the page to access the web parts
• In the Search Core Results Web Part select Edit and Modify the Web Part
• In the Search Core Results settings window navigate to the Results Query Options
• Select the Selected columns and enter the column name to be displayed, in this case <Column Name=”DocumentSubject”/> and Click OK to save the change
• In Data View Properties click XSL Editor
• Navigate to the section beginning  <div class=”srch-Description”>
• To remove the synopsis from the search result, delete the section from as highlighted in the screenshot above
• Under the tag <div class=”Srch-Description”> enter the following line for the column name to appear in the search result
  <xsl:value-of select”=documentsubject”/> </div>
• Click Save to save the changes, click Apply and Ok the see the changes in the search results page.

The Search Result will now bring back the Document Subject for the document.

Thought I’d give some information around index files becoming corrupt on front end servers within a SharePoint farm.  This can sometimes happen due to a network or database failure while a crawl is in progress.  It will result in errors appearing in the Application Event Logs ressembling the following:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Office Server Search
Event Category: Search service
Event ID: 10038
Date:                       8/8/2009
Time: 9:53:02 AM
User: N/A
Computer: WFE1
Description:
Query machine WFE1′ has been taken out of rotation due to this error: The
content index is corrupt.   0xc0041800.  It will be retried in 15 seconds.
Component: c9dba2c2-0077-46f7-b352-aeeddb6ac2fd

In the case where there are multiple front end servers in the farm, end users will remain unaffected since their search queries will be served by the other front end server, but this issue can cause crawls to hang and will log errors to the application logs every time a crawl is attempted.

This happened on one of our production environments recently, and the first thought was that we should reset the indexes and recrawl the content (which would have worked, but would have taken about 3 days to re-crawl everything and we wanted it working by Monday morning).  So in trying to avoid a recrawl, we did the following:

• Open the Operations tab of the Central Administration site
• Select Services on Servers and choose the offending WFE from the list
• Stop the Office Server Search Service on the WFE
• Start the service again, but give a new location for the index file
• The next time the crawl runs, the index will be propagated to the new location and bring the server back into rotation.

Hope this helps avoid many hours of re-crawling content.