Enabling Personalization

September 9, 2009 · Posted by YvonneHarryman
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A feature I commonly saw used in SP 2003 but not so much in MOSS was personalization. This is the ability for your end users to have a shared view and a personal view of their page. By default when you create a collaboration site or publishing site you may notice there are not options to personalize your page. If you were to create a team site the options would be there.

You might be asking where one would look to see these personalization options. Another common mistake is to look at the Site Actions menu, but no these options would be under the Welcome xx menu often displayed in the upper right hand corner of the page. This is because the changes are tied to the user’s profile.

To enable/disable personalization you will need to modify the AllowPersonlization property in your web part pages. As long as one of these zones has AllowPersonalization="true" you will then see the options to enable your end users to personalize their page and specifically to personalize only those zones that you denoted.

Enjoy! Yvonne M. Harryman

Tags:Configuration and Administration, Publishing Sites

 

Propagation waiting for initialization

March 17, 2009 · Posted by YvonneHarryman
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I recently ran into the following error and though this resolution might help others. In my scenario the error propagation status waiting for initialization was being shown for one of the query servers in a MOSS farm. You could see this by looking in the search administration in central admin. If you looked into the ULS logs it says it is unable to find the GUID that is associated with the folder for the query server index location. The GUID was associated with the folder for the query server index location and it did exist and appeared to have the correct permissions configured. In our configuration we have two query servers and only one is dedicated for crawling. We went to the index server and tried to access the query server index location. That was when we noticed we could get to one folder but not the other by typing \\<servername>. The host file on the index server was being updated with the incorrect IP address for the dedicated WFE for crawling and therefore the index server could not propagate the content to the query server. To resolve it I updated the index for web front end to use all web front ends for crawling and then reconverted it back to a dedicated WFE and this seemed to resolve any confusion SharePoint had about entering in the incorrect IP.

A few good links which cover similar topics/situations are:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261810.aspx

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=88

http://sharepointnotes.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/host-file-problems-when-using-dedicated-web-front-end-for-crawling/

Updated March 18th

Thought we fixed it but when I went in the next day the IP address reverted back! What we have done that is working was to switch the setting back to all WFEs for crawling and then manually updated the host file with the correct information by removing the reference for <IP for Query WFE 02> to <Server Name for Query WFE 01>. We left all of the references to the load balanced addresses of the web application pointing to the correct IP address and all seems to be working now with SharePoint using a dedicated WFE for crawling.

Tags:Configuration and Administration

 

Modifying Thesaurus Files

June 30, 2008 · Posted by YvonneHarryman
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When modifying Thesaurus files there are a few things to note that may cause you problems.

·         To get started read the following article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345186.aspx

·         The file that you should modify is at: [Drive]:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Office Server\Applications\

·         If the XML is malformed, SharePoint will throw an error which will be logged in the application event log. You will need restart the Office SharePoint Server Search service and try a query to get the error logs. Items that can cause this to happen are:

o   Special Character will cause an invalid format error. More details on this can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923317

o   The thesaurus expansions and replacements no longer work if you have stemming turned on in the search results web part.

o   Duplicate expansions with the same words

Tags:Configuration and Administration