April 2011 - SharePoint Tips

Mattias Karlsson -Expert in Residence Thesaurus Files are a way for administrators to improve search results by creating synonyms or replacement words used in their queries. For example, you can create a synonym for the word SharePoint so when a user is making a search for the word WSS, you would also get results with the word SharePoint. The Thesaurus Files are located on the SharePoint server in the folder: %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office Servers...

Sean McDonough -Expert in Residence SharePoint 2010 is mirroring aware and utilizes the FailoverPartner keyword in its database connection strings to identify a SQL Server instance that is used for mirroring purposes. Upon learning this, it might be tempting to jump right in and start mirroring SharePoint databases for redundancy. Before doing so, though, you should be aware that the following requirements apply: • Less than 1ms latency between...

Kenneth Lo -Expert in Residence The single best way to share documents with your peers is using the "E-mail a Link" function that is built right in the Ribbon. Occasionally, your recipients do not have access to your SharePoint environment, and you need to resort to the old-fashioned route by emailing these email attachments. Below is a two-step process that lets you send documents that are stored in SharePoint directly via Microsoft Outlook...

Mattias Karlsson -Expert in Residence Authoritative Pages are a way for administrators to tweak search results. When adding Authoritative Pages, the relevancy ranking of a search result is calculated by how many clicks from the Authority Page the sites are located. These pages can then be designated in four different ways: most authoritative, second-level authoritative, third-level authoritative, or non-authoritative. Managing these Authority Pages...

Mattias Karlsson -Expert in Residence An easy way to improve the search relevancy in SharePoint is to use Keywords and Best Bets, which are created by the Site Collection Administrator as a way to promote important information to end users. For example, you might know that a common search query for employees is the word “benefits” to help them find out the different benefits for an employee. But since the word “benefits” is...

Mattias Karlsson -Expert in Residence Search scopes is a way to define a subset of information to make the search result more accurate. The can be very useful when you want to enable searches in a specific content source or for a specific type of content. Search scopes are in SharePoint 2010 created at the Search Service application. Go to Application Management -> Manage Service applications and click on your Search Service Application. On the...

Mattias Karlsson -Expert in Residence When content databases had grown too large or if you for other reasons want to move a site collection or collections from on content database to another you can use the stsadm operation mergecontentdbs. The stsadm command allows you to either move all site collections from one content database to another of use an xml-file as input file with all the sites that should be moved. The xml-file needs to be in the same...

Mattias Karlsson -Expert in Residence In some occasions such as archiving or when moving sites between content databases it is possible to set site collections to read-only. By setting the site collection to read only users are still able to browse and access the content but it will not be possible to add or change content. This can be done using PowerShell to automate it in e.g. a lifecycle plan for site collection but can also be done using Central...