BBB - Bas Blogging 'Bout SharePoint

GeoSearch with Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 - Part 3: how to use the latitude and longitude in your queries

2012-04-10T19:21:00Z

This is the third and last part of a series of blogposts about GeoSearch with Fast Search for SharePoint. I recently held some presentations about extending the power of Fast (on DIWUG and the Dutch TechDays 2012 ) and one of the subjects that I talked about was on how to search for locations, sort on distances etcetera. The recording of my sessions are available on Channel 9 in dutch. Part 1: why and how Part 2: the custom pipeline extension to enrich the Fast index with spatial data Part 3: how...(read more)

SharePoint 2007 to 2010 migration error when changing the UIVersion and masterpages

2012-03-27T14:15:00Z

I am with my team currently busy on a migration of our intranet from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Part of this migration, is updating the masterpages, so that we can benefit from every new SharePoint 2010 feature. The Problem Recently, two of our teammembers got the following error message after updating the UIVersion to 4 and setting a specific SP2010 masterpage. One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields.<nativehr>0x81020014<...(read more)

Upgrading Masterpage and UIVersion from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 without v4.master

2012-03-20T20:21:00Z

When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, several scenarios are possible. When using the database attach method , it's possible to stay in "V3" mode, or execute a visual upgrade too and make use of all SharePoint 2010 love. Whenever custom masterpages have been created for SharePoint 2007, the visual upgrade itself isn't too much of an option: it upgrades the UIVersion of the current web to V4, but the custom masterpage is replaced by the default v4.master, which ...(read more)

GeoSearch with Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 - Part 2: Custom pipeline extensions

2012-02-24T19:47:00Z

This is the second part of a series of blogposts about GeoSearch with Fast Search for SharePoint. I recently held some presentations about extending the power of Fast (on DIWUG and the Dutch TechDays 2012 ) and one of the subjects that I talked about was on how to search for locations, sort on distances etcetera. The recording of my sessions will be made available on Channel 9 . Part 1: why and how Part 2: the custom pipeline extension to enrich the Fast index with spatial data Part 3: how to use...(read more)

GeoSearch with Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 - Part 1

2012-02-24T18:51:00Z

This is the first part of a series of blogposts about GeoSearch with Fast Search for SharePoint. I recently held some presentations about extending the power of Fast (on DIWUG and the Dutch TechDays 2012 ) and one of the subjects that I talked about was on how to search for locations, sort on distances etcetera. The recording of my sessions will be made available on Channel 9 . Part 1: why and how Part 2: the custom pipeline extension to enrich the Fast index with spatial data Part 3: how to use...(read more)

I'm in the MXP for Architects!

2011-11-17T08:55:00Z

"the what for Architects?!", you might ask yourself? MXP stands for Microsoft eXcellence Program, and is a unique collaboration between my employer (Achmea) and Microsoft, with the aim to train people, who will operate as (technical) leaders within the Microsoft community within Achmea. The participants will be intensively be trained and coached (on the job) for two years, to increase their skill on several competences: leadership communication organizational insights strategic insights...(read more)

Fast Search for SharePoint caveat: Apply a sortformula with managed properties of type decimals

2011-11-05T08:53:00Z

Fast Search for SharePoint provides four great possibilities to influence the sort order of your resultset that was returned: Sort by Managed property Sort by Rank Sort by Formula Sort in Random order When I was working on my presentaion and demo for the diwug (Dutch Information Worker User Group) last week, to show off on how you can improve your search experience by using custom ranking models, custom sort orders and extending the pipeline, I ran into an issue that I wasn't aware off. When...(read more)

How to branch with the SharePoint scenario framework

2011-08-11T21:56:00Z

Waldek Mastykarz posted a superb post about one of those hidden SharePoint gems: the SharePoint scenario framework for multi-page forms. As Waldek showed off, this framework enables us to create some flows, but I was wondering if branched flows (for example, an easy yes/no) were possible. And it seems to be that it is!. This post shows off how to create a branched flow based on webparts and the SharePoint scenario framework. Disclaimer: some code has been taken from Waldek and has been slightly modified...(read more)

Fast Search for SharePoint problems - simplified architecture diagram

2011-08-09T21:54:00Z

Recently I had a few colleagues (and myself) who tried to install FAST search for SharePoint on their development workstation. Despite the well written installation guidelines on MSDN , they had several problems, and sadly enough, they all faced different problems. These problems varied from not able to crawl the content to not being able to query the indexed content. As most of the colleagues weren't too familiar with Fast (and SharePoint search in general), I decided to create a small architecture...(read more)

SharePoint 2010 - Fast Search Center site template not available (bug?!)

2011-07-27T10:08:00Z

Recently I found out that, my Fast Search Center was not available from the “New Site” menu. Both the english as well the dutch fast search template was not available. As I saw this happen before, I checked out the site collection features overview, to enable the “SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features”. I had to scratch my head twice when I saw that that feature was already activated: that feature should add fast search center templates to the available templates...(read more)

Fast Search for SharePoint gotcha - query suggestions

2011-07-19T10:07:00Z

At the company i work for, we do have around 30(?!) different labels and we decided that all websites of those labels, should be hosted on one platform: SharePoint 2010. This consolidation to one platform should really decrease costs, because we now have one generic way of developing, one platform to take care of and we can reuse a lot of components. One of the service applications that we wanted to reuse amongst all applications, is the Fast Query Service Application, as we have a Fast instance...(read more)

SharePoint Navigation broken after migration from 2007 to 2010

2011-07-05T22:02:00Z

When migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, it might be possible that your navigation is broken. The error I encountered was the following, but it can occur in more functions within the Navigation namespace. Object Reference not set to an instance of an object. Stacktrace: at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteWebSiteMapNode.FetchDynamicItems(PublishingWeb pubWeb, NodeTypes includedTypes, Boolean& websFetched, Boolean& pagesFetched) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing...(read more)

Fast: Adding managed metadata properties for the use with scopes in SharePoint 2010

2011-06-03T11:17:00Z

Lately I was working on a project that required to make use of scopes and some managed metadata properties in those scopes. For some reason, those managed metadata properties didnt show up in my scope selection dropdownlist, but I was sure that this metadata property was available in my Fast Managed Metadata properties list: as you can see, this property doesnt show up in my properties list: Whenever the SharePoint Search metadataproperties page is accessed, the option "Use in scopes" for...(read more)

Fast for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Crawler is Dead

2011-05-19T08:30:00Z

Lately, I installed Fast locally on my machine for development purposes, and it was working as intended. Crawled a lot of local (and external) content, but suddenly, my Enterprise crawler was not working. nctrl status showed me that the Enterprise crawler was Dead but WHY it was dead? I had no idea at all! Checking the event logs only told me: M05020-DHEVMU98:13260: Process crawler was not running, restarting it M05020-DHEVMU98:13260: Process crawler ports are already in use, will not start it After...(read more)

My SharePoint 2010 & Fast session is online!

2011-05-19T08:23:00Z

On the Dutch Microsoft DevDays (or Techdays, as they were called), I had a session about SharePoint 2010 and Fast. It was recorded and is now published on Channel 9. It's pretty weird to see and hear yourself presenting. If you are interested in: Fast Architecture Fast OOTB capabilities Fast configuration capabilities Ranking & Sorting you should watch my session. For your information, it's in Dutch. the presentation can be found at: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/DevDays/DevDays-2011...(read more)