Friday, May 7, 2010

Managed Paths

Well, I have been bitten bad by these and that is why I am blogging about them.

So, in essence, managed paths provide a way to organize your content and standardize the navigation. There are two type of managed paths:
  1. Explicit inclusion:
    Explicit - ONLY one
    Inclusion - the path is included
    So together these two words mean that when you define a site-path as explicit inclusion, you can create only one site collection in it and the path you define will be used for navigation (i.e. the site collection will be created directly at the managed path and can accessed by simply typing the URL upto the managed path)
    Eg: Your site: http://intranet.company.com/  OR http://intranet/
          Manged path: sales
          This will create the ONLY site collection at the URL accessed as http://intranet.company.com/sales OR http://intranet/sales
          Typing these URLs in the browser will open the site-collections home/default page.
     
  2. Wildcard exclusion:Wildcard - Any or multiple
    Exclusion - the path itself is not included
    This means, when you define a site path as wildcard exclusion, you can create multiple sites under it and the site path itself is will not be included (i.e. there will be NO site-collection at the managed-path URL itself. All the site-collections will be created under the managed-path)
    Eg: Your site: http://intranet.company.com/ OR http://intranet/ 
    Manged path: projects
    Now when you create site collections the site-collection name will be appended to 'projects' and the URLs will look like http://intranet.company.com/projects/projA, http://intranet.company.com/projects/projB  OR http://intranet/projects/projA, http://intranet/projects/projB
    Typing the URL upto the site-path only, like http://intranet.company.com/projects OR http://intranet/projects, will give a '404: Page not found' error. You have to type the site-collection name to access a particular site-collection.
When you create a web-application two managed-paths are created by default:
  • root (/) - explicit inclusion
  • sites - wildcard exclusion
Its good idea to keep the root-site as explicit inclusion because it will allow users to browse to the home/default page when they access the site using the web-app name only, like http://intranet.company.com/ OR http://intranet/. If you make the root as wildcard exclusion accessing the above URLs will give the 404 error.

WARNING: Plan your managed-paths carefully and before you create your site-collections. Once you have created them DO NOT change them EVER. The reason is if you want to change a managed-path from say 'explicit inclusion' to 'wildcard exclusion' later down the road, the obvious thing you would do is delete the original entry for the managed path and add it back again (there is no edit option).
Sharepoint will allow you to do this without any problem or warning, BUT the site-collection you had will be deleted with the managed-path.


Deleting a managed-path deletes all the site-collections under it.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Passed MCTS: MOSS 2007 Configuration!

Gave the MCTS certification for SharePoint Server 2007 (70-630) a week ago and passed with a score of 929/1000.
Well the exam was bit simple compared to what I expected. But it was my first certification so I am glad it went well :)

Now thinking of appearing for the WSS Configuration exam 70-631. Lets see how that goes.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Hide 'My Site' and 'My Links' links

I have searched about this particular issue a lot. And all of the results guide me as to how to hide the link either using CSS or changing the master page in SPD. Bottom-line there has to be some customization to achieve this.

However I always wondered if I have not allowed the users to create 'My Sites' (self-site creation disabled) then why should SharePoint show the 'My Site' link. There has to be a direct/simple solution to fix this.

I just stumbled upon the solution a few days back and its a simple permission setting. Here is how to do it.
  1. Open SSP Home
  2. Click 'Personalization Service Permission' link
  3. Click 'NT_AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users' (will hide link for all users in the farm)
  4. Uncheck 'Create personal site' permission. This will hide the 'My Site' link
  5. Uncheck 'Use personal features' permission. This will hide 'My Links' link
  6. Save
Thats it. The link won't show any more and users wont get the ugly error regading contacting admin blah blah.. when they click it accidently.

Now as this is a permission related setting we can allow selective users to create their 'My Site' while all others can not. Just create/use a AD group and add the relevant permissions to it. So now you can allow the Sales people to create My Sites while all others in your farm can not.

Hope this helps.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Clicking user-name behavior inconsistent: shows userdisp.aspx OR person.aspx

Today I noticed that clicking on certain user-names takes me to their profile page (personal/person.aspx) while the simple _layouts/userdisp.aspx page was shown for remaining users. Why should SharePoint behave differently for the same action?

A quick look at 'User Profiles and Properties' page in the SSP Home revealed the reason. It happened so that all the users were not imported from AD. So for user profiles that were imported and diplayed on 'View User Profiles' page in SSP, clicking their name in SharePoint site displayed their profile page. And for the users who were not imported and hence not displayed on 'View User Profiles' page in SSP, clicking their name simply shows the _layouts/userdisp.aspx page.

Running a full-import for the user-profiles fixed the inconsistency and clicking on any users name now displays his/her profile page.

One of our customers requested to show only the simple _layouts/userdisp.aspx page instead of a full blown profile page for all users. To achieve this we just deleted all the imported profiles and disabled the import schedules.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Crawler architecture in SharePoint 2007

Bill English has written a nice article about the architecture of crawler in SharePoint 2007.
Here is the link: http://admincompanion.mindsharp.com/BillBlog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=83

Monday, October 5, 2009

Search results not generated even when contents are indexed

Background:
Search is configured on the MOSS Server and contents are indexed properly.
However no results are generated when user tried to find the data that exists on the site.

The users are using the URL http://sharepoint.domain.com/ to access the site at http://servername/

Cause:
Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) settings are not set properly.

Resolution:
  1. Add http://sharepoint.domain.com/ URL in the default zone
  2. Add http://servername/ in the intranet zone
  3. Re-run the crawl
The results will be displayed to the users now.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Exchange Public Folders versus SharePoint

SharePoint Team's blog gives a comparison between the two and confirms that the public folders will be available in Exchange 2010 and will be supported till 2020.
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/04/01/updated-exchange-public-folder-vs-sharepoint-guidance.aspx