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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

CMS Assessment Tool

The CMS Assessment Tool helps a user to identify valuable information to plan for issues that might arise when he migrates an application from the MCMS 2002 platform to Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The tool gathers the following information:

1. Lists of template files and the which features they use. From this information, you can determine the level of effort required to migrate each template
2. Information about your current infrastructure. This information can help you determine whether that infrastructure can support a side-by-side installation of MOSS
3. The tool lists characteristics that are not supported in SharePoint Server 2007
4. Statistics about your MCMS users and roles, resources, channels, and postings

Points to note:

1. The CMS Assessment Tool analyzes and reports only on managed code
2. The CMS Assessment Tool is a read-only tool
3. Must be installed on the server where MCMS is installed