Instead of the typical MS documentation saying vague things like “think about your indexing needs” without clear indications of what we should be considering about indexing, NaT has identified common server configurations patterns. Many of us have stumbled into the same basic topologies, or read best-practices guides on “separate your WFEs from your database”, but by presenting them as patterns with the strengths and weaknesses of each pattern identified it becomes a simple guide to picking the right topology for a given need.

App-X6 Pattern

The Web-X6 pattern can perhaps fit for a farm where WFEs do a lot of user authentication for collaboration reasons (authentication could be expensive, so therefore an additional WFE would definitely help). On the other hand, The Application-X6 pattern targets the query role. If you are expecting a lot of search queries, then it might be a better idea to have a dedicated query server than having a 3^rd WFE, for that reason you add a 2^nd application server and that can primarily be used for query but you can also use it to host a second CA or separate the CA from the index server (btw if you are having the CA with Query server you can perhaps stop IIS, and start it back whenever you need it, that way you don’t have to worry about having using up the memory), and you can also use the same box to load balance the Excel Role if Excel services availability is very important.

While he does point out that it’s focused on MOSS 2007, the basic principles of the patterns carry over to 2010 fairly well. I’d love to hear about differences between 2007 and 2010 for these though.

I was happy to see that my current production farm does not fall into an anti-pattern model.

The are fantastically wonderful and I tip my hat. The amount of work to mix food coloring to do Pantone match colors is just daunting to even think about. Her clients better love her, because this care package definitely says she loves them!

While the opening definitely indicates that this is an attack ad produced by Microsoft, the message is still clear and important. Is it right for your email company to read your email in order to show you targeted ads?

Those who know how email servers work know that there’s little to nothing private about email at the technical level. But that is a red-herring defense. That is a technical issue and in respectable companies is constrained by business policies. What Google is doing is implementing a business policy decision to violate your privacy in order to make a buck.

Now to be fair, Google’s stance on this is that it’s all automated so that’s okay. That’s up to you as a consumer to decide whether you’re comfortable with that answer or not.

The key thing to remember here is that Gmail isn’t free. It may feel free, but it’s violating your privacy to fund itself and there’s an indirect cost being paid.

[Via Mashable]

I have to admit, while I was engrossed in the content of the talk I also noticed that I was unconsciously tapping my foot because I knew I had “real” work to be doing. As someone who architects IT resources for education, understanding this material is integral to the success of the solutions we build and deliver, and yet somehow just watching a 10 minute video felt like I wasn’t working on that pile of stuff I have on my to-do plate. I wonder if I’m a bit too future oriented.

In case you missed it, at the 2011 Consumer Electronic’s Show Samsung had functioning displays of incredible new AMOLED display tech. This is stuff that’s been on the horizon for years and to finally see it in full color functioning demos is exciting.

Transparent AMOLED:

Flexible AMOLED:

The flexible displays are the most exciting to me and I can imagine all kinds of product implementations that will be fun to have. The transparent ones are interesting, but I don’t personally want a clear ipad/laptop screen that lets other people see what I’m reading. I suspect that a vast majority of the implementations of the transparent displays will be for store window advertising display.

The next step is obviously to combine the two! Imagine car windshields or motorcycle helmets with real embedded heads up display.

Of course, demonstrations at CES and affordable mainstream products aren’t quite the same thing, but the tech is finally real and it’s now just up to some big players to subsidize it for products.

For a comparison, here’s what the flexible display technology looked like in 2003:

Sample from Driving Shifts Into Reverse. (Click for full graph)

What’s particularly interesting is that by plotting distance and not time on the x-axis, they are able show actual backward movement rather than just a dropping line to indicate a reduction.

For those of you who haven’t tried to set up the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010, what happens is you’re merrily going through adding the service, go to the Services page in Central Admin and click to start the two services and one just sits and hangs there indefinitely.

We’ve run into this before and I thought we had all our bases covered for various permissions including having the farm admin account in the local admins (needed for provisioning the FIM services), which had caught us before. Looking through the job status history, we didn’t see the  UPS provisioning timer job but we did see several other UPS jobs. Using the ULSViewer we looked at the realtime ULS messages and filtered them to just the profile services.

Low and behold we saw several messages that basically said it couldn’t find the User Profile Service and specifically had this line: UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException. Doing a quick search led to this short but excellent post.

Like so many things in SharePoint 2010, there’s yet-another-place-to-set-permissions that we needed to go to. We hadn’t run into this before because on this install we avoided most of the setup wizard which would have configured these permissions automatically. To add the permissions and get it running, do the following:

1. On Central Admin, go to Manage Service Applications.
2. Highlight the User Profile Service (rather than clicking the link)
3. Click the Admistrators button in the Ribbon.
4. Add your farm administrator account and give it full rights.
5. Go to Central Admin > Monitoring > Review Job Definitions and run the  Timer Service Recycle job to kick off the UPS provisioning job again.

The User Profile Synchronization Service should now be able to finish starting.

References:

Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization

Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010

“No User Profile Application Available” Mystery in SharePoint 2010

for those who the MDI, a.k.a. tabbed interface of Photoshop make nuts, simply go to Preferences > Interface, and then uncheck “Open Documents as Tabs” and “Enable Floating Document Window Docking”. This should be considerably less annoying for Windows users, but the Mac works considerably different and the whole docking thing completely disables the ability to work with Exposé, so it should help. For those who the Scrubbing Zoom renders nuts, simply uncheck “Scrubby Zoom” in the Zoom Tool options right under the File Menu when the Zoom Tool is activated. You might think this should have been a preference, but it’s a better idea to learn to check and uncheck the option so to use the zoom tool as a multifunction tool for more efficiency. I do so myself and I find I spend less time zooming somewhere. The Scrubby Zoom is really fast! For those of you without a good video card or fast computer, you might want to disable Hardware Acceleration and Animated Zooms.

Situation

In our profiles, we’re adding a user’s County to their information so that we can find staff based on which county office they are in. Adding the custom property is easy enough, and it shows up fine on their profile screen.

By default, SharePoint makes those properties be keyword links that do a people search with the keyword of the link, like so: http://hostname/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx?k=”Iron“. Unfortunately, that search turns up no results, even when I click on the existing property.

Attempts at resolution details

When creating the profile property, I set it to be indexed. It is also replicable.

In the Search Service Application I created a custom search Metadata Property of County and added “People:County(Text)” and “ows_taxID_County(Text)” to the mappings.

This certainly helped by adding County to the sidebar of refiners in a search, but doesn’t make a blank people search find people when typing in a county name.

Doing a specific named property search (County:”Iron”) does return results so it’s definitely indexing the property. It’s just not making that property available to general keyword searching.

Editing the peoplesearch.aspx page, modifying the search web part and adding County to the Properties XML didn’t make any difference.

<Properties>
   <Property Name="LastName" ManagedName="LastName" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:LastName"/>
   <Property Name="FirstName" ManagedName="FirstName" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:FirstName"/>
   <Property Name="JobTitle" ManagedName="JobTitle" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:SPS-JobTitle"/>
   <Property Name="PersonKeywords" ManagedName="PersonKeywords" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:SPS-PersonKeywords">
      <EffectiveProperty Name="Responsibility" ManagedName="Responsibility" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:SPS-Responsibility"/>
      <EffectiveProperty Name="Skills" ManagedName="Skills" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:SPS-Skills"/>
      <EffectiveProperty Name="Interests" ManagedName="Interests" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:SPS-Interests"/>
      <EffectiveProperty Name="County" ManagedName="County" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:County"/>
   </Property>
</Properties>

Help?

I’m stumped. Any thoughts?

UPDATE 1

Editing the XML on the search page was a step in the right direction, but just the wrong web part. According to this MSDN Article [How to: Change the Properties Returned in the Core Search Results] I need to add the new property to the XML that gets returned in a search result. So I added <Column Name=”County”/> to the Fetched Properties. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to make any difference. Doing a simple search for a county name still returns no results.

UPDATE 2

Modified the XSL for the search results to show the raw XML being returned. What I saw was interesting. When I do a search for a user by name that I know has a county, the custom column for County I had added to the XML was there, but it was showing a GUID for the taxonomy ID that field was associated to instead of the string.

<All_Results>
 <DummyResult>
 <ColleagueOfColleague />
 </DummyResult>
 <Result>
 <id>1</id>
 <county>#8d4de2be-5f99-44e4-9c98-0defc6f9b762</county>
 <workid>476</workid>
 <userprofile_guid>b6c81d23-735c-4c29-a930-43a67c7557d9</userprofile_guid>
 <accountname>uwcx\will.andresen</accountname>
 <preferredname>Will Andresen</preferredname>
 <yomidisplayname></yomidisplayname>
 <jobtitle>Community Resource Development Agent</jobtitle>
 <department>CES</department>

Well that could make finding a string of text difficult if the actual data is a GUID. To change it I went back into the Metadata Properties in the Search Service admin in Central Admin and changed the mapping in the County property to remove the “ows_taxId_County” mapping and left just the “People: County(text)” mapping. This resulted in the County outputting as the correct text name.

<All_Results>
 <DummyResult>
 <ColleagueOfColleague />
 </DummyResult>
 <Result>
 <id>1</id>
 <county>Iron</county>
 <workid>476</workid>
 <userprofile_guid>b6c81d23-735c-4c29-a930-43a67c7557d9</userprofile_guid>
 <accountname>uwcx\will.andresen</accountname>
 <preferredname>Will Andresen</preferredname>
 <yomidisplayname></yomidisplayname>
 <jobtitle>Community Resource Development Agent</jobtitle>
 <department>CES</department>

BUT, it still doesn’t return a search result if I type in a county name. Even though I can see it in the XML. Not only that, but I noticed this line in the XML of the search results:

<hithighlightedsummary>Iron</hithighlightedsummary>

See the “Iron” there? That’s the name of the county. That shows up regardless of the metadata property being added to the search result XML. So now we have the county name showing up in two places in the XML and still a simple search for “iron” doesn’t turn up any results. To test it out, I built a fresh VM and added only county as a custom profile property. I did not do a metadata property mapping in the search service admin. I did not add anything to the search result XML. And yet the <hithighlightedsummary> in the search results still lists the county name in the search result XML (if I search by username, not the county name). So if the the search term is in the XML when searching by username then it should show as a search result when searching for the county name as the term, but it doesn’t. Why not?

This is looking more and more like a bug.

UPDATE 3

I can now virtually guarantee that it’s a bug.

I installed a SharePoint 2007 server and configured it similarly, adding the “County” field to the user profiles. I did not add it as a keyword search metadata, nor did I modify any XML.

In 2007 it works perfectly. A simple search for a county name like “Iron” returns users. Clicking on the link on a user’s profile page, which does a simple search, returns the same. I’m not crazy after all. Something in 2010 search is broken.

Hotfixes Tried

kb983319 – Recommended because it addresses search server. NO CHANGE

kb983497 – Recommended because it addresses user profiles and people search issues. NO CHANGE

UPDATE 4

Well MS support has completely dropped the ball on my ticket and left me hanging. But some great comments here have provided workarounds that definitely make this work, albeit with some additional configuration steps that were previously unnecessary in MOSS 2007:

Dustin Beshears provides and insightful trick: “Add mappings for the crawled properties to the ‘ContentsHidden’ managed property. Run an incremental crawl and then the search should work on Custom Profile Properties. They will be referenced in the Summary section in the results.”

Steve McDonnell provides a blog post with screenshots of this and some added XSLT.

Peter Gerritsen takes it to another level by delving into the ranking model of the search in 2010 and explains why ContentsHidden, while easy, will give a low ranking and offers some XML and a Powershell command to set your own weighted properties.

Test 2 after setting the width

Update: Odd. The first one when posted initially defaulted to the 425px width. I changed the media setting to make the width 583px and added the second video. The first video changed to 583px wide and the second one is still defaulting to 425px.

Update 2: Now the second video is 583px wide. I suspect it has to do with the fact that there is text following the video now, forcing the editor to html conversion to actually update the oEmbed call.