Enterprise SEO - SharePoint Search

A heads up to invite everyone to the next meeting of the Sydney Business & Technology user group where I will be giving one of the sessions on using SharePoint as an enterprise Search platform.

Feeling rather inspired by the SEO & SEM (search engine optimization/marketing) from the last user group by Fred Schebesta, I am going to talk about using Search within the boundaries of the organisation, so this should be quite interesting as we talk about some of the subtle differences between whats needed within the company as opposed to what works out in the web landscape.

When: Wednesday 29 August 2007

Where: 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Microsoft Sydney Office
Theatre 2
1 Epping Road
North Ryde NSW

Reduce information overload and save time and money for your business

We are running SDM Seminar for Knowledge Managers around Enterprise Search and Information Management over the next week or so:

The challenge for Knowledge Managers is to find tools which aid them and encourage employees to share information leading to bottom line cost reductions across the business. Nearly half of all labour costs are now allocated to employees performing so-called ‘Information work’. And so with a typical information worker spending up to a 25% of their time searching for the right information to complete a given task, some organisations could be frittering away their staff costs.

It makes good business sense to make the information access and knowledge management process as productive as possible, and one way in which organisations can reduce the burden associated with information work is to implement an enterprise search and find solution.

The hands-on workshop is designed to:

• provide an avenue for Knowledge Managers to discuss different issues and road-blocks in managing information
• demonstrate how a tailored Information Management solution can reduce your workload
• provide tips and tools on how you can reduce time and increase productivity through tools which help people help themselves including desktop searches and intranet search

When:

SA
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 26, 91 King William Street, Adelaide

NSW
Thursday 3 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 2, 1 Epping Road North Ryde

VIC
Tuesday 8 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place
Southbank

Prescan.exe finished with failure

We have started a large upgrade SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 project for one of our customers. The approach we are taking is to the content database migration upgrade. As confusing as anything with the words migration and upgrade joined together may sound, there is a logic to the approach over the other ways of completing the upgrade, which I will get to later.

An important first step in the upgrade is to run the prescan.exe over your SPS 2003 environment and content database.

On the source SharePoint Portal Server, run the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Prescan utility.

You will need to copy the following files from a base MOSS installation (i.e. from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN)

• Prescan.exe
• PREUPGRADESCANCONFIG.XML (if you have created custom site definitions in SPS 2003, then update this file)

The syntax of the command is:

prescan.exe /c preupgradescanconfig.xml /V http://urlofsitecollectiontobeupgraded/

When I first ran this command, the results I got was the scan finished with failure.

And errors like these in my log file:

• Error: The following site has not been scanned. Id = 2ceb5f7d-gb8b-41ff-ad61-0712e0e9098a and Url = test/jr
• Error: The following list has not been scrubbed: Id=2ceb5f7d-gb8b-4c71-b251-0712e0e9098a, Name=Web Part Gallery, Containing Web=personal/alfpha

What I found out here was the prescan was failing because of some orphaned lists that needed to be removed from the content database.

The resolution to this involved:

1. As well as making sure you have SPS 2003 SP2 and WSS SP2, you will net to get this hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918743

2. Once you have the hotfix, follow the steps on this KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918744
• To detect orphaned items, use the following command line:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName
• To delete orphaned items, use the following command line:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName -deletecorruption

3. This resolved all my issues but one.
To resolve my last issue also involved using the stsadm command line.
In this case I used it to delete the site /test/jr with the following syntax:

Stsadm –o deletesite –url http://SITENAME/test/jr

From there I was able to successfully run the prescan.exe utility and get to the next step of the upgrade process.

A couple of other good references for similar prescan and orphan issues are:

• William Baer - Understanding PRESCAN.EXE Errors
  http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2006/12/22/prescan-errors-what-they-mean.aspx
• Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land - SharePoint Orphans and Twins - Gotta love the little guys http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/06/23/644954.aspx