All posts in Configuration

SharePoint Search – Error While Crawling LOB Contents

Recently I was configuring search to access my SQL Server data via an external content type for a demo I was presenting.  Once the content source was configured I ran the full crawl to populate the index with the data from my external source.  After about a minute the crawl was marked complete.  So naturally I am going to want to test it and make sure my data is pulling through.  The external data is a basic asset database so I did a search for one of the manufacturers I knew was in there.  Received the dreaded “Nothing here matches your search” message.

SearchNoData

Well I know there is data in there so obviously something went wrong.  I know what is wrong as I have done this before, but I want to go through some of the troubleshooting steps you can do to help determine the problem.

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Quickly Build a Multi-Server SharePoint 2013 Developer Environment (Part 5) – AutoSPInstaller Answer File

In part five of my building a multi-server SharePoint dev environment series we are going to install SharePoint 2013.  But first I am going to cover how to create the AutoSPInstaller Answer File. We will do this using the AutoSPInstaller online tool.  There isn’t a lot of information out there on it (that I could find) so I hope it is helpful.  I am going to go through each area in pretty decent detail, but to make things easier for you, I will also provide my answer file that you can easily modify for your needs.  Once we have finished creating the answer file I will show you how to kick off the install of SharePoint.

Posts in this series:

 

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Unable to Uninstall SharePoint 2013

The Problem

The other day I was attempting to fix what appeared to be a configuration issue with our farm.  We were receiving version mismatch errors when running code within our farm.  It turned out there was two problems.  First the farm did indeed have a misconfiguration (I am writing about that one separately) and it was found one of our servers in the farm wasn’t functioning properly due to a recent patch not applying properly.  This post discusses the steps I took and the end result.

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Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) Reporting in SharePoint (Part 2): Audit Reports

This is the second part in my series on reports provided in SharePoint.  Today I am going to focus on the OOTB SharePoint audit logs that will generate reports you can run as a site collection administrator.  The data gathering for these reports is not enabled by default so I will show you how to do that.  I will also discuss what you can get from the reports and how you can configure them to search for data you need.

You can view part one of this series by clicking here.

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Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) Reporting in SharePoint (Part 1): Web Analytic Reports

I have seen over time that new users have asked about reporting in SharePoint.  Usually it is in a forum post which isn’t always the best place to provide an answer as the answer can be quite detailed, so I decided to do a write-up and if someone asks, I can direct them here instead of re-writing in a medium that isn’t quite as nice for the requirements of the answer.  Not only that, I have seen blog posts with posts that are only about one report and not about any of the others.  I would like to discuss all the OOTB reports in one place so anyone looking can find them all.  This isn’t going to be anything new or cutting edge for the experienced SharePoint user.  It’s intended for the person that is new to SharePoint or looking for basic info on SharePoint.

To put it bluntly, SharePoint doesn’t have a lot of OOTB reporting.  You aren’t going to find a lot of user reports or detailed usage logs within SharePoint.  Microsoft provides methods to build reports, but doesn’t provide a lot within SharePoint itself.  Companies like AvePoint, Share-Gate and Metalogix have provided user teams with much needed reporting, but we are here to talk about what SharePoint gives you OOTB.

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