All posts tagged SharePoint Search

SharePoint Saturday Vancouver 2017

This week I had the distinct privilege to present at SharePoint Saturday Vancouver.  I presented a search based session with Joanne Klein and a new presentation I just finished about using  PowerShell to make your day-to-day administration\usage of SharePoint so much easier.  As always, I had a great time presenting.  Had great interaction with the attendees of my sessions.

A huge thank you to the sponsors and to the Vancouver SharePoint Users Group.

As promised here are the slide decks for the two presentations:

Finding the Needle in a Haystack SharePoint Style: Search Concepts and Content Quality

Stop Clicking Your Mouse Button, We have a Script for That!

Field or Property ‘TimeZoneId’ does not exist when using SharePoint Search

Our test environment was giving me issues today.  It’s an error that was reported and supposedly fixed nearly 18 months ago.  When typing a query in the text box, the initial search works, but when using a refiner or changing the query the result would return an error Field or Property ‘TimeZoneId’ does not exist.  This was first reported after the July 2015 CU as a regression and supposedly fixed in the August 2015 CU.  The problem was in the Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.ServerProxy.dll.  Now I admit our servers are out of date when it comes to CUs (something I have been trying to get time from my client to do) but we are well beyond August 2015 CU.

Our environment is setup with Search being provided by our App servers in a Shared Services configuration.  When checking the WFE I found the dll version to be at 15.0.4815.1000.  We have two app servers that are running the search services.  App#1 had the same version of the dll, but App#2 was actually sitting at an older version: 15.0.44020.1017.  I believed this to be the culprit.

Resolving: “Field or Property ‘TimeZoneId’ does not exist

  1. Shut down IIS on the server you need to update.
  2. From a server with the correct version copy Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.ServerProxy.dll to the _app_bin folder of the SharePoint virtual directory (example: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\AppServer\_app_bin)
    • If you don’t have a “good” location, the correct file should also be located in “C:Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\CONFIG\BIN”
  3. Restart IIS and test.  Should be fine now.

The cause is likely this single file not being copied over properly when patched.  Hope this helps someone still having this issue.

 

Thanks for reading!

Finding a Needle in a Haystack SharePoint Style: Search Concepts and Content Quality

After a couple of trial runs with our previous SharePoint Search presentation, Joanne Klein and I decided we really needed to trim it down.  As it was, we were able to create two separate presentations from our single initial presentation.  On January, 25, 2017 we presented the first in our new series based on that initial presentation: Finding a Needle in a Haystack SharePoint Style: Search Concepts and Content Quality.  The presentation was hosted by the Saskatchewan SharePoint O365 User Group and had a great turnout and great interaction with Joanne and myself.

Both Joanne and I always want to ensure that our slides are available to all even if you couldn’t attend so we have uploaded them for others to view.  You can access the slides here.

 

Thanks for reading!!

Finding a Needle in a Haystack: SharePoint Style

This past week a friend of mine, Joanne Klein (@JoanneCKleinhttps://joannecklein.com/) and I travelled nearly 2000km to take part in what we fondly called our Alberta Tour.  We travelled to Edmonton and spoke to the Edmonton Microsoft User Group and the next evening to the Calgary SharePoint Office365 User Group.

Joanne and I spoke on different ways to make SharePoint Search better:

Finding a Needle in the Haystack: SharePoint Style

So you have this shiny new SharePoint environment built inside your enterprise. You have added tons of content and have lots of users adding, modifying and deleting content all the time. You’ve got your system purring like a kitten and everyone loves it except for one minor detail. Your users can’t find any of the content they are looking for. Search is just not working for them. If they don’t know exactly where to find a file they need to reference or work on, they are spending their precious time looking for it. Join us in this session where we will show you the great search tools SharePoint gives you OOTB.

Along the way we’ll show you some tips, tricks and techniques to make a user’s experience better. From search refiners to display templates, from managed properties to OOTB Web Parts we will show you how to customize your search to make it easier to use and to truly make your search so powerful your users won’t have any trouble finding their “needles in the haystack” – their content.

 

As promised to the attendees, here is the slide deck for our presentation.

finding-a-needle-in-the-haystack

How to Resolve SharePoint Search Not Returning Any Results

SharePoint Search Not Returning Any Results

Today in our test environment I ran into an issue in which SharePoint search was not returning any results when queried.  Well that’s not true.  It returned an error.  That’s a result right?  When returning the results the error: “Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned.  If the problem persists, please contact your administrator”.  It also provides a correlation ID (very helpful).

SharePoint Search Not Returning Any Results - SearchError

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