Sharepoint 2007 is also known as Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services 2007 (or MOSS 2007). I was having some problems getting people search to work for my day job.
People search is really cool. Each person with a domain account can have access to their own SharePoint site. There they can post a picture, information and skills. I think that the skills part is VERY exciting for my employer. My employer’s main job is to put contractors to work. Sometimes little jobs come in where they may be able to use an internal worker (like an IT person) on a part time job, or do some consulting. With MOSS 2007 you can search just on skills. This way you can easily find somebody to fill a job.
My problem was that I couldn’t get the people indexed. They where indexed at one time but I must have screwed that up. Searching around the net I found a few sources saying telling me to add “sps3://SERVERNAME” to the content source “Local Office SharePoint Server Sites” as a start page. After kicking off a new crawl it kept on kicking back an “Access is Denied… or not found….” error. Looking around even more I found reference to “sps3s://SERVERNAME”. So I changed the “Local Office SharePoint Server Sites” content source from sps3://SERVER to sps3s://SERVER. I then I got 4000+ Warnings in the crawl log.
GETTING CLOSER!
I didn’t know it at the time but I had enough information to resolve my issue all in the crawl log. The problem ended up being in my rules.
My last rule was to exclude “*://*.*”. This was the last rule so that the search would not go and start getting content I did not specifically tell it to. In my tests I removed that and my 4000+ warnings went away and where replaced with successes. Looking at the url it was accessing my people content at https://SERVERNAME:443. So I added an include rule for “https://SERVERNAME:443/*“. Don’t forget the “/*” or it will only index the front page and no sub-content.
I then re-added “*://*.*” rule at the end, re-ran the full crawl and BANG it works.
It’s amazing that how you feel like a hero with people caring so little about it.
MOSS 2007 is definitely a huge step in the right direction over the previous version of SharePoint. The documentation though is few and far between. Hopefully somebody will Google this post when they have the same problem.
Leave a comment if you need help with this or something similar.
