SharePoint Soup

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  • Search not pulling up plural and other word forms or “Stemming”

    Recently, I was working on a custom search for a project and received the complaint that it wasn’t pulling up the proper results. They were searching “Procedure” and nothing with ProcedureS in the document was coming up. Shouldn’t SharePoint be smart enough to pull up different forms of a word? I thought so and so did the users of the site. When I started researching why it wasn’t pulling up plural words, I found that it was a very simple solution. I’m not sure why SharePoint doesn’t do this by default but you just have to change a setting on the search results page.

    Search Stemming in SharePoint 2010

    Under the Results Query Options, be sure to check the “Enable Search Term Stemming” option. This will solve that problem. Hope this helps someone.

  • Failed to Upgrade SharePoint Products

    Today I went to update the SharePoint servers with the April 2012 Cumulative Update. It was taken down previously because of an error in the update but it was recently put back up. I, of course, tested them first on our test servers and everything went smoothly. The Cumulative Update installed smoothly but when I went to use the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard, the update failed with this error: Task upgrade has failed with a PostSetupConfigurationTaskException An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException was thrown. Additional exception information: Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products.

    I did some research and saw this post: http://wingleungchan.blogspot.com/2011/11/postsetupconfigurationtaskexception.html

    It was saying to run the wizard as administrator. I did that and the steps seemed a bit different but I just went through with it. I ensured to say that I wanted the server to stay connected to the farm, host central admin, etc. the install was successful! It took me to Central Admin and was asking me to configure the new farm! What?! Well, after a mini heart attack, I double checked the sites and went back to the main central admin screen. Phew! Everything was good – since it was using the same configuration database, etc. I think by running it as administrator, it thought I was adding a new server to the farm so it redirects to that page.

  • I am now a SharePoint Administrator 🙂

    Recently (well, in February of this year) I went from being a Webmaster/SharePoint Content Administrator (Site Collection Admin) to being a SharePoint Administrator and eventually a SharePoint Designer/Developer as well. This was a huge undertaking though I was up for it. I had been hired at my previous job as an Internet Developer. I was thinking I’d get to design and develop websites from start to finish but unfortunately the job ended up being more of a ‘maintainer’ job. I was working for the Air Force as a contractor. Whenever I attempted to ‘redesign’ a site, the site ended up being obsolete before I could finish. I was working on redesigning the organization’s public site and then they decided we didn’t need it anymore. I started redesigning the Intranet site until they decided they wanted to move to SharePoint. I’m glad that the Air Force decided to use SharePoint though as I was able to learn a new skill set. Though they did not let us use SharePoint designer and I was only a Site Collection Admin on some sites (Full Control user on most), I did learn a lot. I become super familiar with the way permissions worked, how to ‘work around’ not having designer or central admin access, and basically everything a super user could know about SharePoint 2007. I hit my 6 year mark with this company and this contract position in December 2011. Not bad. I love my company – awesome benefits and great people…

    Then my husband found a job in another city 3 hours away. He couldn’t turn it down and we actually lived separately for a few months while we made sure he liked the area and the job itself. Once we knew he did, I started looking. I got a great job offer from a government organization but also from my current company – a chance to work at their corporate location as their SharePoint Administrator. My future boss knew that I didn’t have experience with the server side and not even the Central Admin interface but he wanted to hire me anyway because of my potential and my previous design skills. Wow! Because I already had 6 years under my belt (which equals over 4 weeks vacation per year, 10% of my salary into my 401a account (not matching but for free!), and more awesome benefits, I decided to go with my current company’s offer. I didn’t (and still don’t) want to let them down so I’ve been busting my butt learning all I can about the admin side and learning SharePoint 2010 in the process. It’s a bit hard since I was left with sort of a mess. I also started dabbling with theming in SharePoint Designer. I will be posting on here about different issues I’ve encountered (and will encounter) and how I’ve solved them. I frequently got help from other blogs so I will try to reference them whenever possible. I hope I can help others out there struggling with SharePoint. Some subject previews are: User Profile Synchronization, People search results, Search Service, Cumulative Updates errors, and more! Stay tuned.