Tagging External Links in SharePoint

One of the most successful Microsoft product SharePoint is becoming more and more center of our daily business lives. Users started with storing the documents, pictures, contacts, emails and then of course their bookmarks to a central location in SharePoint. Most of the time this location is their very own MySite.

Users are able to store their bookmarked links in the SharePoint and they can access whenever they want. These links could be an internal link right in the SharePoint farm or external link from outside of their farm. They can obviously copy and paste the URL of the link they would like to store right into a link list anytime. However in this blog post I would like to underline that there is another and much easier method available for them to bookmark a link utilizing SharePoint's tagging system.

Here how it works:

1. Go to your MySite, click "My Profile" link at the top navigation bar and then select "Tags and Notes".

2. Towards the bottom of the page there is a link says "Right click or drag and drop this link to your browser's favorites or bookmarks toolbar to tag external sites.". Just do as it says in the text, drag and drop this link to your browser's favorites or bookmarks toolbar.

3. Right click on the link and select add to favorites.

4. You can chose to give it a name you'd prefer also if you can add that into your Favorites Bar it would be accessible very easily. By clicking "Add" this will be added to your Internet Explorer's Favorites Bar.

5. Now it is time to test. Please go to a web site of your choice which you'd like to tag it in the SharePoint. While you are in the page please select "Tag in SharePoint" from your Internet Explorer's Favorites Bar.

6. After clicking the "Tag in SharePoint" SharePoint pops-up a new window and asks you to put your tags about this particular bookmark link. Please feel free to add all relevant tags for this bookmark because this will become handy when you are searching this bookmark later on.

7. And the here you go. Your bookmark is tagged in SharePoint.

People Search in SharePoint 2010

People Search Box Web Part in SharePoint 2010

People Search is one of the great and useful features of SharePoint 2010. By using people search feature of the SharePoint 2010 users can find their co-workers not just by their names, by their hobbies, interests, department, job title, knowledge and expertise as well.

In this blogbost I would like to show you how you can enable the SharePoint People Search web part and customize it. So let's get started.

If you have a brand new SharePoint 2010 farm or you have not configure the search in your SharePoint 2010 platform, this is something you need to take care first. Here is how:

• You need to visit the SharePoint central admin and locate your content sources under the search service application by clicking "Application Management", "Manage Service Applications", "Search Service Application" and "Content Sources".
• If this is a new instance you'll probable have one item called "Local SharePoint sites". Please click this content source and edit.
• In this page you need to make sure sps3://MySiteRoot item is in your start addresses list. 
• You alse need to scheudle the full and incremental crawl in this page and check "Start full crawl of this content source" before clicking "Ok.
• At this time you'll see the following screen:

Once this is completed, now you can insert SharePoint 2010 People Search Box web part into any page you desire. In my example I am placing the web part right into the SharePoint home page. 

• First you will edit the page by going "Site Actions", "Edit Page"

  

• Then you can select "Insert", "Web Part" by going "Editing Tools" ribbon.
• You will chose "People Search Box" web part under the "Search" category of web parts. 

• 
  

• Once the People Search Box web part is added tot he page then we can configure the web part selecting "Edit Web Part" from the web part drop down menu.
• While you are editing the web part, you can have scopes drop down menu and select which search scope you'd like to use and in which format. In this blog post since I will be showing the People Search, I am not including the "Scopes" drop down menu.
• You can configure the Query Text Box, by assigning a label, fixing it's size, and defining the text box prompt string.

• Query suggestions is a great way to display keyword suggestions to end-user while they are typing the query. These suggestion will be created automatically by SharePoint automatically based on certain number of click-throughs. There is a daily timer job scheduled to compile the suggestions. It is called "Prepare query suggestions" timer job and it is turned on by default.  If you are testing the keyword suggestions, you probably don't have any suggestion compiled yet. You can add these suggestions manually with power shell scripts. here is an example:

$searchapp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication -Identity "Search Service Application"

New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $searchapp -Language En-Us -Type QuerySuggestionAlwaysSuggest -Name "Jeff Armstrong"

New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $searchapp -Language En-Us -Type QuerySuggestionAlwaysSuggest -Name "John Smith"

New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $searchapp -Language En-Us -Type QuerySuggestionAlwaysSuggest -Name "Jennifer McDonald"

Start-SPTimerJob -Identity "prepare query suggestions"

• There are many options to configure in miscellaneous section of the SharePoint People Search Box web part. Please refer to this TechNet article for further configuration options: Change properties for the Search Box Web Part (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Once it is configured you can save the web part and save and check-in the page you are editing. This is how it will look like on the page: 

If you have done everything correctly and you have SharePoint publishing features enabled you will get a "404-Page not found" error because "peopleresults.aspx" does not exist in the Site Pages library. There are a few ways to workaround this issue. One of them is to create people results page manually. which is detailed in my other blog post called "People Search Results Return 404 - peopleresults.aspx is missing."
Here is how your results page will look like:

People Search Results Return 404 - peopleresults.aspx is missing.

People Search Results Return 404 - peopleresults.aspx is missing.

If you've turned on SharePoint publishing features and used a publishing page to house your people search web part, you got an HTTP 404 Page Not Found error.

If you can delete the "Basic Search Center" and create a new "Enterprise Search Center" you can resolve the issue. However if it is not your intention to create an Enterprise Search Center you can create th epeoplesearch.aspx page manually. Here is how:

• Please create a new page by going "Site Actions", and "New Page"

• You need to call this page "peopleresults"
• This action will create a new page called "peopleresults.aspx" in the site pages liblary.
• I suggest that you should create a basic two column 1 row table here. First column will host the search filter web part and second one will show the people search results. 
• Please select Insert -> Table -> 2x1 Table.
• Set the first column width to 150 pixels

• Please locate you cursor in the first column and add "People Refinement Panel" web part by going "Editing Tools" -> "Insert" -> "Web Part" -> "People Refinement Panel".

• Now you can locate you cursor in the second column do the same thing for "People Search Core Results" web part by going "Insert -> Web Part" under "Editing Tools"

• You can remove the table borders while the cursor is in the table by going to "Table Tools" -> "Design" -> "Styles" -> "Table Style 1 - Clear". Here what you will get after:

• Now you can save and close the page. At this stage the results page will show nothing which is normal. However if you do a people search you will get following result:

SharePoint 2010 Out Of The Box Themes

Everytime when I am creating a SharePoint site I usually start with an Out Of The Box theme. When I am chosing a theme I always go in and out of the themes one at the time and I can't see all the themes in one screen and compare, pick, and chose.

The process of chosing the right "look and feel" feels a bit frustrating and time consuming. I always though that, there must be a page which displays all the themes. I took the time to put all the themes in one page.

Here they are:
 

Azure

Berry

Bittersweet

Cay

Classic 

Construct

Convention

Felt 

Graham

Grapello

Laminate 

Mission 

Modern Rose

Municipal 

Pinnate 

Ricasso 

Summer

Vantage

Viewpoint 

Yoshi 

Configuring "Alternate Access Mappings" at SharePoint 2010

Once you have your SharePoint site up and running you may want to add/change the URL of your SharePoint site. In very basic terms here how you can accomplish this.

When you want to change or add new URL to your existing SharePoint site.

First thing you need to do is to make sure that the new URL is in your DNS settings. I mean when you ping the new URL it should ping the same IP address of your existing SharePoint site URL.

In my case since I have a single server installation on my desktop all I needed to is to add the new URL to my "hosts" file.

In case if you don't know where is your hosts file here are quick steps for you to get that done.

• Open a Notepad (or any other editor) in "Administrator" mode
• Then go to File->Open and open to "\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts" file:

• Add the IP address and the destination to the end of your hosts file. In my case I added "127.0.0.1        SharePointTidBits" right to the end.
• Save and Close.
• If you have an environment controlled by a DNS server you should add new name to your existing DNS Servers either "A" or "CNAME" record.

Once we handled the DNS/hosts modification then we need to add or modify the "Alternate Access Mappings" (AAM).

Go to :

Central Administration -> System Settings -> Configure Alternate Access Mappings.

Then you click to "Add Internal URLs"

Please select the correct "Alternate Access Mapping Collection". This will be the your site you’d like to add/change the URL. Click "Alternate Access Mapping Collection":

In my case I select "SharePoint - 80" and I enter the URL I would like to add to the appropriate zone which in my case it is my Intranet.

Then I click save and here we go:

You think that its that easy, isn't it?

It should be but in my case when I try to access to the new URL "http://SharePointTidBits", IE is keep prompting me the user name and password.

Here is what I need to do to solve this issue:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0

3. Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value.
4. Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the IIS service.

Tadaaa!

I hope this helps.