Search alerts have been turned off for this Search Application. For assistance, contact your server administrator

Issue: Whenever users try to setup alerts on the search results you would sometime receive this error “Search alerts have been turned off for this Search Application. For assistance, contact your server administrator” Which means your Search results alerts are not turned on

                                

Resolution:

1) Navigate to Central Administration.

2) Go to Application Management > Manage Service Applications and click on your Search Service.

3) Enable Search Results Alerts

      

This solved my issue.

SharePoint 2010 Governance

There is always a good discussion about would should be part of governance team and who should drive it. We decided to have Governance team as two teams,

-          Strategy Team (Business Owners and IT leads)

-          Tactical Team  (IT Project Team)

 

Strategy TeamThis team consists of appropriate business owners willing to provide strategic insight and direction for the portal, and able to drive strategic initiatives into their respective organizations. Resources represent a good balance between business and IT, and also centralized control vs. decentralized empowerment. This team is a small, living team reconstructed on a quarterly basis with new volunteers to maintain a fresh perspective on the business and exploit the collective wisdom of the company.

They would seek answers to the following:

·    How do we improve business processes and how do we deliver on that?

·    What structures need to be in place to deliver this value?

·    What areas of the business offer the most opportunity for growth?

·    How can we align our activities with the goals of the business?

·    Are there synergies that can be created between divisions and departments?

·    What groups are doing similar initiatives and how can we help?

·    What ways can we reduce inefficiencies and duplication?

Tactical TeamThe Tactical Team, as its name suggests, is focused on operations, portal and site administration, functional ownership of specific sites, and building the framework and features of the portal. The tactical team builds the infrastructure (hardware, operating system, and so on), provide database support and network connectivity, provide security, and support all of SharePoint’s features. This team is also responsible for global SharePoint configuration, site provisioning, site administration, and SharePoint maintenance.

Performances issues with big lists

We were noticing some performances issues with big lists (say around 2500 rows not big enough in my mind) and users began to see slowness and this can be caused due to many reasons. As part of trouble shooting we tried to look at the performance counters on the web, app and SQL server and did not notice any major bumps. We started SQL profiler and we noticed significant duration being taken while rendering the results or displaying the list items. Then we looked at this link published by Microsoft http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/cc262813.aspx and found the issue with Row Wrapping. We exceed the number of columns for the Multiline text filed that needs to be in a single Row. We changed couple of fields to the Single Line of text and we found significant improvement in performance. We also indexed the columns that re commonly used in the Views(http://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/manage-lists-and-libraries-with-many-items-HA010378155.aspx?redir=0#_Toc268174145)

Hope this helps for someone who runs into similar problem.

How to get SPUser object from String

String UserName= “Srikanth Kancharla”;

SPUser User= SPWeb.EnsureUser(UserName);

SPWeb.EnsureUser():Checks whether the specified logon name belongs to a valid user of the website, and if the logon name does not already exist, adds it to the website.

SharePoint 2010 - Missing Dropdown menu for choosing the views

When two or more web parts are added to the standard view page then the drop down menu for choosing view gets disappeared.

Resolution that worked for me is to edit the view Page in the SharePoint Designer advanced Mode

Look for the line,

<SharePoint:ListTitleViewSelectorMenu AlignToParent="true" id="LTViewSelectorMenu" runat="server" />

and replace with,

<SPAN id=onetidPageTitleSeparator><SPAN><SPAN style="POSITION: relative; WIDTH: 11px; DISPLAY: inline-block; HEIGHT: 11px; OVERFLOW: hidden"><IMG style="POSITION: absolute; BORDER-RIGHT-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-TOP-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-BOTTOM-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-LEFT-WIDTH: 0px; TOP: -585px !important; LEFT: 0px !important" alt=: src="/_layouts/images/fgimg.png"></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN>

<SharePoint:ViewSelectorMenu ID="viewSelectorMenu1" runat="server" />

Hope it helps someone !!

Creating a new permission level in SharePoint 2010 using PowerShell

When the out-of-the-box permission levels do not meet your needs then SharePoint 2010 allows you the capability to create new combinations of permissions that can cater your needs.

There are two ways of creating Permission level

 - SP2010 GUI

 - PowerShell.

Using SP2010 GUI it is very easy to create permission level, if this is only needed for one or two Site Collections. Imagine you have 100 + Site Collections then this solution will not work, Obvious choice is to use PowerShell.

Here is the PowerShell script to create custom permission level

When

$webapp = Get-SPWebApplication http://xyz.com

foreach ($SPSite in $webapp.sites)

{

$OpenWeb = $SpSite.OpenWeb()

$spWeb = Get-SPWeb $OpenWeb.url

$spRoleDefinition = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPRoleDefinition

$spRoleDefinition.Name = "Site Owner"

$spRoleDefinition.Description = "Custom Permission for Site Owner"

$spRoleDefinition.BasePermissions = "

ManageLists,

CancelCheckout,

AddListItems,

EditListItems,

DeleteListItems,

ApproveItems,

ViewListItems,

OpenItems,

ViewVersions,

DeleteVersions,

CreateAlerts,

ViewFormPages,

ManageSubwebs, 

CreateGroups, 

ManagePermissions,

ManageWeb,

ViewUsageData,

AddAndCustomizePages,

BrowseDirectories,

EnumeratePermissions,

ManageAlerts,

Open,

ViewPages,

BrowseUserInfo,

UseClientIntegration,

EditMyUserInfo,

UseRemoteAPIs,

AddDelPrivateWebParts,

UpdatePersonalWebParts,

ManagePersonalViews"

$spweb.RoleDefinitions.Add($spRoleDefinition)

$SPSite.Dispose()

$OpenWeb.Dispose()

}

Happy scripting J

The secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate sent by the server was invalid and this item will not be crawled

On starting the full crawl of the default content source I received the  error. “The secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate sent by the server was invalid and this item will not be crawled”

It was because one of the site was SSL enabled. 

Solved it in the following manner,
1. Navigate to Central Administration.

2. Go to Application Management > Manage Service Applications and click on your Search Service.

3. In the left Navigation, click on “Farm Search Administration”

4. Under the Farm-Level Search Settings, click on Ignore SSL warnings status “NO” (by default is No). Select the Ignore SSL certificate name warnings check box if you want to trust that sites are legitimate even if their certificate names are not exact matches

  

5. Restart Incremental or full crawl as needed.