SharePoint Search Error: “The item may be too large or corrupt”

To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of this recent discovery of mine.  SharePoint search & document library support (in terms of sheer numbers) have always been in the millions with basic performance threshholds being in the thousands for views.  With this knowledge, I was not concerned at all when we started pumping +-20000 documents into SharePoint daily thinking that it will all be candy.

Well, a surprise lay around the corner and after a month or so users started complaining about “partial search results”.  In this case, documents were being returned, but not all.  This partial result returning was actually as a result of successful crawls (and propagation) that were completed when the document libraries contained less items.

The crawl logs had wonderful error reporting and after completing a couple of searches I found a blog entry by Josh Gaffey that suggested a solution by updating the registry.  I was very nervous to make registry entries especially in this case as we are not talking about millions of documents.

In any event, I proceeding with the following changes:

Note:  When updating the registry switch the values to decimal and then input the items above.

After making the changes on all the servers in the farm, I completed an incremental crawl and slowly but surely the errors in the crawl log disappeared.

In terms of the SharePoint deployment, I will be looking into the list performance and further backup & archiving (perhaps using StoragePoint).

Custom Control: Header and Footer Links for SharePoint 2007 Website

I just wanted to highlight an interesting control I whipped up to allow one of our customers to easily manage header and footer links on their website that I am currently porting to MOSS.

The basic display is a horizontal list of links with separators, and CSS styles available as control attributes to allow styling of the links and separators. This control is added to the master page so that it displays throughout the site.

When a page is in edit mode, an icon is displayed that directs the content administrator to the associated list that contains the links.

The custom list definition is deployed via a feature, with a feature receiver that automatically creates the list in the root site when the feature is activated. This is to ensure that no manual work is required during installation such as creating lists etc.

The links can be ordered, and can be set to open in a new window if required.

This same control is also used in the site footer and styled accordingly.

Quality, Correctness, and Building Components to Specification

If you’re unlucky enough to still be forced into building software according to legacy predictive approaches such as Waterfall (something that still affects a large majority of companies today), something to always keep in mind is that the specifications and requirements documents are not the be all and end all of what you as a developer has to deliver.

As we all know, specifications are notorious for being vague and incomplete. More often than not, this leads to scope issues and quality complications down the line. One solution is for the project team to take advantage of newer and more efficient methodologies for building software (Agile etc.), however this is not always possible and hardly ever in your control, given that your company’s sales department is probably still selling fixed-length, fixed-scope, fixed-price projects.

When building software in this way, it is important to remember that – even though you’re restricted by the project approach – you still have a duty to deliver the most value possible to your customer, and this often entails stretching scope and accommodating functionality that is non-existent in the specification.

What this means is that, when you deliver a component that is ‘correct’ according to the functional or technical spec, it should not be considered finished until all of the necessary internal and external quality considerations have been met. What good is a component if it only meets the bare requirements of the specification? Is it really delivering the intended value to your customer? Is it simple, user-friendly and good looking? Is it fast, scalable and secure? Easy to deploy? Easy to reuse? Easy to test and maintain?

Clearly there are many factors that determine the quality of a final product, and hardly ever does your specification provide this granular level of detail (and rightly so). It is up to you as a software professional to use your experience to maximize the quality of your piece of the puzzle, and to always remember that your component is not ‘finished’ just because it meets specification.

TechDays 2010, Johannesburg – Funzor

As I’ve been in and around the Microsoft world for approximately 6 yrs I still find it difficult to understand that yesterday was my first TechDays attendance to date.  For this reason, I had no expectations which may / may not have been a good thing.

I was pretty satisfied with most of the day and I’ve decided to highlight some key areas of the day.

Content (8/10)

Since the announcement of SharePoint 2010 I have been involved in as many events, training sessions, webcasts etc as possible and the content presented in the SharePoint related tracks were mostly a reiteration of what I’ve seen before.  Special mention does however have to go out to Michael O’Donovan for his presentation on “Building Workflows using SharePoint Designer and InfoPath”.  I had recently completed this exact task at a client and could therefore relate directly to not only what was being done, but how super fantastic and cool it is.

The keynote address handled by Fred B (Chief Technology Officer) was really good.  His overview of Microsoft was fantastic and as always his energy is electric.  Side note:  I was interviewed by him once upon a time and it was a fascinating experience.

What I enjoyed most about the keynote was the Windows Phone 7 discussion led by Rory Headon-Weaks and I’m giddy for the launch of that.  I currently have a HTC Touch Diamond 2 with Windows Mobile 6.5 and I love it!

The session on FAST search was again an eye opener.  I’ve been exposed to quite a number of FAST presentations to date and I thought it would be much of the same.  Brian, from FAST, handled the presentation and Michael O’Donovan gave us a demonstration.  I absolutely loved what was shown from Getty Images and Globtrix.  Absolutely mind-blowing and FAST is for sure the technology that brings the dream of Enterprise Content Management to life.

Venue (8/10)

TechDays was held and the Sandton convention center and the venue was therefore superb.  Parking was paid for by the event organisers and the lunch / chill area was also laid out pretty well.  The only gripe I had with the lunch area was that there was not enough space for people to eat properly.  I stood around with a plate of food and a fork eating which was not pleasant.

A number of sponsors had set up stands I have to say the 3fifteen and Intervate stands stood out for me.  3fifteen were showcasing a product called EXPRESSNet and although there might be some gaps (haven’t seen enough to make a call) in the implementation, the idea is a good one.  Many more partners will follow suit with the concept especially as SharePoint 2010 is now launched.

Intervate showcased their new website running SharePoint 2010 and it looked super slick.  I was slightly miffed that ours wasnt’t 100% ready.  Oh well, I guess being second won’t be the worst in the world.

On the second floor, the sound wasn’t so great and we could hear other presentations being held which was a little off putting.  Other than that, the venue get’s a super 2 thumbs up!

Food (9/10)

For those that know me you will know that I looovvee food.  Yipyip, I pretty much eat a lot.  :)  Okay, on a serious note though, I was very satisfied with the spread that was made available for all delegates.  On arrival water, coffee, muffins and tons of pastries were available.  I just had breakfast so I just had water.  At lunch time a monster buffet was spread out and I pretty much ate a ton.  I had so much starch that I had to skip the dessert which looked out of this world.  Later on the day further snacks were put out and it ensured that you never went hungry.

The launch party also had food and it was all themed as a German beer hall.  I didn’t like the music, but the idea was fantastic.  It got people into a festive mood and the German style snacks where off the hook.  Well done all!

Overall Impression (8/10)

I paid +-R906.50 for the day.  All things being considered I believe that it was well worth it.  Other than the incorrect spelling of “Share Point” on the certificate things were pretty well organised.  Not only was the venue good, the food was fantastic and the available content was really superb.  The goodies received were not fantastic but I did get a soccer ball as I left which made up for it.  There were groovy give-aways and two poor soles that could have won a DELL laptop weren’t there to collect it so the prize went to the next person in line.  <– Super FAIL!

I enjoyed the day as it is always good to connect with your peers in the industry.  I definitely learnt a couple of tips and tricks and have a good idea of where Microsoft is heading which in never a bad thing especially in the Microsoft Partner space.

Installing printers through SharePoint

Here is an interesting way of allowing users to install printers via SharePoint.

The author shows you how to create a floor plan in Visio that is displayed in SharePoint with the Visio viewer, and provides hyperlinks for users to install the relevant printer. As the author mentioned, this would come in handy if people are visiting your office and don’t know the layout of the office or the printer names.

SharePoint 2007 “Cannot find assembly” error: GAC vs. Bin folder

I came across an interesting problem when referencing a custom webcontrol in my SharePoint 2007 master page.

When my DLL was deployed to the GAC and not to the website’s bin folder, the page would throw a "Cannot find assembly" error. When I put the DLL in the website’s bin folder (C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80) as well as in the GAC, the page would run fine and my control would render. I was stumped as to why the page wasn’t finding the DLL in the GAC, even though the relevant settings were correct (safecontrols entries had been added etc.) – I thought the GAC was supposed to be ‘global’.

I eventually realized what I had forgotten to do: I needed to ensure that the @Register declaration in my master page referenced the strongly-named assembly and not just the assembly name. Once I had updated this reference with the PublicKeyToken etc. the page loaded without any issues.

Hope this is of use to someone trying to solve the same issue.

Narrowing the Cone of Uncertainty

“One question that managers and customers ask is, "If I give you another week to work on your estimate, can you refine it so that it contains less uncertainty?" That’s a reasonable request, but unfortunately it’s not possible to deliver on that request. Research has found that the accuracy of the software estimate depends on the level of refinement of the software’s definition. The more refined the definition, the more accurate the estimate. The reason the estimate contains variability is that the software project itself contains variability. The only way to reduce the variability in the estimate is to reduce the variability in the project itself.”

Source

Getting Value from SharePoint Foundation 2010

“There has been a lot of new content on the latest version of SharePoint. However, most (if not all) of the coverage has been on the licensed version SharePoint Server and little on SharePoint Foundation. As one of the key factors in the overall platform success, it’s important to understand just what value you can get from the the upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services.

Like it’s predecessor, SharePoint Foundation will be shipped as a free download from Microsoft’s site.  And, like WSS before it, Foundation provides all of the basic features found in the licensed SharePoint Server product.  If you work in an organization that can only take advantage of the non-licensed version, here are some of the features you get with Foundation.”

Read more…

Dilbert 13/04/2010

www.dilbert.com

SharePoint 2010 Browser Support

“Part of WCM is accessibility. SharePoint 2007 is for the most part jailed to Internet Explorer. Sure, you can load any SharePoint site in Firefox or Chrome, but it’s not fully supported and several features do not function correctly.

Firefox now has roughly 25% of the browser market share, and Microsoft is listening. In 2010, Firefox 3 is now a tier 1 supported browser. This essentially means that it has the same level of support as IE, but only on Windows machines.

Although you might not have the same experience on Mac or Linux with Firefox, Safari 3 is now a tier 2 supported browser. That will no doubt increase the ability of non-Windows users to browse SharePoint sites in an environment they are comfortable with.”

Read more in ‘8 Ways Web Content Management has Improved in SharePoint 2010’…