Hi friends. I have been playing around for some time now. We have a funny client and that has kept me out for months. Well, as you would expect, I encountered a lot of issues and this is just one of this list of them.
Even though the MOSS 2010 has a lot more better and enhanced search capability, yet, so many of us are still administering 2007 version of the product.
However, you come in one morning and find out the People Search in your MOSS 2007 server farm is down. Now, so many of us will just have to jump in to doing several thing….from gooling to creating new SSPs(I hate this…….it makes the page so untidy) and so on but before any of these, consider and review the following first:
- Has there been any change of any of the SharePoint server’s DNS records lately – check the DNS HOST A entry for MySite
- Is the active indexer server running
- Are the people’s profile imported to the SSP
- You check the People Search Scope in the Central Admin and you have zero items in scope (you find this on the following navigation breadcrumb: Shared Services Administration: SharedServices1> Search Administration > Scopes)
- You verify that you have the sps3://mysite entry on the Local SharePoint Server Content source.
All these and other more are to be considered if you are not able to search for People. You may however note that if you are not able to search for information and not just people…then, something must be wrong….and this post may not address this.
So going back to the checklist I have above, the issue I faced with this client of mine was that in three different cases, we were not able to do people search and I noticed it all stopped when we had cause to change the DNS serverHOST A entries for both Mysite and the SharePoint site. When you do a search, something pops up like this:
This may actually deceive you if you are not very careful. You may assume that you do not have any name like the one you are searching for. It is always adviceable to search for items that are very familiar…..if you are a user on the portal, you may have to try your name.
Now, if you have confirmed that the search is not working and you eventually find out that the Central Admin Scope for people search is showing zero items and perhaps, User Profiles are imported and the Shared Service Provider is running fine. You may now have to follow these steps to get things to work in your farm again.
- You will have to re import the User’s Profile from the Directory Service: You will have to navigate to the following on your Shared Service Provider Settings: Shared Services Administration: SharedServices1 > User Profile and Properties > Start Full Import.
- After the import, you will navigate to the server running the Active Indexing Service (MOSS 2007 allows one Index server and Index location to be used in a particular time ) Select the server from the services on server then stop the Service. The stop this service by stopping the following service on the server: Office SharePoint Server Search.
- Navigate to the Shared Service Provider Page (Not the SSP Created), select the default/active SSP (you created) and click on Edit Properties.
- Verify that the Indexer selected there is the same indexer where the Office SharePoint Server Search was started, if not select the correct one.
- You will now have to re-crawl the SharePoint Local Site Source: Shared Services Administration: SharedServices 1> Search Administration > Content sources > Edit Content Source.
- Once thisre-crawl runs successfully, you can now search and find you people without problem.
So, with this few steps, I hope that you will be able to fix you People and Staff search. It is always easier to tackle in a single server environment but it sometimes, may be troublesome in some type of complex farm deployment.
Have a nice day!
Tags: MOSS 2007, People Search, SHarePoint 2007
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