The parameter is incorrect

From one day to the next my Crawl Log went to all *%&%&$.

On every item that was being crawled, a message of The parameter is incorrect was being returned.

I was shocked that this fixed it, but it did!

Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server > Office SharePoint Server

Search Service Settings

I updated the Contact E-mail Address with a new email address, entered the Farm Search Service Account password, and clicked OK.

Fired off a Crawl, and everything was back to normal.

 

office sharepoint server search stopping

Recently had the Office SharePoint Server Search service get stuck in a Stopping status.

Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server

Things I tried that DID NOT work:
1. Rebooting the server.
2. taskkill.exe /F /IM mssearch.exe /T
3. Disable the Office SharePoint Server Search Service
Reboot
Start the Office SharePoint Server Search Service

What DID WORK:
Logged into the server using one of the Farm Admin accounts.
Ran this command: stsadm.exe -o osearch -action start

This stuck on Stopping issue appears to be a common problem. Some people can resolve the issue by rebooting the server, while others have to run the SharePoint config wizard. Hope my quick fix helps.

Your SharePoint site collection is about to expire

To extend the expiration date for this site collection, click the link below:
http://url.aspx

Otherwise this site collection, including all of its subsites, might be deleted.

If this site collection is no longer needed, you can delete it by going to http://url.aspx, and selecting “Delete this site”.

Please note – When a SharePoint Web site collection is deleted, all Web sites, content and information which were part of the site collection are completely erased. The site can only be restored if a backup exists.

To update the settings for this alert you will need to venture into Central Administration.
Central Administration > Application Management > Site Use Confirmation and Deletion

Select the Web Application you want to update and then click OK.

SharePoint Designer Blank Lines

How do you remove blank lines in SharePoint Designer?

1. Select / highlight 4 blank rows (select more or less depending on how many you want to delete).
2. Ctrl+H (Edit –> Replace)
3. Replace All

You might have to perform this more than once to truncate all the blank rows.

My .aspx grew from ~1,000 rows to over 300,000 rows.  Why?  I’ll assume it had something to do with the Data View web part.

SharePoint Search Thesaurus TSenu.xml

How do I update SharePoint 2010 or 2007 to search for more than term at a time?  What?

In my example, every time I search for Pizza, I also want to see Taco search results.  This is a two way street.  Search for Taco, I also see Pizza results.

Key word here is synonyms.  And we have two options to play with. Replacement and Expansion Sets.  Replacement = user searches for “top secret” and they see results for “HR company policy”, Replacement allows you to replace search strings with other search strings.  Expansion Sets = user searches for “Taco”, and they get results for Taco, Pizza, Fruit, Cookie…. Expansion allows you to add more words to your searched text.

This KB article goes into greater detail: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289652

Another helpful link: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/36203/How-to-Configure-SharePoint-Treasure-Synonym-In-MO.aspx

First I created a Document Library and uploaded two files, Pizza and Taco.

Search for Pizza, and the only think I see are Pizza results.

After updating the TSenu.xml file located at:

Drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Applications\[SSP Admin Site GUID]\Config\tsneu.xml

to look like this:

<XML ID="Microsoft Search Thesaurus">
<thesaurus xmlns="x-schema:tsSchema.xml">
<diacritics_sensitive>0</diacritics_sensitive>
<expansion>
<sub>Taco</sub>
<sub>Pizza</sub>
</expansion>
</thesaurus>
</XML>

Then do a quick command update:
NET Stop oSearch
NET Start oSearch

I now see results for Pizza and Taco

No need to reboot or do an IISreset.

If you update the xml file and do the NET Stop/Start, but are not seeing expected results.  Try searching for TSenu.xml on your server to make sure you are updating the correct file.

As you can see here, there is more than one XML file on a server.

Note from the KB article:

(For example, the English (United States) version of the thesaurus is TSenu.xml.

If you working in other languages make sure you update the correct XML file.

Alerts not being sent

Create an Alert in a Library and the first email is sent letting you know you have setup the Alert.  Change or update an item in the Library and the Alerts are not being sent…

First I looked in Central Administration at Job History (_admin/TimerJobHistory.aspx) and not noticed nothing had ran in a few days.

Next, I located and ran the Immediate Alerts job.  After the job ran, I refreshed the page and noticed the Last run time: had not updated.

Well something isn’t doing it’s job!

Now, pop over to the Server Manager –> Configuration –> Services and locate the SharePoint 2010 Timer service.   If it’s not running, right-click and select start.

Cruise back over to your Job History page in Central Admin. and refresh the page.

The same solution might apply to SharePoint 2007, but I resolved this in SharePoint 2010.

more info:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee924649.aspx

***UPDATE***
For some reason Alerts were not being sent from one of our Web Applications.
After digging around the Farm, I learned that that Web App in question, was trying to send Alerts from one of the App servers in the Farm. Why? Not sure yet.

The server that the Web App was trying to send from, was not allowed to relay emails from our SMTP server… Once we added the IP to the SMTP server, the Alerts started alerting.

***** Another Update *****

One of my users reported that Alerts were not being sent to an AD Distribution List (DL).  Turned out someone had messed with the site permissions and set the DL to Limited Access.

The DL you are wanting to alert, needs Read access to the SITE and the List / Library you are creating the Alert on.  Yes, this sorta sucks if you have a ton of Lists / Libraries that inherit permissions from parent.

 

Code blocks are not allowed in this file

I was trying to enable code in an aspx page in SharePoint Designer, with no luck!

(warning, search google for reason not to do this.)

Appears my problem was related to not including the SubFolders option in the web.config file update.

<script><!–mce:0–></script>
<form id="form1"> Current server time is <% =GetTime()%>. </form>

This is the contents of my aspx page in SharePoint Designer (2010).

What web.config file did I update?

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80

Do I need to run an IISreset?

Nope, I’ve tested this and there is no need for an IISreset.

Spaces count as characters in a file name or url

Question:  Do spaces count toward the total character limit in file or folder names?

Answer: Yes.

How I tested this.

I created a text file and named it

111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.txt

The name is a 124 characters long.  Uploaded it to a Document Library and it works.

Now, try adding some spaces to the file name, the re-upload the file.

You will see this error:

The specified file or folder name is too long. The URL path for all files and folders must be 260 characters or less (and no more than 128 characters for any single file or folder name in the URL). Please type a shorter file or folder name.

More info from Joel Oleson’s blog:

File Names

 

  • Invalid characters: ” # % & * : < > ? \ / { | } ~ 
  • Cannot be longer than 128 characters
  • You cannot use the period character consecutively in the middle of a file name
  • You cannot use the period character at the end of a file name
  • You cannot start a file name with the period character

Folder Names

 

  • You cannot use the following characters anywhere in a folder name or a server name:  ~ # % & * { } \ : < > ? / | “
  • Cannot be longer than 128 characters
  • You cannot use the period character consecutively in the middle of a folder name
  • You cannot use the period character at the end of a folder name
  • You cannot start a folder name with the period character

 

update.

More info from Microsoft on this topic:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff919564.aspx