SharePoint Search Crawls : Incremental Cawls for Day to Day living

I was at Microsoft the other day talking to some of their PFEs regarding all things bright and SharePoint. The topic of search crawls came up. I received some information which I wasn't aware of which I thought I would log.
As most of us are aware SharePoint Search can conduct a "Full crawl" and an "Incremental crawl". What most people do (myself included in the past) is schedule a full crawl late evening / early morning and schedule incremental crawls at regular intervals throughout the day. To be honest I'm not sure where this habit came from. I guess it just seems to make sense......except it doesn't.

A scheduled Incremental crawl is sufficient for day to day crawling. There is no need and as far as MS have informed me, no advantage in running Full crawls on a regular basis. Full crawls are only required if a crawl rule or crawl property has been changed (there might be another couple of situations - but these are config changes).

All changes are stored in a change database and this is what the incremental crawl looks at to see what it needs to update. The changes database automatically clears down so you don't need to worry about it getting too big. There is one caveat and that is that the change database does clear itself after a certain amount of time so you have to make sure you do your incremental crawl within this time. This period is in the region of 30 days so assuming that you are going to schedule incremental crawls more frequently than this you are ok.

So, for day to day search indexing, only schedule incremental crawls.

SharePoint 2010 Send Documents to Records Centre Link

So I was wanting to know how to send documents to a record centre manually. Took me a little while to do the digging to find out were you configure the "Send to" links so I thought I would do a quick post to remind myself.

Assuming you all ready have a record store in place and you know the location. You must go to:

Central administration -> General application settings (on left hand side) -> Configure Send to connections

Once on this page you can add a new send to connection for a specific web application.
For sending records to the records centre you set the URL to be:

http://ServerNameOrAAM/RecordCenterSiteName/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx

Once you have done this you are able to specify whether you need to copy, move or move  the document leaving a stub in its place.

Copying dlls to and from the GAC in Windows server 2008

I have always had a cold feeling when attempting to add dlls to the gac on Windows server 200. This post here sorted me out although I did have to steal gacutil from my dev machine.

Installing an assembly into gac from windows server 2008

It also can be tough getting dlls from out of the GAC. This post hightlights the process for successfully copying all the dlls from the GAC into a specified folder.

Copying files from the gac

Very helpful when you have TFS With SharePoint WSS3.0 and for some reason content is referencing MOSS dlls.........the things we have to deal with hey.

Creating themes in PowerPoint 2010 for SharePoint 2010

A requirement was passed to me to do some light weight styling on a SharePoint 2010 site. Low and behold we enter the world of themes. Themes have been available in SharePoint in previous versions however there have been some improvements in 2010. The main improvement seems to be that you can now create themes in PowerPoint 2010, save them as a THMX file and then up load them to SharePoint for reuse on your sites.

I followed the article from the main man Joel but there was one thing which was not obvious to me from his article (no offence to the man because he truly is great) and that is that there is now a "Themes" gallery in SharePoint 2010 sites where you can store your themes. Excellent, this makes all our lives easier as we no longer need to deploy them to the server(s).

To locate the "Themes" gallery, navigate to the root site collection and view "Site settings". You will see the gallery in all its glory under "Galleries".....clever really.

View Joel's article SharePoint 2010 Themes and Resources for Upgrading a Custom Master Page .

SharePoint 2010 : Verbose diagnostic logging by powershell

A simple one really, but if you want to turn on verbose diagnostic logging when central admin is being a troubled soul this command can be used in the PowerShell command window.

Set-SPLogLevel -TraceSeverity Verbose -EventSeverity Verbose -verbose

More info at : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748656.aspx#section3

Take care for now.

Update

Thought I might as well put this in here too. If you want to update in STSADM you can with:

stsadm -o setlogginglevel -tracelevel verbose

SharePoint your lives away.

Time saver : Host file short cut

In this world of SharePoint I often find myself having to alter hostfiles to enusre that traffic is routed correctly. So normally i either browse to or type in:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

I found out the other day that you can just type in "drivers" into the run box and it will take you staight to the drivers folder.

This will actually save me time so thought I would share.Te

SharePoint 2010 Administration Roles

In SharePoint 2010 the general approach has been to make administration permissions more granular then in SharePoint 2007 so that the overall security model is more flexible.

Farm administration

• Farm administrators are able to perform administrative tasks on the farm (conduct tasks is central administration).
  They are able to assign administrators to Service applications. This implies that farm administrators don't necessarily have to administer service applications.
• They don't have access to site content by default.
• Farm administrators are not able to run powershell unless give then SharePoint_Shell_Access role.

Aside : Local administrators on the server can do all farm admin features and more.

Service administration

• Service application administration also adheres to the concept of granularity.
• All service applications can have specific administrators assigned by a farm administrator. So the search service application for example would have its own administrator who is not necessarily a farm administrator.
• This provides flexibility so that different service applications can be administered by different people / groups.

Feature administration

• This is a new concept which allows specific users / ground to administer a sub set of services application settings.
• Feature administrators are effectively allowed to administer specific features within a service application. An example would be administering 'Audience settings' within the User profile service application.

Tenant administration

• Tenancy is a new concept for 2010 and the administrator model has changed to support this.
• Tenancy allows service applications to be separated depending on tenant. For instance the same search service application can be shared across multiple tenants.
• Tenant administrators can administer some service application settings  which are specific to their tenancy.
• In addition tenant administrators are also able to create site collections.

So the key take away is...... Its more flexible in 2010 then it ever was in MOSS.