Catapult Systems Blogs

Every so often I get asked about creating a corporate phonebook or mobile phonebook for SharePoint. I have been doing a lot of planning sessions this week and needed something creative to do, so here's something fun. I decided to create a lightweight people search page for mobile devices.   I created the page starting with an regular ASPX page. After adding a web part zone I dropped a People Search Box and People Search Core Results web part. I finished it up with a little CSS and this is the result. The best part is that you don't need to be an administrator to implement a solution like this. Just upload the files to any document library and you're good to go. Here are some of the finer points... Create the Page Open a document library in SharePoint Designer. Choose File | N...

It saddens me to report that the SharePoint community has lost a legend. Patrick Tisseghem passed away suddenly in Sweden on Wednesday. If you have not heard of Patrick, he was a SharePoint MVP and GREAT GUY! He was a prolific contributor to the SharePoint community. The author of many SharePoint books, most recently “Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007” and “Inside the Index and Search Engines”. As a cofounder of U2U he produced CAML Editing & Query tools and many utilities that you probably use on a regular basis. Beyond his technical ability Patrick was a great person. Always friendly, always patient. He always had time to help. He will be missed!...

Often I blog things so that I can stop searching for them. I run across this error all the time...and then have to search for the KB with the fix. When opening IIS Manager you click on the Web Sites folder and receive the following error: The path specified cannot be used at this time. The only temporary solution I have found is to perform an IISRESET which is a drag, because the site is usually working fine. The patch information is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946517...

Introduction This is Part 4 of a 4 part series on how to create an image search center on a MOSS site. My goal is to create a search results page similar to the Microsoft Live Search Images page. In Part 1 I explored the out of the box search experience for images and walked through the setup required to get the indexer to crawl image file types. In Part 2 I installed the XMP IFilter and demonstrated the capabilities related to Managed Properties. In Part 3 I detailed how to configure Crawled Properties and create a Pictures search scope. Then we configured a basic search results page. We concluded the post with an issue: How do I make my search results sexy? Search Results Configuration The Search Core Results Web part can be edited to display our results. The challenge is that t...

Introduction This is Part 3 of a 4 part series on how to create an image search center on a MOSS site. My goal is to create a search results page similar to the Microsoft Live Search Images page. In Part 1 I explored the out of the box search experience for images and walked through the setup required to get the indexer to crawl image file types. In Part 2 I installed the XMP IFilter and demonstrated the capabilities related to Managed Properties. We concluded the post with an issue: Why don't I see all of my properties? Crawled Properties As the indexer and IFilter work together to return properties from the files in the content sources SharePoint registers the new properties as Crawled Properties. You can view the Crawled Properties in Search Administration by choosing Metadata ...

Introduction This is Part 2 of a 4 part series on how to create an image search center on a MOSS site. My goal is to create a search results page similar to the Microsoft Live Search Images page. In Part 1 I explored the out of the box search experience for images and walked through the setup required to get the indexer to crawl image file types. We concluded the post with an issue: images stored in document libraries are not indexed the same as images stored in Picture libraries and on file shares. Hey! Where are my properties? In order for SharePoint to index the properties of your image files, including the file extension, you need to install an IFilter for the image types you are interested in. There are several on the market. I have used the following two: http://www.aimi...

Introduction After working on several search projects it is clear that the out of the box search experience for images is, well, less than optimal. I mean look at how cool the Microsoft Live Search Images interface is, then, hover over an image and look at how cool the property display is! How about the results in SharePoint… OK, I know, SharePoint is a document centric application and it is built for the indexing, searching and display of documents. I agree! What if your company's documents ARE images, no matter where you store them? You may use file shares, SharePoint Document libraries, SharePoint picture libraries, and SharePoint Publishing Images libraries. Why I love SharePoint If I had to sum up why I love SharePoint, it is this: SharePoint is very flexible. So yo...

I have been working on a couple search projects lately and have found it very helpful to create a XML Results page in my Search Center. It is easy enough to do. In the Search Center choose Site Actions | Create Page. Create a new Search Results page and call it XMLResults.aspx Once the page is created, set the "Target search results page URL" property of the Search Box to "xmlresults.aspx". This will direct any new queries from the XMLResults page back to the page, rather than the default Results page. Edit the Search Core Results Web part and remove all of the XSL and replace it with the text from this MSDN Article. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="h...

Thanks again to my hosts at the San Antonio SharePoint User Group. I had a great time. You can download my deck and the samples that I demonstrated from my SharePoint Conference post. I have not added the information on image search that I presented last night. I am working on a three part post that will pull all of the necessary information together. Thanks again to Rackspace, our gracious host, you guys take recycling to a whole new level!...

The folks over at AMD have been busy getting their message out and they are using the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition to do it! The team developed an EBE theme that goes with their corporate brand. No customizations beyond the XSL that you have to write to complete your concept....