Tag: Search

Obligatory SharePoint 2013 Search Powershell post

Maybe you’re still kicking the tires on SharePoint 2013 installing it for the first time. Maybe you’re in the throws of planning your migration. Maybe you’re a consultant who’s been stuck on a SharePoint 2010 project for the last 18 months. Either way, we all have to face the music sooner or later and upgrade to SharePoint 2013. When you do, you’ll have to setup a Search Service. It’s not as bad as you’d think. And if you have at least 3 servers in your farm (1 app and 2 WFEs) then this script will work for you. Without further delay:

#Config Section
$APP1 = "App1"
$WFE1 = "WFE1"
$WFE2 = "WFE1"
$SearchAppPoolName = "SearchServiceAppPool"
$SearchAppPoolAccountName = "domainSearchSvc"
$SearchServiceName = "SharePoint Search Service"
$SearchServiceProxyName = "SharePoint Search Service Proxy"
$DatabaseServer = "DBserver"
$DatabaseName = "SP_Search_AdminDB" 

#Create a Search Service Application Pool
$spAppPool = New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name $SearchAppPoolName -Account $SearchAppPoolAccountName -Verbose 

#Start Search Service Instance on all Application Server
Start-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance $App1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Start-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryAndSiteSettingsServiceInstance $App1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Start Search Service Instance on WFEs
Start-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance $WFE1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Start-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance $WFE2 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Create Search Service Application
$ServiceApplication = New-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication -Partitioned -Name $SearchServiceName -ApplicationPool $spAppPool.Name -DatabaseServer $DatabaseServer -DatabaseName $DatabaseName 

#Create Search Service Proxy
New-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplicationProxy -Partitioned -Name $SearchServiceProxyName -SearchApplication $ServiceApplication
$clone = $ServiceApplication.ActiveTopology.Clone()

#Set variables for component creation
$App1SSI = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance -Identity $App1
$WFE1SSI = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance -Identity $WFE1
$WFE2SSI = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance -Identity $WFE2

#Create Admin component
New-SPEnterpriseSearchAdminComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $App1SSI 

#Create Processing component
New-SPEnterpriseSearchContentProcessingComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $App1SSI

#Create Analytics Processing component
New-SPEnterpriseSearchAnalyticsProcessingComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $App1SSI

#Create Crawl component
New-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $App1SSI

#Create query processing component
New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryProcessingComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $App1SSI

#Set the primary and replica index location; ensure these drives and folders exist on application servers
$PrimaryIndexLocation = "C:SPSearch"
$ReplicaIndexLocation = "C:SPSearchReplica" 

#We need two index partitions and replicas for each partition. Follow the sequence.
New-SPEnterpriseSearchIndexComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $WFE1SSI -RootDirectory $PrimaryIndexLocation -IndexPartition 0
New-SPEnterpriseSearchIndexComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $WFE2SSI -RootDirectory $ReplicaIndexLocation -IndexPartition 0
New-SPEnterpriseSearchIndexComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $WFE1SSI -RootDirectory $PrimaryIndexLocation -IndexPartition 1
New-SPEnterpriseSearchIndexComponent –SearchTopology $clone -SearchServiceInstance $WFE2SSI -RootDirectory $ReplicaIndexLocation -IndexPartition 1

$clone.Activate()

#Verify Search Topology
$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
Get-SPEnterpriseSearchTopology -Active -SearchApplication $ssa

This script is actually pretty basic. 90% of the services end up on your App box, while the Index partitions live on your WFEs. You could provision the service on one box or any combination you see fit. That’s the beauty of this model. For me, I like having the Index partition closest to where people will be searching (i.e. the WFEs).

The script should take anywhere from 10-30 minutes to run, maybe longer depending on your hardware. Once done, navigate to your Search Service in Central Admin and this is what you should see in the Search Topology.

Most important thing to remember when using this script is to create the C:SPSearch and C:SPSearchReplica directories on your WFEs PRIOR to running this script. The script will fail if you don’t do this and it’s a pain to cleanup after so create the directories first. I’ll probably write in a check to see if the directories exist – and if they don’t go, ahead and create them – next time I run this script when setting up an environment.

SharePoint on Azure: several lessons learned

We got back from Convergence on Friday. I had a good time overall; good food, good times, crazy things to see. Never did make it to Acme Oyster House (sorry dad!).

Meanwhile, we’ve migrated a public SharePoint site to Azure. I should say we’ve migrated a SharePoint 2010 internet site to SharePoint 2013 running in the 14-hive. Many of my colleagues throughout the SharePoint community I’ve spoke to have this to say about that:

In the last few weeks we’ve learned some valuable lessons. Here they are (in no particular order):

  • Search scopes – I chose to not migrate the Search databases because migrating the content db was hard enough. Plus, when we complete the upgrade to 2013 I would just have 1 DB to focus on. In doing so, I don’t have scopes anymore since they’ve been deprecated in SharePoint 2013. You can’t even use PowerShell to add them. The fix was to revert back to the All Sites scope. It isn’t the end of the world though because the Search Service App is smart enough to see the variation you’re searching from and serve up that site’s content. For example, if you search for bikes on the German site, you’ll get German site content back to you, rather than UK or US content.
  • SharePoint Designer – Someone wanted a quick change to a page layout. Good news here is that only 1 page in the overall site uses that page layout. SharePoint Designer 2010 works but I was unable to add another web part zone the page layout. As a workaround I added the HTML directly to the page layout. Again, not the end of the world here, but it definitely isn’t what I would want to do. Adding a web part zone would have allowed me to drop additional content in the future or replace it altogether from the Edit Page rather than editing the Page layout.
  • compat.Browser config – We never bothered with mobile sites in SharePoint 2010 with this site. All we did was turn off the mobile browsers in the compat.browser config. I did the same for SharePoint 2013 (set all ismobiledevice to false) then reset IIS. However, this did not result in success. Got hit with a vague SharePoint error. I started looking on the interwebs for help and ran across this: LINK. Followed Option 2 and hit pay dirt. It does seem out there to have to drop a statement in to the overall web.config but I had to get things working. Once we migrate to SharePoint 2013 we’ll remove the statement and make use of device channels but since we’re still running in the 14-hive I don’t get that functionality quite yet.
  • Azure IaaS growing pains – IaaS is still in preview, and thus you’re subject to wonkiness and issues beyond your control. A few days ago we experienced an outage on the site. SharePoint couldn’t talk to SQL for some reason. Logged on the SQL box and couldn’t even connect to the SQL instance. The service was running but still no dice. Well, time for a restart and Yahtzee! everything was better. I went through the logs as best I could but had no idea what I was looking for. Come to find out Azure pushed down restarts. In doing so, SQL came back before the AD instance did so nothing was authenticating properly. HUGE lesson learned there. Best way to overcome this is to start using Availability Sets: link to documentation.
  • Calculated Column issues – had a user come to me with this one. The user noticed that a calculated column was throwing a string of characters into the column. I went and checked the column settings and miraculously the issue was gone. I edited another item and got the exact same string again. So it would appear that it wasn’t the formula but rather something was going on in the DB. Luckily I was at Convergence and there were a handful of SharePoint support folks in the Expo hall. Ran by their booth and showed them the issue. Thankfully this is a known issue and installing the March PU will fix everything: link to PU. One other note, according to the KB, you MUST install this PU if you ever hope to install a future CU.

That’s about it for now.

Search adventures with SSRS in Integrated Mode

At Trek we’re all about the BI. Just so happens I sit within the BI team so it was no surprise when Steve wanted to go with all the BI tools. PowerPivot and PerformancePoint were already setup before I got there. With SQL 2012 we get an overhauled instance of SSRS in Integrated mode and the newly introduced Power View. SSRS is now a Service App rather than a separate application so it makes deployment a lot easier. I won’t bore you with the details of installing as you can find all sorts of other bloggers walking you through the steps. What most bloggers don’t cover are the details of searching for .rdl’s.

Installation is pretty easy and getting your report libraries up and running are relatively straightforward. We even managed to create a few shared data sources and reports the day we went live. Real “Ready, Fire, Aim” type stuff. We happened to do the install on a Friday so we didn’t really put everything through its paces until Monday. When we began emailing links to rdl’s around we started getting complaints that users couldn’t see these reports. In addition, rdl’s weren’t showing up in search results.

Now what?

Posted this to the technet forums: LINK. Nauzad was pretty helpful in his reply in pointing me in the right direction. Come to find out, rdl’s are not extensions SharePoint search crawls by default. That’s an easy fix. Navigate to Central Admin > Manage Service Apps > Search Service App > File Types > add “rdl” and you’re golden. Kick off an incremental crawl and you should start to see rdl’s showing up in your results.

But I also noticed that only Full Owners, Site Collection Admins, and Farm admins were seeing reports in search results and in the libraries themselves.

Based on my research for the search issue I found that Report Libraries rely heavily on Publishing. Because of this, only those with Full Control rights and Site Collection Admins or Farm admins will see the rdl’s until they’re published, but it doesn’t stop there. You also have to publish the data source file as well. After some trial and error we figured this all out.

It’s relatively easy to get around the publishing requirement. Navigate to the Library Settings > Advanced Settings > check the box for “all users can see draft items.” Doing so will make all reports and data sources viewable as well as surface all reports in search regardless of published status.

For now, we’ve made the intentional decision to leave publishing on as it will allow use to security trim who has access to publish (accurate) reports and provide layer of oversight.