There is an official fix from Microsoft regarding the SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 2 expiration date issue. This fix can be applied either before or after the installation of Service Pack 2.

For all the details and the download the fix, visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971620

SharePoint Blog Posts and Searching

Yet again, this was something that I found out the hard way.  I created a simple, out of the box site based using the blog site template.  The site created successfully, and myself and my colleagues started posting.  After having generated several blog entries, I started a full crawl to get the blog posts included in the Search indexes. 

Once the crawl was completed, I performed a search against the contents of the blog posts.  Search was unable to index the contents of the blog posts.  It had crawled the titles of the posts, and linked to the page containing the list of posts.  Search would neither crawl posts nor display links to the actual blog post items themselves.  it always returned me to the entire list.

This just didn’t make any sense at all.  How could SharePoint offer Search, but not be able to crawl or index any of it’s own content? 

I thought that it might have something to do with the fact that blog post items are created as “enhanced rich text” instead of just “rich text” or “plain text”.

As a test, I went into the properties of the ‘body’ column of the post item and changed it from “enhanced rich text” to just “rich text”.  I initiated another full crawl (it’s a small MOSS site) and I got the same results (or rather, lack of results).  I also tried as plain text.  No luck.  So, there is something inherently different about blog posts in SharePoint that make it difficult for SharePoint Search to index.  I’m still investigating why this is.

As an alternative, I discovered the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) which has an Enhanced Blog Edition.  This SharePoint Solution Package is pretty straightforward to install.  The blog posts created when using it are searchable and the search results list directly to the post item itself, not back to the list of posts.  Beyond that, it has many themes to choose from and offers a few more features than the out of the box SharePoint Blog site.  You can find it on CodePlex.

App Offline File

A colleague pointed out this extremely useful tip for a quick and easy way to provide a friendly message to users when a SharePoint site is being upgraded or changes are  occurring behind the scenes.  This applies not just to SharePoint 2007 sites, but any .NET 2.0 application.

By simply placing an HTML file named app_offline.htm in the root of your web application (not necessarily the root of your web server), your users will get your custom HTML message instead of a nasty ASP.NET error message.   One caveat to this is to be sure that the file is at least 512 bytes in size.  If you don’t have enough text in your custom app_offline.htm page, just add a series of hidden comments. 

The beauty of this is that you can have this file ready and waiting, and it only takes a few seconds to copy it to the right folder before performing any maintenance. 

If you have a lot of SharePoint web applications and you were not consistent in your naming of their virtual directories (like I did), right click on your SharePoint web site in IIS 7, and select Explore.  This will open the root of your web application on the file system.  Drag and drop your app_offline.htm file to this folder.  When your maintenance is complete, drag this file out the folder.

A great resource and a simple example of this can be found at ScottGu's blog site.