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I’ve put together a screencast that carries on from my previous post on installing and configuring Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.

This screencast covers:

• Setting up a new external content source (my example is this indexing this site)
• Viewing the crawl log to determine the success or failure of a crawl
• Adding a search scope to give the end users the option to focus there search query to a particular area
• Enabling the search scope in the site collection
• Setting up the search centre page web parts to show the search scope dropdown

In the screen cast I mention that the navigation links in central admin or the search administration don’t link to the search scopes settings page. I manually added the url:  http://<server-name>/ssp/admin/_layouts/viewscopes.aspx?mode=ssp

The higher quality screencast can be found here or the youtube version:

You may not have heard about Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express, just as SQL Server Express is the little brother of SQL Server, Search Server 2008 Express is the little brother of MOSS. It offers most of the enterprise search capabilities of MOSS minus the BDC.

I’ve put together a screen cast of the install and initial setup of the product, you’ll find that the entire process is almost the same as WSS or MOSS, that is because the product is built from the same components. The one notable difference is the new Server Wizard page, it combines all the common settings such as app pool accounts, selection of the index server, content access accounts into one place.

The search administration is the same as MOSS with the infrastructure updates, in fact the infrastructure updates goal was to align the work done around the Enterprise Search Server space with the search capabilities of MOSS, new features like federated search etc.

I highly recommend taking a look at Search Server 2008 Express if you want to provide search to your organisation without the committing to a full MOSS install or even to increase the search capabilities of your WSS farm.

The install steps are:

• Launch the installer, make sure you select the ‘Install all components’  from the advanced option if you wish to connect to a SQL Server, otherwise the stand alone option if you wish to use the SQL Express version.
• The configuration wizard will run after the install (just like SharePoint), depending on your option, I choose to create a new farm.
• Enter your database server name and the database access account, this account should have permissions to create databases.
• Specify a port for central admin to run on, try to make this consistent across all your farms, it makes it easy to remember that way.
• Once the setup completes, central admin will be launched, a page specific to Search Server will be presented. This page will ask for the content access account, the application pool account and various other options. I really like this consolidated page, hopefully we will see more of it in SharePoint 14
• In my case the web application was created successfully, however the site collection wasn’t created, so I selected the create site collection option in central admin and used the search centre template.

The higher quality screen cast can be found here or the youtube version:

Of course you should also subscribe to the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog to help stay up to date with this product.

I’ve put together a screencast that demonstrates how to configure a web application so that it can host MOSS MySites.

The basic steps are:

• Create the web application
• Create a site collection to be hosted in the newly created web application, make sure this is based on the ‘My Site Host Template’
• Create a managed path for the MySites
• Change the MySite settings in the SSP central admin to reflect the URL and managed path that was setup in the previous steps
• Enable self service site creation so that new MySites are created when the user clicks on the My Site link

The high quality version can be found here or the youtube version:

I’ve put together a screencast that shows how to use your data from an external source such as a SQL Server database and combine it with your user profiles.

The screencast shows how to:

• Import the application definition to setup the BDC application
• Setup a custom import connection of type business data catalog and how to set the key between active directory account and BDC data
• Setting up custom profile property section (the example is cricket statistics)
• Setting up custom profile properties that import data from the BDC data source
• Start a full import
• Perform a search which returns the user and show the new data that is displayed in the users profile page.

A good quality version of the screen cast can be found here (4 mins).

Or the low quality youtube version:

The web part that I'm presenting today is more of a building block, it doesn't do much on its own. It makes use of the JQuery Corners Plugin.

To set the corner types you can modify the Corner Type setting:

The above example will cause the following JavaScript to be output:

jQuery('cornerDiv').corner('tr 25px');

This web part makes use of the JQuery Script Manager that I've posted about previously.

As usual the source can be found here.

A screencast of the control in action can also be found here.

Continuing on my theme to bring more JQuery plugins into SharePoint, I present a sample application that makes use of the search features of MOSS and some custom web parts that provide Ajax tag suggestion and a tag cloud web part that works over all SharePoint document libraries with a little configuration of the search engine.

Here is a screen cast that demonstrates the concept:

SharePoint Tagging

Alternatively you can download a higher quality video here (7mb).

I will blog more about how I built this application in the coming days and I'll also release the source code to it along with a more detailed description.

If I can convey any message about this application it would be that the search experience is an integral part of the overall application and it can really add some value. For example in the tagging demo I've created a metadata property mapping called Tags, this property is used to crawl the Tag column of the document library. The search cloud web part renders a link to the search centre with the selected tag embedded in the search query, so for no code I've managed to display all the documents that are tagged with the selected tag.

The Ajax tag suggestion web part is based on the great Tag Suggestion plugin, it uses a IHttpHandler to iterate over all of the lists to create a collection of matching tags which are returned as JSON, now this approach won't scale, but we can work on that in the future, hopefully we can also leverage the search engine for that as well.

For now, hopefully this demo will give you some ideas to employ the search engine inside your MOSS development.

I've recorded a screencast that is a complement to Part 1 - Zones and Authentication Providers, in this screencast I show how to setup a custom zone to use forms based authentication by extending the existing web application onto a new zone and configuring that zone to use forms based authentication.

I thought I might create a screen cast for a bit of fun, so this screen cast shows how you can stop IE from prompting you to enter your windows login credentials:

Basically you need to ensure that your site is in the Local Intranet zone, IE will automatically forward your current login credentials on to sites in this zone.