Recently I began working for a large government department – and unfortunately, I’ve inherited a SharePoint implementation that was rushed, and is full of holes. Getting my head around how it all hangs together, and even who is responsible for what is going to be a huge task, but already I’ve been able to find some really obvious mis-configuration, that has been relatively easy to fix. Little quick wins earns me time!!
One of the project managers came to me this morning with some issues about search “not being what was advertised”. As is fairly standard, they were promised a great search experience, however, short of defining some crawl sources, nothing in this area had been configured.
I created the search center, and configured it for the site collection – all good. Then I noticed one little problem… Whenever I would run a search, the first page of results would show up fine – any subsequent switching to another page would take 30+ seconds, and not show any progress along the way… I tested a few scenarios – both of the default templates for search center (with tabs and without) suffered the issue, however, the default WSS results page did not. Since nothing had really been customised, my suspicion turned to the added functionality in the infrastructure update, and specifically, federated results. A quick search turned up Sourav Dutta’s blog which seemed to indicate similar behaviour. By following this advice, and effectively disabling federated search, the issue resolved itself.
In this case, I’m thinking the root cause of the issue is proxy related – to do with some fairly heavy restrictions on which accounts can and cannot access the outside world. Similar issues can happen with the RSS viewer web part. When I have time, I’ll work out 100% what is causing the issue… for now, I have “real” search, custom scopes, and I’m working on conditionally customising the results returned to make more sense for the business.
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