Pearls of MOSSy Wisdom

I don't want to get on a rant here, but I came across something yesterday that just made me shake my head at the (lack of) quality control in SharePoint 2007.

Yesterday I was working with my Authoritative pages in Search Administration trying to get my search results ordered better.  Now, given the size of my site (an intranet) there were enough pages in the Primary list to go "below the fold" of the text box.  Fair enough.  And in going back and forth on the admin page trying to get the results just right, I overlooked something - I added a duplicate entry.

Earlier in my session, I had added the URL to my News & Events section in my Primary pages text box.  Well, in a moment of what I'm sure will be classified as careless administration, I added the same URL of my News & Events section in the Secondary results text box and clicked "OK".  Much to my surprise, I received a fun error message telling me "An item with the same key has already been added.".  Um, ok?  After a little Google-ing, I found that others have had this problem and noted that I had entered the same URL in two different levels of Authoritive ranking.  In trying to fix it, I went back to the ranking page... same error. Even better, when I click the "Search Administration" link in my SSP main page I get the same error.  So because of this little oversight, I now have a broken Search admin.  Good times.  Good times.

Now... at this point, you'd think that if adding the same value in two different text boxes breaks Search Admin this badly that someone at Microsoft would have found that in QA somewhere in the Beta2TR era.  But as I've found that the more I work with SharePoint 2007, the more I realize that Microsoft skipped alot of their QA time to get a 2007 release date.  If you're curious to other reasons I think that, read my other posts about Variations.

So... is there a solution?  well, yeah... according to the blog-o-sphere, I can delete the record from the database and it will all be better.  Of course, if I do this, I void your warranty.  Microsoft's solution? Re-create the SSP.  Not really an option given I have a mature intranet.  So right now me and my fellow admins are looking into our options.

One other point I wanted to make about this... why does this query get run when you click the main "Search Adminsitration" link?  I have yet to understand that. 

Oh yeah... to my original point... How does one hork up Search Administration in two easy steps?

1. Enter a URL in the Primary Authoritative Pages section and click OK.
2. Enter the same URL in the Secondary Authoritative Pages section and click OK.

Done!  You can now no longer do any Search Administration.


For the record, this is on a SP1 Farm.  The true humor is that this Farm (5 servers: 2 WFEs, 1 Index, 1 MOPS, and 1 Backend) was built by Microsoft.  Even better, this Farm failed the SP1 load by not updating one database record.  SP1, according to Microsoft, installed correctly so they're no longer concerned.  But without that DB line, NO OTHER UPDATE WILL RUN CORRECTLY!  So now we're stuck at SP1.  So even on a Microsoft-built farm, these errors are still present. 

Some days I with I'd specialized in MS Access App Development.  Fewer frustrations that way.