As it turns out, when you install the Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server (first Foundation, then Server) – you are required to run the configuration wizard on your own at the end of the process.  I can only assume this is because a reboot is required after each patch application.  Here is the error that first caught my attention in the Event Viewer (EventID 69):

The mount operation for the gatherer application 28c08c8b-2c00-408c-8572-87638068e335-crawl-0 has failed because the schema version of the search gatherer database is less than the minimum backwards compatibility schema version supported for this gatherer application. The database might not have been upgraded.

Big red flags in that error message.

Here is a link to all of the details on Microsoft’s WEB Site.

So, if you have applied your SP1 for SharePoint 2010 and can’t get a crawl (incremental or full) to complete – check to see if your farm requires updating:

• Launch an elevated (Run as Administrator) SharePoint 2010 Management shell from start, All Programs, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products, SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.
• Once the shell opens, type the following command followed by enter:
  (get-spserver $env:computername).NeedsUpgrade

If this comes back with “TRUE” – then run the configuration wizard.

Also – note the link above points out that you also need to apply the June CU if you want to have the most current code-set running on your SharePoint farm.

Have a beautiful day -

The timer job completed, but failed on one or more machines in the farm.

And sometimes the PowerShell command runs indefinitely.  In these circumstances it’s good old STSADM to the rescue:

stsadm -o deleteconfigurationobject -id “service app ID“

To get the service application ID, use the SharePoint Console (powershell)

Get-SPServiceApplication |?{$_.name -eq “Search Service Application”}

Happy deleting…

http://www.markus-alt.de/blog/?p=118

BTW: if you wanted to get this list yourself, you just need to use the following PowerShell:

Get-SPWebTemplate | select Name, Title

The Tenant Administration (or TA) Site gives the tenant administrator the ability to create new site collections and manage all features that have been assigned to that site subscription. 

A Site Subscription is comprised of a unique ID that is used to associate the TA Site, Site Collections, Feature Sets, and Service Applications.  There is a lot there that we will dig into in future posts.  But for now I want to give you a quick tour of the TA Site (site collection – to be specific).

First of all – how do you get one?  This can only be done via PowerShell because of a few of the switches you have to throw at creation time.  Here is the basic syntax:

new-spsite -url http://intranet/sites/CloudAdmin -AdministrationSiteType tenantAdministration -template “tenantadmin#0″ -owneralias {domain user}
-SiteSubscription {SiteSubsciptionID}

There are 3 Key switches you need to pay attention to:

-AdministrationSiteType : When you set this at site collection creation time it sets a flag that this site collection is used to managed tenant site collections.  The site will still create if you don’t set the switch – but many of the features inside of the site collection will not work. 

-Template “tenantadmin#0” : This is a new site template in SharePoint 2010 that provides the appropriate abilities to manage tenant site collections.

-SiteSubscription : This is how you associate the tenant administration site with a SiteSubscription.  Note: This is a one-to-many relationship.  A site collection can only be associated with one Tenant Administration Site while a Tenant Administration Site can be associated with may site collections.

Lets take a look at the site:

The beauty of this site is it delegates many of the activities that the IT Pro had to do for all customers like:

• Creating new Site Collections
• Managing InfoPath Forms Services
• Configuring Send-To Connections
• Managing Profile Services

And many more.  So as you can see – this new feature creates a new level of administration for you to plan for in your Governance plan for your company.  Many people have been slow to come to the table on this “tenant” concept because they think it’s just for Hosting companies.  The reality is I believe it is equally as important in the enterprise for managing site collections and ultimately, keeping sensitive internal content out of the hands of those who shouldn’t see it (HR, General Council…)

Here you can see items that you can manage for Site Collections:

This is a lot of power to delegate out to your user base – so you’ll definitely want to plan for that education and oversight. One thing I want to point out here – notice that you can create new Site Collections from the Tenant Administration site – this will fail if you don’t have Self-Service Site Creation enabled.  To enable this, go to Central Admin > Application Management > Configure self-service site creation.

Much more to come on tenant administration!

So as you can see SharePoint Search indexed the content sources and the “people” directory to create a rich index and property database to be able to provide a rich Search experience.  All of the goodness that has been added to Search in SharePoint 2010 is now available to the end user.  While there has been a lot of enhancements to the new version of search, there still are some limitations that would drive someone to want to use FAST Search for SharePoint (more on that in another post). 

So when FAST is added to the configuration, SharePoint Search is not removed from the configuration – they are actually sharing some of the roles.  Take a look at this diagram:

Here you can see that SharePoint Search stays around to handle all search aspects of the People directory.  FAST Search for SharePoint take point on indexing all all content.  The secret sauce of providing a unified experience to the end user happens at the Query Object Model.  It’s at this location where the 2 result sets are brought back together and ultimately delivered to the WFE and ultimately to the end user.

So there your go – when you use FAST Search for SharePoint – you are actually using 2 different search technologies.

From time to time – we need to create an abundance of sites which makes the argument for “typing” stronger. The command its self is:

New-spsite

Below I have listed the help which is available for any PowerShell function via the command:     GET-HELP

NAME

New-SPSite

SYNOPSIS

Creates a new site collection at the specified URL.

SYNTAX

New-SPSite [-Url] <String> -OwnerAlias <SPUserPipeBind> [-AdministrationSiteType <None | TenantAdministration>] [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Confirm [<SwitchParameter>]] [-ContentDatabase <SPContentDatabasePipeBind>] [-Description <String>] [-HostHeaderWebApplication <SPWebApplicationPipeBind>] [-Language <UInt32>] [-Name <String>] [-OwnerEmail <String>] [-QuotaTemplate <SPQuotaTemplatePipeBind>] [-SecondaryEmail <String>] [-SecondaryOwnerAlias <SPUserPipeBind>] [-SiteSubscription <SPSiteSubscriptionPipeBind>] [-Template <SPWebTemplatePipeBind>] [-WhatIf [<SwitchParameter>]] [<CommonParameters>]

DESCRIPTION

The New-SPSite cmdlet creates a new site collection with the URL and owner specified by the Url and OwnerAlias parameters.

For permissions and the most current information about Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Products, see the online documentation (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=163185).

RELATED LINKS

Get-SPSite
Set-SPSite
Backup-SPSite
Move-SPSite
Restore-SPSite

REMARKS

To see the examples, type: “get-help New-SPSite -examples”.
For more information, type: “get-help New-SPSite -detailed”.
For technical information, type: “get-help New-SPSite -full”.