Team Site Search Broken on SharePoint 2003

Posted on April 13, 2009, under SharePoint.

I realize SharePoint 2003 is fairly old by now, but there are a few production installs out there I’m sure. I still see frequent hits on the account lockout post from awhile back. Here’s a tip from some troubleshooting last fall in case it helps someone else.

We ran into an issue on one of our SPS 2003 installations where the team site information was not searchable at the team site level. We could successfully search all content at the portal/area level, but no results would come back when we performed the same search inside of a team site.

After some troubleshooting with our DBA and Microsoft Support (mostly our DBA), we realized that a required column by SharePoint for indexing the team site content was missing. The column name was Extension.

The resolution for this problem ended up being fairly simple once we figured it out:

  1. Open SharePoint Central Administration on the front-end server
  2. In the left-hand navigation, click “Windows SharePoint Services”
  3. Under “Component Configuration”, click “Configure full-text search”
  4. Uncheck “Enable full-text search and index component”
  5. Click OK
  6. Under “Component Configuration”, click “Configure full-text search”
  7. Now re-check “Enable full-text search and index component”
  8. Click OK
  9. At this point the required column “Extension” should be recreated in the SQL database
  10. Force a re-index or wait for the next schedule
  11. Test

This fixed the issue for us, and we were able to bring back search results at both the portal and team site level again.

One Reply to "Team Site Search Broken on SharePoint 2003"

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Miguel Henriques  on October 22, 2010

Hi,
I have this problem with search on sharepoint team sites but when I go to the “Enable full-text search and index component” checkbox, I get an error sayint that the operation is not possible. Is there any way to do this manually?
thanks
Miguel

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