Remember Sammy Jankis

MOSS Search for SSO/Form-Based Authentication Sites

Hi,

It's been a while since I wrote something. I know - It sucks. Especially since I've gathered around a couple of really cool stuff to publish. 24 hours is simply not enough! Hope we'll get more in the next SP/Release…

This post will deal with a huge issue in the Crawl Engine for MOSS or MOSS For Search: Crawling content for Form-Based authentication. If you ever tried it, you probably saw that we can actually use MOSS to crawl content that is saved on forms-based authentication sites (or cookie-based authentication of course). The problem is that it practically gives us nothing. In Most cases, only the logon page of a site is crawled and the rest of the site is deprived and never accessed by the Crawler. That's a real deal if you have a couple of ASP.Net Web Systems is your hand and would like to add some of their content to be available in Search. By the way, you'll get the same symptom even if the web site that is SSO-Based – still nothing gets into the Index. I have found a few workarounds to this matter up until now (usually crawling directly the Database of the Web System with the BDC feature) but this was time consuming and very annoying.

ALAS! No More! Microsoft finally came up with a hotfix for this problem that tweaks up MOSS and the Admin UI to support this issue. If you don't want to wait until the much-anticipated upcoming SP1 for MOSS (due to later this year) - Here are the details:

• AddRule.exe downloadable package: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D5090BC4-5B4F-411B-8CDE-E37D33F7EFDF&displaylang=en
• KB article for FBA/CBA hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934577/en-us
• Public downloadable location for hotfix: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B3C932A5-B3C0-4473-8EA5-62AE44190878&displaylang=en

I guess this means we can throw some of those really nasty-defined BDC's away. Well, this guy isn't planning on shading tears over it …

Bye,

Adir Ron.