Finally a Microsoft Certified Professional!

After more than a decade of working with Microsoft technologies like SharePoint Server, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and gotten myself Certified.

mcp

This week I wrote exam 70-576 PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications. Passing grade is 700, and I scored 887. My weakest area was Designing SharePoint Composite Applications, which are codeless solutions for Information Workers – as a codehead, that’s okay with me.

Thanks go to Susie Ibbotson, the SharePoint team’s tormentor-in-chief at non-linear creations, whose constant nagging got me to this eminent position.

From here I guess I should take 70-573 MCTS: SharePoint 2010, Application Development, which would get me the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) designation …

“Scope in your query does not exist” (SharePoint 2007 search)

I am in the process of moving a large Internet-facing website on MOSS 2007 from one hosting company to another. There are three main Web Applications (Apps A, B and C), each served by its own Shared Services Provider (SSP A, etc.). Two of the SSPs have custom search Scopes.

After the Site Collections had been configured and the web content migrated into them, I was finding that any search, in any of the three Site Collections, returned in the error message in the title above.

Web searches turned up a lot of advice on overcoming this ScopeNotFound Exception while developing custom search applications, but this was happening in the out-of-the box search pages.

Web Applications not associated with the right Shared Service Providers

I found the answer by checking the Associations under Shared Services Administration in SharePoint Central Admin: by accident, all three of the Web Applications had been associated with SSP ‘C’ (the default). I moved App ‘B’ to SSP ‘B’ and so on, and all searches immediately started working.