Hard Knocks - Ben Sufit’s Technical Blog

There have been several occasions in my consulting career where I have discussed what a corporate intranet should look like.   There are several aspects to this question, branding, custom web parts or other bells and whistles, but I believe that the fundamental structure or information architecture is one of if not the most important aspect of a solid, useful corporate intranet. Clearly, each individual company will have a unique look and feel and information architecture.   This will depend on the underlying business as well as the relative size, geographical locations and languages of the company. However, I have noticed certain commonalities across companies and have started to develop a template of how I can help an organization visualize there corporate intranet.   This could be used as a target to reorganize an existing intranet or as a template to stand up a new one.   In either case, changes will have to be made to suit the individual company’s needs.   Most companie

This is another one for me so I never have to figure this out again.   All the other posts I found when looking into this talked about how to set up a search center and redirect people over there.   That is pretty well documented at this point, but the problem I had was that people were trying to search the local site, being direct to the out of the box _layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx page and getting no results.   The fix was frustratingly simple, check your alternate access mappings.   If you have extended the web app and users are using the new AAM then that could be the reason that the OOTB search results are not working.   In my case I had the short name as the default, and the FQDN as the custom, I switched them and now everything works.