Problems with Peoplesearch in MOSS 2007

Today I ran into some problems concerning People-search in MOSS 2007. My customer was using https for their main sharepoint site and I had installed the mysite host on the same web application (in https://servername/mysite) according to the specifications found around the net.

Well, my customer just couldn't get the people search to work, and I had heard that there were some problems with using it on a site that runs on https (http with ssl), so I wasn't very surprised. As a bit of backgroud, the peoplesearch is set up as a contentsource in the search using sps3://servername. The server in this case should be the web application hosting mysite.

Well, how to solve it. First of all I tried to just create and extension of the sharepoint application on http port 2000 (http://servername:2000). It worked just as it should, when I browsed it, it worked and I was also tranfered to the default site (https://servername).

I tried adding this as a content source instead of the old one, in other words:
sps3://servername:2000, sadly it didn't work.

As a matter of fact, we had got it to work previously in the same environment. We had first installed sharepoint on http://home and then added https://home.company.com with an extension and an alternate access mapping. The later was used as the address to be used from the outside, by using MS ISA as a reverse proxy. After a while, the customer complained about problems with people copying/emailing url:s that didn't work from the outside. (the url was http://home/... and not https://home.company.com/..., so not very strange. This resulted in the action of removing the alternate access mapping of http://home (the original one) so that only https://home.company.com remained (and was hence set at the default). This worked great, people could enter "home" in their IE and they would reach the site https://home.company.com.

However, when I removed the alternate access mapping for http://home, people search started failing.

So, the remedy, I added an alternate access mapping for http://home:2000 in the zone Intranet (doesn't really matter, which zone as long as it isn't the default), re-indexed the search server and made a full crawl that worked like a charm! The point of using TCP port 2000 was that is is very unlikely that a user might just happen to enter that, it could just have been 1234 aswell...

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se