Microsoft Exchange and Remote Desktop Services Specialists

SEMblog

Microsoft Exchange Server and
Blackberry Enterprise Server news, views and fixes.

Google Custom Search and IE Accelerators

For some time, I have had a web site called <removed>, which was created a few years ago when I first discovered Google Custom Search. It was a result of playing with this new (at the time) service from Google and creating search engines for some IT vendor knowledgebase.
The site was rather basic and I didn't do anything with it.
The site wasn't published, but Google found it, and it has had a trickle of traffic ever since - usually much less than 100 visitors a day.

However at the end of last year I started to split off some of the content from amset.info out to their own sites. This was content that wasn't core Exchange or Outlook related, but was responsible for a significant proportion of the traffic. A page I wrote six years ago as a getting started guide to the Command Prompt received more visits a day than the next five pages put together. It now has its own site at http://dosprompt.info/
With these additional sites, I implemented a common core design across them all. This design needed to be applied to others, and it was then I realised how poor it was and that the site needed some attention.

At around the same time, I was starting to play around with Windows 7 in some more depth, including the accelerators that are built in to Internet Explorer 8. The Google search tool was very useful, but there wasn't one for the UK version of Google. I found one for Canada, so I pulled it apart and modified it for the UK.

I therefore wondered if I could combine this newfound knowledge of IE search Accelerators with my <removed> site.  The reason for this was that I had created a custom search that was simply a web search engine, so that I could search Google without getting results that were mangled with their tracking information when you copied the result. An example of the URL that is returned is this:

<removed>

The custom search is here: <removed>

I found that you could indeed create an IE search accelerator for a Google custom search engine. What this means is that I can take a term and search for it through my own version of Google.

I have written exactly how here:
http://www.amset.info/ie/custom-search-accelerator.asp
And the resulting accelerators are to be found here:
<removed>

This post has been modified to remove links that are no longer valid. 

BES 5.0 Cannot Delete or Select User: The Request Could Not be Completed

Currently migrating a client from BES 4.1 to BES 5.

All going well, except a few users didn't migrate correctly using the transporter suite. When selecting the user, it returned an error "The Request Could not be Completed". This stopped me from doing anything with the user account, including deleting them so I could reactivate them.

However a clever trick was shared with me, which I hadn't seen anywhere else, which allowed me to delete the troublesome user.

Select Manage Users, then Search. At the bottom of the page, choose manage multiple users. Select the user with the problem and then choose Delete User at the bottom of the list. You will get asked if you are sure. After selecting yes the user is then deleted and can be added back in again and go through the regular activation process.

A simple fix for an annoying problem.