This is a longer post so I’ll be breaking it up into multiple parts. I had an interesting problem occur the other day when working with SharePoint. Im not yet sure of the cause, but will be working to find the cause and hopefully post on my findings.The Scenario is a migration from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS. Due to the complexity of the migration, we decided to use AvePoint’s DocAve. There is a possibility this is one cause of this issue as I haven’t seen it before. Due to EPC Group’s (my employers) strong partnership with AvePoint, if this is indeed a bug, I will be working with them to get it resolved.

One of the requirements was that all the existing URL’s remain the same with no downtime while performing migrations that took several hours to complete. With this requirement, we created web applications on alternate port numbers to perform the migrations to and then once the migrations were done.

However, once we were done with all the migrations we wanted to turn off the old IIS sites (running on the alternate ports) to preserve resources. However, upon turning off the IIS sites, our “This Site:” and “The List:” search quit working and every other search, All Sites, for instance with the search center were returning the results using the URL for the alternate port number rather than the search results using the URL we were hitting the site from. Needless to say, this caused lost of confusing for users and search results that couldn’t be used, because the URL returned was inactive. Even turning the alternate “port number” URLs back on, still didn’t resolve the problem of our search results displaying the wrong URL.

Through some trial and error we have discovered how to resolve the issue. If you have ever had similar problems stay tuned as I will post our fixes and finds over the next couple days in the next few parts to this post.