Our development team recently encountered a cryptic “No results are available due to a network failure” error message while developing our new company portal based on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (product link).
The problem, as it turned out, was caused by the deletion of a user profile property called “Work Phone” (of all things!). Thanks to a post I came across by Nikander over on the MSD2D SharePoint site I made the suggested change and the search started working right away.
I’m still puzzled by why this error occurred and why no further diagnostic information was provided (such as errors being logged to the event log, for example) and why something as simple as the deletion of a seemingly unrelated property would prevent the search features from working. Let’s hope that the SharePoint community continues to grow and evolve while we look forward to the next release of SharePoint with, hopefully, an improved administrative experience.
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