Search - SharePoint for End Users

11/20/2009

New Search features in SharePoint 2010: Friday Cool Content

One of the benefits of working at Microsoft is that we get to eat our own dogfood. That may sound gross, but it means we get to play with cutting edge features on new products such as SharePoint Server 2010 (and fix anything that's broken).

If you haven’t heard the buzz from the SharePoint Conference or this week’s PDC about the new search features in SharePoint Server 2010, take a look at this 30 minute webcast by SharePoint MVP John Ross. John does a great job of covering a wide variety of the new search features available in SharePoint.

My favorite feature of the new search results page is the refinement panel. After you’ve searched for a document or a person, the refinement panel shows you the categories (or metatdata) for the first 50 items in the results list. You can easily change how the results display by clicking the links in the panel.

For example, click on the name of an author to bubble up all documents written by or containing the author’s name. Or, click the name of a site to display all of the documents on that site that contain the keywords in your query.

Another way to use the refinement panel is to click on the type of document you want.

If the results contain Word documents, presentations, and Web sites, and you’re looking for a Microsoft Word document, just click the link for Word. That puts only Word documents in the top 50 results.

For a demo of how the refinement panel works, watch Evan Richman's Enterprise search video from our October 30 GTP post.

There are a lot of other new search features -- several of which occur behind the scenes -- and all of which make SharePoint 2010 really cool to use. Now that the public beta is available, we look forward to hearing about how you guys like our dogfood!

...Renée

SharePoint End-User Content Team

Posted at 9:41 AM by | Category: SharePoint 2010; Search ; Cool Content | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

11/7/2009

Busy Saturdays for SharePoint

I've been hearing the buzz and reading posts about SharePoint Saturdays for months, and I've finally had the chance to attend one in person with today's SharePoint Saturday Redmond.

What's a SharePoint Saturday? It's a forum for training and connecting with the SharePoint community, with venues in many U.S. and some worldwide cities. Make sure to check out the schedule for a city that might be near you.

In fact, there are three SharePoint Saturdays (Raleigh, Philadelphia, and Redmond) today, plus the SharePoint 2010 RoadShow in Chicago. Plus, SharePoint Saturdays are coming to six more U.S. locations and one Australia location later this month.

You can check out live feeds for today's events at EndUserSharePoint.com, as well as a SharePoint Saturday Redmond event page on FaceBook. If you have other links related for today's events, feel free to let us know in the comments.

It's amazing to see the energy from all the planners, sponsors, speakers, and participants of these events. For example, the Puget Sound SharePoint Users group has been collaborating on this event for several weeks, not to mention the efforts of people around the world who make events like this happen. If you've ever planned events, you know there are dozens of details to coordinate.

It's also impressive to see the dedication of the participants who overcame the inertia of a soggier-than-usual fall day in the Pacific Northwest. Today's weather is more naturally suited for a warm fire, a good novel, and hot tea, but the great content and energy in the 19 sessions are worth donning the raingear.

So far, I've caught the SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 overviews. They've provided a great flavor of the upcoming releases, ranging from tags to visual workflows to enhanced editing and customization.

I heard the SharePoint Administration session next door included a wake-up SharePoint dance, as well as insight on governance and server health features.

I have to sign off now for the next session - it's been hard to choose which of the 19 sessions to attend. In the next few days on Get the Point, we'll be providing more details about the specific sessions.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to learn more about SharePoint while connecting with others, check out the upcoming SharePoint Saturday dates and locations.

Cheers,

Toni

SharePoint Content Team

Posted at 12:58 PM by | Category: SharePoint 2010; Search ; Rich Media; Business Processes | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/21/2009

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Conference Live: Search Quality and Relevance in SharePoint 2010

Hello from the final session from Day 2 of the SharePoint Conference 2009! For this session, we are talking about search relevance. First off, defining the quality of a search results in how relevant the results are to the user's query. Two enterprise-level search products are available from Microsoft: SharePoint Server 2010 and FAST. FAST implements more visual and contextualized Best Bets.

The ideal is to provide a conversational user experience that helps the user achieve fast and high-quality task completion. When running the query, analyze and drill-down into the result set and adapting it based on the user interaction.

SharePoint 2010 allows users to browse through the multiple slides in a PowerPoint file to investigate if it is useful to their task without requiring them to open it. As well as the ability to refine their result set through sorting categories along the left such as result type, author, site, etc.

Contextual Promotions is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 which utilize Best Bets, Visual Best Bets, Site Promotions. By taking advantage of the properties in the user profile such as Title, Function, or Department, Contextual Promotions is able to build a result set that is most relevant to the user. For example. Someone who is a sales manager verses a developer would have interests in different types of files. It's great to see this level of intelligence configurable to search!

Applying refiners to Results page is done through a Web Part with further customizations done by editing the XML. There are additional configurations that can be customized through development tools, however, the web part and XML allows a great deal of capability without requiring code. Yay!

Top 10 Data Organizational Tips

10. Avoid mixing multilingual metadata, text and message files.

9. Annotate text regions with their language

8. Group by language where possible, then by subject

7. Encourage natural hierarchies

6. Use natural language for metadata

5. Supply copious metadata such as author, dates, titles, and tags

4. Encourage population of My Sites and Profiles - it helps people search

3. Encourage application social tags

2. Reserve areas for your premium content - ensure it is hosted on reliable fast servers.

1. Encourage archiving obsolete data

That wraps-up today, but tune in for more tomorrow. On my agenda is content types (my favorite topic) and Excel Services in SharePoint 2010.

Cheers,

Sandra Tersteeg

Technology Business Consultant

Allyis, Inc | www.allyis.com

Posted at 7:57 AM by | Category: Search ; SharePoint 2010 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/11/2009

Cool Content Friday - Resources for wrangling SharePoint content

Wrangling content throughout its lifecycle can be a major challenge. It's human nature that people and groups might use slightly different terms or systems to work with files, which could lead to complexity or chaos over time.

Planning how to organize content can make it easier for users to find and work with it. If you are storing records electronically, your organization may need to set policies and establish guidelines.

SharePoint MVP Zlatan Dzinic recently covered these topics in presentations at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference, and he has shared his insights in this post. He has also shared his slides.

The following two presentations are downloadable - on the pages that appear, click the "zipped" folder icon Zip Folder

on the left to start the download.

The Taxonomy in SharePoint ECM and Enterprise Search presentation covers ways to organize data consistently, such as by setting up a taxonomy (structure), and opimizing for search.
The Records Management: Best Practices in SharePoint presentation covers setting policies, establishing standards and procedures, and designing management systems.

We hope you find these resources to be helpful. Cheers,

Toni

SharePoint End User Content Team

Posted at 1:41 PM by | Category: Compliance; Cool Content; Planning & Process; Search | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

7/8/2009

Target search results with keywords and Best Bets

by Vicki Patel

Office Content Publishing

Keywords and Best Bets are manually configured by a site collection owner and are a great way to target important information in your search results. When a user enters in a pre-configured keyword into the search box, the best bets are displayed as part of the search results at the top of the page marked by a yellow star

As a site owner on our internal team site, I configure best bets for terms on which our team members are searching. For example, I know that new hires to our group often search on the term permissions to find out how to get access to all the relevant tools and sites as part of our group. Because permissions is a word used in many documents, lots of results with the word permissions in them may be returned that are not relevant to new hires. So, we manually created a keyword and best bet term for permissions to ensure that the getting started info needed by new hires displays right at the top of our search page.

Defining a best bet for a keyword is easy to do. Just follow these steps.

Add your Keyword and Best Bets

Click Site Actions, then Site Settings, then Modify All Site Settings.
Under Site Collection Administration, click Search Keywords.
Note: If you do not have permissions to manage site collections, you will not have a Site Collection Administration option. See your site administrator for help.
On the Manage Keywords page, click Add Keyword.
Enter the search term you want to define in the Keyword Phrase text box. (i.e. in this example we are using permissions.) You may also want to enter a synonym in the Synonyms box, but this is not required.
Click the Add Best Bet link.
In the Add Best Bet dialog box, be sure Add New Best Bet is selected.
In the URL box, enter the URL of the page you want users to find based on the keyword you entered.
Enter a title for the best bet in the Title box.
Enter a description in the Description box. This is optional, but helpful to identify the purpose behind your best bet.
Click OK to close the dialog box.
(Here is my best bet example for keyword = permissions)
On the Add Keyword page, you can enter the following optional information.

A definition of a keyword that will display with your search results under Keyword Definition.

A contact who is responsible for the Keyword/Best Bet entered in the Contact box.
Under Publishing, add the Start Date (if later than the current date) and, if applicable, End Date (leave blank for no expiry), and Review Date.

On the Add Keyword page, you can enter the following optional information.

When you're done, click OK.

Next...test it out! In the search box for your site, enter your newly created keyword term, hit enter, and you should see at the top of your search results page your Best Bet -- a yellow star next to your Title, below that the Description, and then the URL link to your page.

Posted at 10:18 AM by | Category: Search ; Site Admin | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (2)

6/15/2009

Updating Metadata on Files in SharePoint: Low Cost, High Reward

by Mike Doane

Ascentium | www.ascentium.com

Once documents are in SharePoint libraries, there’s always going to be a need to update metadata, whether it’s because the original author didn’t apply metadata correctly, or there’s a need to add new metadata. Finding documents is a high priority for all clients we work with, but many don’t have the resources or big budgets to do the work manually with their dwindling resources.

We see this scenario all the time with clients: one person (who may no longer work for the company) created a template for a Word doc, and someone borrowed it and started working on a new doc, etc. The original author’s name is still in the Properties field, so it appears that s/he has written half the company’s documents. I’m exaggerating, yes, but the story rings true with many customers who laugh at that scenario.

So, once docs are in place, yes, you can go to Spreadsheet view and make changes, but a much easier and more comprehensive way to do this is to use DocKIT’s “Apply metadata to documents from metadata file” feature, which basically works like the migration tool, except that it simply updates the metadata already attached to the documents in SharePoint.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1 – Review documents to be changed in your SharePoint site. Below I’ve identified five documents that need a metadata “refresh”.

Step 2 - Create a spreadsheet with the URL of the documents you want to change (see above) and the new metadata in columns that match the Site Column names/values in the SharePoint site. Below you can see that I’m going to make changes in Profession, Professional Organization and Author.

Step 3 – Start DocKIT and use the Apply metadata to documents from metadata file (the Excel file above) option.

Step 4 – Make sure to identify what columns you want to change.

Step 5 – Run the Wizard to update the metadata. When DocKIT is done, the metadata are updated and ready to be indexed for search. Old author names are gone, new metadata are in place.

Step 6 – Create Views to take advantage of the new metadata. For example, you cold sort a View by Professional Organization.

Hope this makes sense! Post a comment if you need more explanation. The idea works great if you’ve got a lot of old metadata (or NO metadata) on documents that you want to update, and if you don’t have a lot of time/resources to do it manually by hand.

There are a lot of other uses for the tool, but those are some we’ve done with clients so far. Thanks for reading.

Posted at 1:02 PM by | Category: Productivity; Search ; User Experience; Compliance | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (9)

6/2/2009

Using and customizing a Search Center in Office SharePoint Server 2007

The SharePoint 2007 Search Center with tabs offers several benefits over the search box found on all non-administration pages of your SharePoint sites:

· It can be centralized or located within the collaborative environments.

· It uses Web Parts, not field controls, and therefore provides an easily customizable set of user interfaces without writing code.

· It is a separate site, which supports inherited or unique permissions.

The Search Center has no default content other than the three default pages—the search page, the advanced search page and the results page. It is a SharePoint site and, as such, can contain other pages and content. Those three pages are the default.aspx, advanced.aspx and results.aspx.

We introduce these three pages in the linked article Using a Search Center in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and discuss how to customize them in the following linked articles.
* The linked articles require Adobe Reader.

Customize the Search Page in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center Site

The Search Page in a SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center site is a Web Part page with two default Web Parts, the Search Box and a Content Editor Web Part.

The preceding linked article discusses how to modify a Search Page in a SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center site and the Web Part settings associated to the two default Web Parts. We will also discuss the recommendations and best practices for additional modifications and suggested Web Parts that can be added to this page.

Customize the Advanced Search Page in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center Site

Customizing the Advanced Search page in a SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center site will involve understanding the page construction, the existing and available Web Parts and how to use them. The unique configuration required by your organization may require multiple Advanced Search pages for different purposes, different users or different SharePoint Server 2007 Search Centers.

The preceding linked article covers the steps to customize these pages and best practices and recommendations for making the advanced search pages for your Search Center site more effective.

Customize Search Results Pages in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center Site

The results page for any search is a very important page as it does the heavy lifting of the query process. A SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center results page is the most complex of the three default search pages with a total of seven Web Part zones and 10 Web Parts.

The preceding linked article describes how a search is executed and what information is passed back to the Search result page. You will learn how to customize the search results page, read about the available Web Parts, how to configure those Web Parts and learn best practices for modifying this important page.

Adding Pages to an Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center Site

One of the search customization tasks that is certain to be required in a SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center site will be creating additional search pages for your Search Center, especially if you have a central Search Center for all users. That is the focus of this post.

The Search Center “light” template supports the collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, but only contains three pages by default:

· The Search Page

· The Advance Search Page

· The Results Page

In the preceding linked article we discuss the mechanics of creating new pages, customizing the pages and some best practices. Since there are many advantages in using SharePoint Designer to create additional pages we include a light discussion on its use as well.

Ben Curry

Ben Curry is SharePoint MVP, an enterprise network architect, and a senior instructor for Mindsharp.

Bill English

Bill English is a SharePoint MVP, author, educator specializing in SharePoint Products and Technologies, and Mindsharp CEO.

Posted at 11:07 AM by | Category: Search | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/23/2009

Codeplex, community-generated SharePoint solutions you can use - Friday Cool Content

Don’t be scared by the name (you know, CODE)! This site is Microsoft's open source project hosting site. Why am I mentioning it here on our SharePoint End User blog? Because it includes hundreds of community-generated SharePoint solutions, which means downloadable site templates, Web parts, and SharePoint features.

You can, for example, download a community kit or podcasting kit for your sites, add Windows Media Player and Silverlight Web parts, and enable numerous features from one of the tool baskets.

Check it out today, bookmark it, and RSS feed it, because this site keeps growing in size and popularity! www.codeplex.com

Codeplex

Here are the top 10 downloaded SharePoint CodePlex projects at this time:

Community Kit for SharePoint
WSPBuilder
MOSS Faceted Search
SharePoint SmartTemplates for Visual Studio
Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint
SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard
SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population Tool
Sharepoint - Query Based Lookup Field Control
SharePoint Tool Basket
SharePoint Solution Installer

Thanks,

Tom

SharePoint End-User Content Team

Posted at 9:50 AM by | Category: Site Admin; Design; Search | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/15/2008

Remove unnecessary SharePoint lists and libraries from search to improve relevancy

There are many ways you can increase the search relevancy of SharePoint by configuring Best Bets, Authoritative Pages, and Search Scopes. However, there is one minor tweak you might have overlooked in the pursuit of more perfect search results.

The solution is quick and easy and will help to improve your portal’s search relevancy without requiring you to analyze the impacts to information architecture, mining your search reports, or deriving relevancy from your index.

Every SharePoint deployment has a number of lists and libraries that can be classified as either redundant data sources or “support” lists. Prime examples of this are:

· link lists that point to sources of data on other sites;

· lists that provide data to Lookup columns in other libraries; and

· staging libraries used for content publishing.

By default, these lists are indexed by SharePoint and therefore items in these support lists show up in search results. This is detrimental to relevancy and the end user experience in the following ways:

· End users see multiple instances of the same item in the search results

· End users often have to click multiple times to get to the actual data source because they choose the search hit from the “support library”, instead of the true source of the item.

· Due to the nature of how SharePoint builds relevancy based on URL length, the true source of the data is often given a lower relevancy than items in support lists. To learn more about how SharePoint calculates relevancy, read Search: Fine Tuning search relevancy in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007: Getting the search results your user expects, by Brian Wilson.

The simple solution to removing the lists from the search results is to identify these “support” lists and libraries and manipulate their list settings. You can accomplish this by following these steps:

1. Go To the List/Library Settings

Click the Setting menu drop down and choose “List Settings”.

List Settings on the Settings menu

2. Go To Advanced Settings

Under the General Settings header, click “Advanced settings”.

Advanced Settings

3. Remove List from Search

On the Advanced settings page, go to the Search section and choose the “No” radio button for “Allow items to appear in Search results”.

Allow items from this list to appear in search results? No.

In summary, once you complete these steps for all your “support” lists and libraries, your end users will instantly get better search relevancy. They will be able to find the true source of data without having to wade through miscellaneous links and lists. Additionally, the true source of data will immediately have higher relevancy since the competing information no longer exists.

Finally, unlike the other search relevancy options, you do not need to be a Search Administrator to do this. Anyone with the proper permission to these lists can help increase search relevancy at a team site and company level.

Ryan Gachet

Ryan Gachet is a Knowledge Management Consultant with Redmond Technology Partners (http://www.redtech.com/).

Posted at 5:42 PM by | Category: Search ; Team Sites; Site Admin; Lists and Libraries | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (3)

9/23/2008

Restore the Contains option to the Advanced Search page

If you recently applied the Microsoft Office Servers Infrastructure Update, which applies updates to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), Microsoft Search Server, and Search Server Express, you may be puzzled by the disappearance of a options on the Advanced Search page.

In these versions we removed the default options to search by Contains or Does not contain because in some installations they caused major performance concerns.

Here's what the Advanced Search page used to look like:

To restore the Contains and Does not contain options to the Advanced Search Web Part, use the following steps:

On the Advanced Search page, click Site Actions, and then click Edit Page.
From the Advanced Search Web Part, click Edit, and then click Modify Shared Web Part.
Click Properties to expand the selection.
In the Properties text box, click the ellipses to open the Builder dialog box.
In the Builder dialog box, under the root node, find <Option Name="AllowOpContains" Value="False"/>. If the option does not exist, create it.
Change the value from False to True.
Click OK.
Click Publish.

The two options will show up on the Advanced Search page.

I hope this helps solve the mystery of the disappearing search options.

Renee K. Smith
Microsoft SharePoint End User Content Team

Posted at 3:45 PM by | Category: Search ; Site Admin | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (8)

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