Sanjaya on SharePoint Search

I have been working with this product called Longitude for sharepoint for some time now. I must say this is a great product that extends sharepoint search capabilities. It lets users preview documents without the necessity to download them as shown:

Some of the other kool features of the product are:

• Faceted Navigation (let users refine results based on grouping by document metadatas)
• Popularity tagging
• Key concepts (based on document tagging)
• Documents preview, download, print etc functionality right on the search results page.
• XSLT based customization of Search UI
• Parametric Search
• Hit highlighting
• Wild card Search
• Enhanced People Search etc

With these features, finding the relevant information is 10 times faster than with the default sharepoint search.

For additional info on the product, visit http://www.ba-insight.net

A scope can be applied to  a search core results web part so that the search core results webpart displays results from that particular scope only.

Lets say you created a scope called "Technical Documents" to be able to search on documents where managed property documenttype is technical. Next, follow the steps below to specify the scope on a search core results webpart so that the webpart displays technical documents only on reuslts.

We, at times, are very specific about the results returned in search. As an example, if you are searching a document workspace, you are most concerned with documents and to you, most of the other items like pages, lists, sites etc that are returned are clutter. Wouldn't it be nice if you could filter them out. Yes, Ofcouse!!. Well here is how you can return only documents in search.

Follow the steps below to ensure that only document type results appear in search.

1)      Find the managed property IsDocument and set “Use in scope” property to true.

·         Browse to the central administration site.

·         Click on the Shared Service Provider (SSP) for the site.

·         Click on Search settings

·         Click on metadata property mappings.

·         Find the managed property IsDocument and set “Use in Scope” property to true as shown below and Click Ok.

2)      Add a scope rule to display only documents.

·         Browse to the central administration site.

·         Click on the Shared Service Provider (SSP) for the site.

·         Click on Search settings

·         Click on View Scopes.

·         Click on Edit Properties and rules for the scope you want to add rule to as shown.

·         Click on New Rule.

·         Add a rule where the property IsDocument=1 and set the scope behavior to require as shown and click OK.

3)      Update the scope

·         Browse to the central administration site.

·         Click on the Shared Service Provider (SSP) for the site.

·         Click on Search settings

·         Click on Start update now.

While supporting customers to setup our search product Longitude for SharePoint, I usually come across this search center related setting I am going to talk about in this post.

The typical scenario is you want to redirect the user based on the search center specified at the site collection level and also based on the target pages specified for the scopes. Say you have configured search center for your site collection and you also have a target results page peopleresults.aspx for the scope "People". To ensure that the search center uses the specified target results page peopleresults.aspx for the scope “People”, you must do the following steps.

If the search center is configured properly for the site collection and the target resutls page , the URL for the target results page must be valid and working.

• Select Site Actions > Site Settings>Search scopes and Click on the scope “People”.
• Verify the target results page url for the scope.

When you click on Search button of the search box, javascript error occurs and you are not redirected to the search results page. Scopes dropdown shows no items. The typical error screen is shown below

Resolution:

This error occurs if the search scopes group specified for the search box webpart does not exist or misspelled.

In order to correct the search scopes group for the search box, follow the steps below

• Select Site Actions> Edit Page

• Click Edit> Modify Shared Web part on the Search box web part

• Expand Miscellaneous and Verify the value for scope display group with the scope groups for the site collection

• To view the scope display groups available in the site collection, select site Action>Site Settings and then select Search scopes under Site Collection Administration.

In this post, i am putting together some of the frequently asked questions on Scopes. Similar types of questions have been asked by our customers in the past on scopes while deploying one of our products called "Longitude for SharePoint" that extends SharePoint Search capabilities. I believe sharepoint administrators working on sharepoint search configuration can benefit from this.

1)      How to display results for a scope on a customized page and not on a default search center results page?

• Create a customized page as you want.
• Specify the customized page as the target results page for a scope as shown.

•  Create a scope called “Only PDF” and add a rule type of property query to apply the following property restrictions FileExtension=PDF as shown.

• Use the scope to search for pdf documents only.

To be able to include items from all the document libraries of all the sites in a farm, the search scope must be a SSP level scope.

After creating a SSP level scope, add a rule with rule type “Property Query” with the property restrictions

Types of scopes

There are two types of scopes in SharePoint namely Custom Scopes and Contextual Scopes.

1. Contextual Scope:

The scopes that are created by sharepoint automatically based on the context of the site area the user is currently working on are called contextual scopes. These scopes read like “This site”, “This list” etc and lets users search only in the specific area the user is currently working on.

2. Custom scopes

Two types of custom scopes can be created in sharepoint.

• Shared Services Provider (SSP) level scopes

The SSP level Search Scopes are global and are shared across site collections that are associated with the SSP.

Creating a SSP level scope:

• Browse to the central administration site.
• Click on the SSP for the farm and then Click on Search settings.
• Click on View Scopes and then Click on New Scope link to create a new scope

A site collection level scope can not be edited at SSP level as shown:

•  Site Collection Level Scope:

The site collection level Search Scopes can only be used within the site collection that it is created.

Creating a site collection level scope:

• Browse to the site collection home page.
• Select site actions>site settings
• Click on search scopes link under site collection administration section.
• Click on New Scope to create a scope.

A SSP level scope can not be edited at site collection level scope as shown below:

Scopes are a logical view on index. With scope, a section of the index can be defined effectively ahead of the query time based on some rules and users can execute search query against that specific scope only.

To demostrate the the usage of scopes in sharepoint search, lets consider a scenario where you would like to define a scope to be able to search on your fileshare documents only. In other words, lets add a new scope called "FileShare" to the scope dropdown of the search box as shown:

Step1 :Creating a content source to crawl your fileshare

Scopes can be based on either Managed Property or Content source or web Address. I'm going to create a content source to crawl our file fileshare.

• Browse to the central administration site and Click the SSP for the site collection.
• Click on search settings and then Content sources and crawl schedules.
• Click on New Content Source link.
• Create a content source by entering the required details. Check the attachment below for reference.

Step2 :Creating a scope based on the content source

We created a content source that crawls our fileshare. In this step, we will create a scope based on the content source.

Browse to the central administration site and Click the SSP for the site collection.
Click on search settings and then Click on view Scopes.
Click on new scope link.
Enter title as "FileShare" and leave other details as blank and Click OK.

Click on Add Rules option for the the scope "FileShare"
• Select the content source created for the fileshare in step #1 as shown and Click OK.

Step3:Adding the scope to a scope display group

A scope display group is used to organize a list of scopes. The scope display group is then assigned to a search box to be able to search on those scopes.Lets add our scope "FileShare" created on step #2 to a scope display group.

• Browse to the site collection for your search center (This is the site collection which has your search page).
• Select Site actions>Site settings>Search scopes. The page attached below will be shown. Please note the scope "FileShare" has no scope display group assigned at this time. We can either create a new display group and add scopes or add our scope to an existing group.

• Click on the scope display group "Search Dropdown" and Select our scope "FileShare".

Step3:Using the scope display group for a search box web part

The scope display group "Search Dropdown" has our scope included in it. In this step, we will ensure that our search box webpart uses this scope display group.

• Browse to the search page and select site actions>edit page.
• Select edit>modify shared webpart on the search box web part.
• On the properties pane, expand the section miscellaneous and check the property value for the property scope display group as shown.

Step4:Updating the scope

Unless the scope is updated, it will not appear on the scopes dropdown of the search box webpart. To update the scope, follow the steps below.

Browse to the central administration site and Click the SSP for the site collection.
Click on search settings and then Click on Start update now.

That's it. The scope "FileShare" must be available on the scopes dropdown of the search box webpart. If it does not, you would want to make sure that show scope dropdown option is selected for the webpart as shown.

With this, our scope is ready to be used.

We are done with part1 of the post on SharePoint Search scopes. The next and the last part will be on scope rules and scope behavior starting with various types of scope. Keep watching.