Sanjaya on SharePoint Search

Enhancing SharePoint search with Longitude Keyword suggestions

spaudel — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:03:00 GMT

Longitude for SharePoint search now provides Keyword suggestions when users type in search keywords.

This feature is provided on a search box web part by binding it with Longitude’s keyword suggestion WebPart. The keyword suggestions WebPart improves the user experience by suggesting a list of keyword as the user types in letter in the search text box. By default, the Longitude Search site template includes this web part on the default.aspx and results.aspx pages. This can be bound to any search box web part by adding the web part to the page and specifying the title of the bound search textbox web part in the property page (read below)

Below is the description of possible configuration settings that can be used for keyword suggestion.

Maximum number of Search Keywords that will be looked at to provide suggestions.
Maximum Keyword Suggestion: Specifies the maximum keywords to be suggested on screen
SearchBox Title: The title of the searchbox web part to bind to. This field is used when adding the keyword suggestion web part onto a new page.
Select Scope: Lets you select which Parametric search scope to use for keyword suggestion
Select Sources: Select which sources are used to suggest keywords. .

SearchKeywords corresponds to the concepts tracked by Longitude. This functionality is automatic and does not require any configuration.
Bestbets: Longitude will reuse the keywords and best bets specified in the site collection
Thesaurus: Longitude will look at the search thesaurus file in your sharepoint farm to suggest keywords
Parametric: Longitude will reuse an existing parametric search scope to offer filter suggestions: for instance: LastName:Gates

SharePoint site crawling not working-IIS log shows authentication denied, Error code:2148074252

spaudel — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:33:00 GMT

The crawling on our intranet and internet based support site stopped working for some reason. The crawl log showed an access denied for the default account. I tried reentering the password and I confirmed the account wasn’t locked out but everything was ok. I was even able to access the sites with that account.

Then I tried accessing the same sites from the server and that didn’t work. I would be continuously prompted for credentials. I tried accessing other WSS/SharePoint sites not hosted in the same farm: the authentication worked. I tried accessing another .net app on the same server using http://localhost:xxx that worked too. So the issue was really isolated to our sites.

Next, I looked at the IIS logs and searched for the win32 error code returned when denying authentication: 2148074252.

I found a couple of posts referring to a IIS 6 issue and a kb article from MS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

This matched exactly my problem: our site used host headers so that’s why I couldn’t authenticate.

The solution I used was however not the one from the KB article as this could be a security threat. Instead, what I did was to add an alternate access mappings for each site using the server name and a different port: 81, 82, etc… and then index these sites using these new urls.

The crawl went fine and the documents were searcheable again.

Note: if you follow the same steps I did, make sure to update your crawl rules, authoritative sites and scopes definitions as they may have an impact.

No need to update the search results however as users will continue to access the WSS site using the normal url so the documents will continue to have same urls in the search results.

Create and Configure a Scope to Only Return Documents in a Search Result

spaudel — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:27:00 GMT

It is evident that SharePoint can index content in web sites, file shares, exchange public folders, or any other content that has a URL. However, many users like to execute a search which is restricted to a specific type of content such as Tasks, Announcements, Events, Documents, Blogs etc or a content source such as a document workspace or a team site or a file share etc. On a similar note I would like to quote what one of our customers who was evaluating our search product Longitude for SharePoint asked for.

"We are most concerned with documents and to us, most of the other items that come up that may contain the search string are clutter and it would be nice to easily filter them out"

The customer basically wanted a provision to narrow down search to documents only and was not interested in the announcements, events, and wiki pages etc that came up in the resutls.Typically when the requirement is about being able to execute a search restricted to a content type or a content source, SharePoint Search scope is the way to go.

In this article, we will go through all those configurations required to create a search scope that will be dedicated to return only documents. Before we start with the configurations required, let's take a look at the basics of SharePoint search scope.

In an enterprise, gigs and terabytes of data is crawled from various content sources on a regular basis. The crawls create a single content index representing all the content sources. SharePoint provides search scopes as a way to filter the content index to define a subset of it. By effectively defining a section of the content index a head of the query time, search scopes facilitate to limit the results that are returned from the index. Search scopes are pre-compiled and efficient.

SharePoint has two types of search scopes.

The Contextual scopes are created automatically based on the context of the site area user is currently working on such as a web or a list etc. In a SharePoint site, these scopes read like "this site", "this list" etc.

The Custom Scopes are the ones that an administrator can create to target a specific type of content. Two types of custom scopes can be created:

SSP Level Scopes are global and shared across all the site collections that are associated with the SSP. The SSP level scopes are managed at the SSP level by a farm administrator.
Site collection level scopes are local to a site collection and are managed by the site collection administrator.

Create a scope to return only documents in search

In the steps outlined below, we will be creating a SSP level scope called "All Documents" and add a rule to include only documents.

Step1: Create a all documents scope

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

Step2: Allow the "IsDocument" property to be used in scopes

IsDocument is a managed property provided by SharePoint and is true for all documents only. Therefore, before adding a scope rule to the scope "All Documents", we must ensure that this property can be used in scope. Follow the steps to allow the property to be used in scopes.

Browse to the central administration site.
Click on the Shared Service Provider (SSP).
Click on Search settings
Click on metadata property mappings.
Find the managed property IsDocument and set "Use in Scope" property to true and Click Ok.

Step3: Add scope rule

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 "All Documents".
Click on New Rule.
Add a property query rule where the property IsDocument=1 and set the scope behavior to require and click OK.

Step4: Add 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. To add the scope "All Documents" to a scope display group, follow the steps below:

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. You will notice that the scope "All Documents" has no scope display group assigned at this time. We can either create a new display group and add or add it to an existing group.

Click on the scope display group "Search Dropdown" and Select the scope "All Documents".

Step5: 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 and make sure that it is "Search Dropdown" as selected at #Step4.

Step6: Update 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.

We are done. The scope "All Documents" 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.

Finally, some frequently asked business requirements questions from our customers where search scopes have been used.

1) I have a content source (cs1) which is an archive of past projects and is static and I have another content source (cs2) which has all active projects with dynamic content. I crawl cs1 once a week and crawl cs2 once a day. However, I want to be able to search results from both content sources at one place in a Global Search Center.

Create a scope say "Global Scope".
Add an include rule by selecting cs1 as the content source.
Add another include rule by selecting cs2 as the content source.
Use the scope "Global Scope" in your Global Search Center to be able to view results from both the site collections at one place.

2) How do I get only PDF documents in my search results?

Create a scope say "PDF Documents"
Add a property query based rule where FileExtension is equal to pdf.
Set the scope rule behavior to include.
Update the scopes.
Search using the scope "PDF Documents".

3) I want to search on only those documents that have been tagged as "Legal Documents".

This requirement has got two aspects of it:

Results must be documents not a blog posts or wiki pages or a list item etc
Results must have only those documents which have been tagged as Legal documents.

Here you will have to create a document with two scope rules. The first would be to include all the documents from the content index and the second would be to ensure that only Legal documents are included. Assuming that you have a managed property called "Tag" mapped to the column that stores the tags for the documents, follow the steps below to create a scope to search against.

Create a scope say "Legal Documents"
Add a property query based rule where IsDocument is equal to 1 and Set the scope rule behavior to include.
Add another property query based rule where Tag is equal to "Legal" and Set the scope rule behavior to require.
Update the scopes.
Search using the scope "Legal Documents".

4) I want to search on only those documents that have been tagged as "Legal Documents" and are not authored by Martin.

As opposed to the requirement #3, this one has got three aspects of it:

Results must be documents not a blog posts or wiki pages or a list item etc
Results must have only those documents which have been tagged as Legal documents.
Results must not have those documents which are authored by Martin.

In addition to the two rules as mentioned #3, we would also need a third rule to exclude those documents where Martin is the author. Therefore, assuming that you have a managed property called "Tag" mapped to the column that stores the tags for the documents, follow the steps below to create a scope to search against.

Create a scope say "Legal Documents"
Add a property query based rule where IsDocument is equal to 1 and Set the scope rule behavior to include.
Add another property query based rule where Tag is equal to "Legal" and Set the scope rule behavior to require.
Add another property query based rule where Author is equal to "Martin" and Set the scope rule behavior to exclude.
Update the scopes.
Search using the scope "Legal Documents".

5) I have many blog sites which are spread over different site collections. How do I have a search scope that returns only blogs related results.

This requirement is to include content specific i.e. blog related items in the search scope that can be search against. We must see if there is a property which represents a specific type of content. Fortunately, contentclass is one such property that distinguishes content from one another. Therefore follow the steps below to create a scope.

Create a scope say "Blogs"
Add a property query based rule where contentClass is equal to "sts_listitem_posts" and Set the scope rule behavior to include.
Add another property query based rule where contentClass is equal to "sts_listitem_comments" and Set the scope rule behavior to include.
Update the scopes.
Search using the scope "Blogs".

Note: Just like "sts_listitem_posts" and "sts_listitem_comments", there are other pre-defined values Sharepoint assigns to the property contentClass to represent different types of content. The table below has most of them.

STS_Document	STS_List_Comments
STS_List_300	STS_List_Contacts
STS_List_850	STS_List_DiscussionBoard
STS_List_Announcements	STS_List_DocumentLibrary
STS_List_Categories	STS_List_Events
STS_List_GenericList	STS_list_Links
STS_List_PictureLibrary	STS_List_Posts
STS_List_Tasks	STS_ListItem_300
STS_ListItem_850	STS_ListItem_Announcements
STS_ListItem_Categories	STS_ListItem_Comments
STS_ListItem_Contacts	STS_ListItem_DiscussionBoard
STS_ListItem_DocumentLibrary	STS_ListItem_Events
STS_ListItem_GenericList	STS_ListItem_Links
STS_ListItem_Posts	STS_Site
STS_Web

Restrict search to return documents from a File Share only?

spaudel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:09:00 GMT

Sharepoint search scope is the way to go to realize the above requirement.In this article, we will go through all those configurations required to create a search scope that will be dedicated to return results from a file share only.

Before we start with the steps to create our scope for file share, let's take a look at different types of search scopes, scope rules and scope behavior.

Scope Types

SharePoint has two types of search scopes.

The Contextual scopes are created automatically based on the context of the site area user is currently working on such as a web or a list etc. These scopes let user search content from those specific areas only. In a SharePoint site, these scopes read like "this site", "this list" etc.

The Custom Scopes are the ones that an administrator can create to target a specific type of content. Two types of custom scopes can be created:

SSP Level Scopes are global and shared across all the site collections that are associated with the SSP. The SSP level scopes are managed at the SSP level by a farm administrator.
Site collection level scopes are local to a site collection and are managed by the site collection administrator.

Scope Rules

The custom scopes can be created based on the following types of scope rules.

Web Address -With web address you can limit the results to a certain web address only. Such as a document library or a list in sharepoint, a sharepoint subsite, a sharepoint site collection or a folder in a sharepoint document library etc.

Property Query applies restriction as a comparison of property to a value. Such as you can restrict results to the documents where the property Author=Mark or exclude the documents where Author=Martin or require that all the documents in the results must be authored by John. How the scope rule should apply to a scope is defined by scope behavior and will be dealt in the section Scope behavior.

A content source that has already been created can be used to create a scope that includes all the items indexed by the content source.

By choosing All Content type scope, the scope will include all the items indexed by all the available content sources.

Scope Behavior

How a scope rule should be applied to the overall scope is defined by scope behavior. One of three behaviors can be applied to a scope rule.

Include - Any item that matches this rule will be included, unless the item is excluded by another rule. Select this option if you want the rule to be applied (if another rule precludes its inclusion, it won't be included). The include option is analogous to the logical operator AND.

Require - Every item in the scope must match this rule. Select this option if you want the rule to be applied regardless of other rules. The require option is analogous to the logical operator OR.

Exclude-Items matching this rule will be excluded from the scope. Select this option if you want items that match this rule to be excluded from the search scope.

Create a scope to return documents from a File Share?

We looked at what search scopes are and how are they applied to SharePoint content index, here we create a scope to search documents from a file share.

Step1: Create a content source to crawl your 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.
Enter a content source name and address url to the FileShare such as file://devserver/sampledocuments or file://devserver/sampledocuments
Click ok.

Step2: 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 blank and Click OK.
Click on Add Rules option for the scope "FileShare"
Select the content source created for the FileShare in step #1 and Click OK.

Step3: Add 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" 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. You will notice that the scope "FileShare" has no scope display group assigned at this time. We can either create a new display group and add or add it to an existing group.

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

Step4: 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 and make sure that it is "Search Dropdown" as selected at #Step2.

Step5: 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.

SharePoint Search Techniques-Property based Search

spaudel — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:57:00 GMT

While troubleshooting search related issues, it sometimes requires me to quickly find very specific type of document. I find property based search very handy and useful in such scenarios. As an example, searching for "fileextension:pdf" will return only pdf documents in the result and saves time if i am specifically looking for pdf documents. In another example, say you are looking for installation documents and you know that those documents are word documents. If you simply search for "installation", the search results will bring all types documents and items for installation. This will mostly require you to browse through the pages of results to find the required word documents. Instead, you can search for "fileextension:doc installation" to return only word documents for installation. In SharePoint Search, this type of search involving property is termed as property based search.

Property based search allows the use of managed properties to help refine searches. The basic format is

These forms of search queries will return only those results where the specified property name is equal to the specified property value.

The property based restriction can also be applied to a search scope by creating a scope rule.

There can be many more such properties and their possible values based on the managed properties created and the content crawled respectively. However, I would like to present two commonly used properties and some of their possible values.

ContentType

Some of the possible values for content types are:

Announcement
application/msword
application/pdf
application/vnd.ms-word.document.12
application/x-zip-compressed
Article Page
Categories
Discussion
Document
Event
image/svg+xml
image/tiff
Item
Link
Message
message/rfc822
Page
Post
Sites
Tabs
text/html
text/html: charset=utf-8

Given these possible values for contenttype, if you simply search for contenttype:application/pdf, it will return only the pdf files in the search results or if you search for contenttype:post, it will return only the blog posts from the site collection. Similarly, you could create a scope with a rule which says contenttype is equal to Announcement so that the scope will return only announcements in search.

ContentClass

Some of the possible values for content class are:

STS_Document
STS_List_300
STS_List_850
STS_List_Announcements
STS_List_Categories
STS_List_Comments
STS_List_Contacts
STS_List_DiscussionBoard
STS_List_DocumentLibrary
STS_List_Events
STS_List_GenericList
STS_list_Links
STS_List_PictureLibrary
STS_List_Posts
STS_List_Tasks
STS_ListItem_300
STS_ListItem_850
STS_ListItem_Announcements
STS_ListItem_Categories
STS_ListItem_Comments
STS_ListItem_Contacts
STS_ListItem_DiscussionBoard
STS_ListItem_DocumentLibrary
STS_ListItem_Events
STS_ListItem_GenericList
STS_ListItem_Links
STS_ListItem_Posts
STS_Site
STS_Web

Given these possible values for contentclass, if you simply search for contentclass:sts_web, it will return all the sites in the given search scope or if you search for contentclass:sts_list_post, it will return all the blog posts from the site collection. Similarly, you could create a scope with a rule which says contentclass is equal to sts_listitem_Announcements so that the scope will return only announcements in search.

Replacing “OSSSearchResults.aspx” with “/SearchCenter/Pages/Results.aspx”

spaudel — Sun, 03 May 2009 03:50:00 GMT

Every time users make search using the "this site" scope in the top level search box of the root site, the result page is OSSSearchResults.aspx although you have a search center configured for the site collection.

Well this is a known limitation where you are always redirected to osssearchresults.aspx instead of the configured search center.

In order to redirect the search to the preferred search center, you need to edit the Osssearchresults.aspx page. The Osssearchresults.aspx file is located on the web front-end server, in the following folder by default \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS. Insert the code provided below before the “</script>” tag.

function getURLParam(strParamName)
{
  var strReturn = "";
  var strHref = window.location.href;
  if ( strHref.indexOf("?") > -1 )
  {
      var strQueryString = strHref.substr( strHref.indexOf( "?" ) ).toLowerCase();
      var aQueryString = strQueryString.split( "&" );
      for ( var iParam = 0; iParam < aQueryString.length; iParam++ )
      {
        if( aQueryString[iParam].indexOf(strParamName.toLowerCase() + "=") > -1 )
        {
          var aParam = aQueryString[iParam].split("=");
          strReturn = aParam[1];
          break;
        }
      }
  }
  return strReturn;
}

var urlstring = '/SearchCenter/Pages/results.aspx?k=' + getURLParam('k') + '&cs=' + getURLParam('cs') + '&u=' + getURLParam('u');
location.replace(urlstring);

Documents (doc,docx,xls,xlsx,pdf etc) preview functionality with sharepoint search

spaudel — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:42:00 GMT

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

Search Scopes Recommendation

spaudel — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:36:00 GMT

Applying scope to a search core results web part

spaudel — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:29:00 GMT

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.

Browse to the search results 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 specify the property value as "Technical Documents" for the property scope as shown.

Display only documents in search results

spaudel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:13:00 GMT

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.

When to check "use site level defaults property" for the search box web part

spaudel — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:01:00 GMT

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.

Step 1: Verify the target results page for the scope is valid.

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.

Step 2: Ensure that the property “Use Site level defaults” is checked for the search box web part.

The search box web part must be configured to use site level defaults so that the target results page that have been configured for a scope will be used to display search results.

· Select Site actions>Edite page.

· Select edit>modify shared webpart on the search box webpart.

· Expand the section miscellaneous.

· Ensure that the property “Use site level defaults” is checked as shown.

You clear that box when you want all searches from the text box to be redirected to the target page you specify in the search box web part configuration settings.

Search box does not respond. Javascript error occurs on click.

spaudel — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:22:00 GMT

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.

SharePoint Search Scopes-FAQs

spaudel — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:59:00 GMT

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.

2) You have a content source (cs1) which is an archive of past projects and is static and you have another content source (cs2) which has all active projects with dynamic content. You crawl cs1 once a week and crawl cs2 once a day. However, you want to be able to search results from both content sources at one place in a Global Search Center.

Create a scope say “Global Scope”.
Add a include rule by selecting cs1 as the content source.
Add another include rule by selecting cs2 as the content source.
Use the scope “Global Scope” in your Global Search Center to be able to view results from both the site collections at one place.

3) I want results from PDF documents only on search.

Find a managed property FileExtension and set the value “Allow the property to be used in managed property” to true 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.

4) How to create a scope to get results from all the document libraries ?

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

Contentclass= STS_ListItem_DocumentLibrary

To learn more about the contentclass property, follow the link below.

http://sharepointbeagle.com/blogs/bobmixon/archive/2009/02/19/creating-an-all-documents-search-scope-using-contentclass.aspx

SharePoint Search Scopes-Part2

spaudel — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:31:00 GMT

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:

Next, we will see what are scopes based on and how scopes are defined using scope rules. Understanding of scope rules is very critical to define the right scope for a given requirement.

A scope does not represent any index without a rule defined. A newly created scope looks like this

Creating a scope rule:

The add rule screen looks like this:

As shown, a scope rule type must be selected first and can be one of these

Web Address

Web Address scope rules can be used to create search scopes that include content in web sites, the shares, exchange public folders, or any other content in the search index that has a URL.

Folder rules will include items in the folder and subfolders of the indicated path.

Domain or hostname rules include all items within the specified domain or hostname.

Property Query

Property Query applies restriction as a comparison of property to a value. All items matching the property query will be added to the scope. To make additional properties available for use in scopes, navigate to the managed properties list and select “Allow this property to be used in scopes" for the desired managed properties.

Content Source

A content source that has already been created can be used to create a scope that includes all the items indexed by the content source.

All Content

By choosing All Content type scope, the scope will include all the items indexed by all the available content sources.After selecting the scope type that represents the source for the scope rule. User must apply behavior to include or exclude items from the selected source.

Scope behavior

Scope behavior decides how a scope rule should be applied to the overall scope. The scope-wide filter is used when combining the items matching all rules to determine what is in the scopes overall.

One of three different behaviors can be applied to a scope rule:

Include - Any item that matches this rule will be included, unless the item is excluded by another rule. Select this option if you want the rule to be applied (if another rule precludes its inclusion, it won't be included). The include option is analogous to the logical operator AND.

Require - Every item in the scope must match this rule. Select this option if you want the rule to be applied regardless of other rules. The require option is analogous to the logical operator OR.Exclude-Items matching this rule will be excluded from the scope. Select this option if you want items that match this rule to be excluded from the search scope.

The Exclude option is analogous to the logical operator AND NOT.Note: Scope rules are applied to the scope in the order they are created.

SharePoint Search Scopes-Part1

spaudel — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:23:00 GMT

What are Scopes? How to Use?

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.

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.