Introduction To Enterprise Search - OKCSUG 2010

Introduction to SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search
Corey Roth
Blog: www.dotnetmafia.com
Twitter: twitter.com/coreyroth

Corey Roth
Consultant for Stonebridge
Worked in Consumer Electronics, Travel, Advertising, and Energy industries
Currently doing SharePoint development specializing in Enterprise Search
Microsoft Award for Customer Excellence (ACE) Winner
MCTS: MOSS 2007 Configuring, Developer
Very active in SharePoint community
E-mail: coreyroth@gmail.com

What is Enterprise Search?
It helps you find your stuff…

What is Enterprise Search?
Enterprise Search is one of Microsoft’s current offerings to do search in the Enterprise
Included in SharePoint 2010, MOSS 2007
Also available as a stand alone product (Search Server 2010/ 2008 / Search Server Express)
Allows for indexing and querying of documents from multiple sources (i.e.: documents, web sites, file shares, Active Directory (people), databases, web services, etc.)

Components of Enterprise Search
Content Sources
Crawled Properties
Managed Properties
Scopes
File Types
Crawl Rules

Content Sources
Defines what is being crawled
Configure a crawl for SharePoint, Web Sites, File Shares, Active Directory, Line of Business Systems (using BCS) etc.
Specifies a full and incremental crawl schedule
Can manually start crawls here

Search Center
Out of the box site and web parts for searching and displaying results
Can be created using the Site Settings menu on the root web site by enabled certain features
Search Results can be customized using XSLT
MOSS 2007 supports keyword search only for now (no wildcard) – For wildcard search alternative see wildcardsearch.codeplex.com (no longer necessary in SharePoint 2010)

Metadata Properties
After a full crawl, Crawled Properties are created for any metadata discovered (i.e.: Site Columns, Columns in a database, etc.)
Properties can be of type text, integer, decimal, date / time, boolean
Only text properties are included in the index by default
Managed Property - a property that can be queried on or displayed on the results page
One or more Crawled Properties can be mapped to a Managed Property
Managed Properties can be used to define scopes

Scopes
Scopes allow you to predefine subsets of the search index using rules
Rules can be created by web address, content source, or managed property query (i.e.: Color:”Red”)
Scopes can be grouped together in Scope Display Groups for use in the Search Center

Querying Search
Used to search by Managed Properties
Can specify Scopes (Scope:”MyScope”)
Can be passed via URL to CoreResultsWebPart (k Query String parameter)
AND implied between each keyword (i.e.: Color:”Red” Size:”M” is the same Color=“Red” AND Size=“M”)
OR implied when multiple keywords of the same managed property used (i.e.: Color:”Red” Color:”Blue” translates to Color=“Red” OR Color=“Blue”)
Asterisk can be used to do wildcard searches (SP2010)
Supports operators such as >, <, >=, <= etc (SP2010)

People Search in SharePoint 2010
Great way to find people in your organization
Improved in SharePoint 2010
Support phonetic searching and synonyms
Gateway to new social features

Search Center – Web Parts
SearchBoxEx
CoreResultsWebPart
BestBets
Paging
AdvancedSearch
PeopleCoreResultsWebPart – People Search
RefinementWebPart (new in SharePoint 2010)

Search Center - Customization
CoreResultsWebPart displays search results
Columns property – XML specifying Managed Properties
XSL – Transform the HTML output of the search results
Column names are specified in lower case in XSL (i.e.: Color will be color)

Indexing Other Sources
File Shares
Database
People

Drawbacks of Enterprise Search
No out of the box Wildcard Search (i.e.: docum*) – Use DotNetMafiaWildcardSearchWebPart – http://wildcardsearch.codeplex.com (MOSS 2007)
Search Center customizations limited to XSLT
Advanced Search web part is ugly and not very configurable
Cannot exclude sections of pages to not be indexed
Most search web parts are sealed and cannot be inherited from

What’s new in 2010?
Lots of things!
More Options – Search Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, FAST Search Server 2010
Refinement Web Part
Keyword Query Syntax Improvements – Wildcards!
Multiple Index Servers
Greatly improved People Search
Common API between SharePoint Search and FAST

FAST Search Results
Visual, Conversational Search
Sorting on any property
Scrolling PowerPoint
Previews
Visual Best Bets
Thumbnails
Refinement with counts
on any property
Similarity Search

Questions?
Corey Roth

Introduction To Enterprise Search - OKCSUG 2010

by Corey Roth

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