This document introduces enterprise search and its key components. It discusses how enterprise search allows indexing and querying of documents from multiple sources within an organization. The main components covered are content sources, crawled properties, managed properties, scopes, and the search center. The document also outlines some drawbacks of earlier enterprise search offerings and new features in SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search Server 2010.

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

2. 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 E-mail: coreyroth@gmail.com Twitter: twitter.com/coreyroth Blog: www.dotnetmafia.com

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

4. What is Enterprise Search? Enterprise Search is one of Microsoft’s current offerings to do search in the Enterprise Included in MOSS 2007 Also available as a stand alone product (Search Server 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.)

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

6. Content Sources Defines what is being crawled Configure a crawl for SharePoint, Web Sites, File Shares, Active Directory, etc. Specifies a full and incremental crawl schedule Can manually start crawls here

7. 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 Supports keyword search only for now (no wildcard) – For wildcard search alternative see wildcardsearch.codeplex.com

8. 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

9. 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

10. Search Center – Web Parts SearchBoxEx CoreResultsWebPart BestBets Paging AdvancedSearch

11. 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)

12. 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”)

13. Drawbacks of Enterprise Search No out of the box Wildcard Search (i.e.: docum*) – Use DotNetMafiaWildcardSearchWebPart – http://wildcardsearch.codeplex.com 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. Indexing Other Sources File Shares Database

17. Questions? Corey Roth Blog: www.dotnetmafia.com Twitter: twitter.com/coreyroth