Dev Dives: Streamline document processing with UiPath Studio Web
Product Catalog and IT Service Management
1. Product Catalog
& IT Service
Management
$
presents
Join the conversation
at #spfestchi
2. About Us
#spfestchi
Matt Engibous
Solution Lead, SharePoint Architect
mengibous@concurrency.com
Twitter: @MattEngibous
http://concurrency.com/blog/author/mengibous
Drew Madelung
SharePoint ECM Consultant
dmadelung@concurrency.com
Twitter: @DMadelung
http://concurrency.com/blog/author/dmadelung
Peter Hurth
SharePoint Content Management Architect
phurth@concurrency.com
Twitter: @ConcurrencyPete
http://concurrency.com/blog/author/phurth
Microsoft Managed Gold Certified
Systems Integrator
• Founded in 1989
• Offering a full range of professional services
focused on Microsoft Infrastructure as well
as Office 365, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM
productivity platforms.
• Hundreds of clients Nationwide
Recent Awards:
• 2014 Microsoft Partner of the Year
Management and Virtualization Finalist
• 2012 Microsoft Content Management
Partner of the Year
• 2012 Microsoft Central Region Partner of the
year
• 2011 Microsoft Midwest Partner of the year
Twitter @ConcurrencyInc
3. Agenda
1. Why IT Service Management?
3. Configuring a Product Catalog
2. Product Catalog Demystified
Demo
5. Office 365
vs
On-Premises
4. Limits and Uses
5. Why IT Service
Management?
IT Service Management Portal
Hierarchical collection of services
Dynamic changes of IT services
Delivery of consumable services
Service specific knowledge content
6. Grow
efficiently
Wait! What?
Wait! What?
SharePoint Online can…
Product Catalog
Demystified
Can be used to display any dynamic content
Separation of content authoring from
consumption
7. Grow
efficiently
Cross-site
publishing
Search driven sites Authoring content
Term sets
Catalog
configuration
Crawled & Managed
properties
Search web parts
Product Catalog
Demystified
What is the Product Catalog?
Display templates Product Catalog
8. Grow
efficiently
What is the Product Catalog Product Catalog?
Demystified
Authoring Site(s)
Catalog(s)
Search
Term Store
Publishing Site
9. Why Product
Catalog Rocks!
#spfestchi
New SharePoint 2013 Search
FAST search engine
Continuous crawl (On-Prem handle with care)
Result sources
Query rules
Display templates
Analytics
10. Business
anywhere
SharePoint 2013
Search Architecture
HTTP
File shares
SharePoint
User profiles
Lotus Notes
Exchange folders
Custom - BCS
Public API
Unit of scale/role boundary
Crawl
Analytics
Reporting
SharePoint
SP Apps
Devices
Admin
11. Business
anywhere
Why Product
Catalog Rocks!
Scale and Manageability
With 2 pages you can…
• Category & Item
Breaking down site collection boundaries
• Anonymous Access – gives users access to Search Index
without access to authoring site
12. Configuring a
Product Catalog
On SharePoint Online!
#spfestchi
First things first
Create site collection(s) for authoring and publishing based on
your scenario
1.
Activate SharePoint Server Publishing and Cross-Site Publishing
site collection & site features
2.
PLAN logical & security architecture
3.
Create term set hierarchy and ensure it is marked as available
for tagging content 4.
Create site content types on the authoring site that contain the
necessary metadata and utilize the new term set 5.
13. Connect with
customers
Configuring a
Product Catalog
This Product list is just like
the on-premises Product
Catalog Site Collection
Create content sources (library/list) on the authoring site, add
content type and upload data 6.
Enable the content source as a catalog via List Settings 7. -> Catalog Settings
8. Set the Catalog Item URL Fields and the Navigation Hierachy
Enabling Anonymous Access
is also configured on the
Catalog Settings Page
14. Connect with
customers
Configuring a
Product Catalog
Connect your publishing site to the catalog and configure catalog
settings 9.
Refiners can also be used to
assist with navigation
15. Connect with
customers
Configuring a
Product Catalog
You can use separate pages
as category and item pages
and assign them in term
store management.
Customize the new Catalog Item and Catalog 10. Category pages
Use Content Search web parts with custom display templates
Category Page Search Query
Item Page Search Query
16. Display Templates
2 Types of display templates primarily used
• Control & Item
• Mainly use Javascript and HTML
No display template out of the box will work
• Custom display templates must be built to provide a good user
experience
• Use the built in HTML display templates as starting points
Stored in the Master Page Gallery of the site collection
• Map a drive for easy access to HTML file
• You can test with unpublished display templates but ENSURE
they are published prior to go-live
.
18. Know your limits Managed metadata term store
7 max level of nested terms
30k max number of terms per term set
1 million items per term store
2k max items in managed navigation
Variations (language)
Takes some work
Timer jobs – 15 min (sync)
19. Safeguard
your business
Office 365 vs SharePoint On-Premises
Prego…it's in there
On-premises only
Office 365
Query rules, display templates, rank models, managed navigation,
search schema, analytics, CSOM, query builder and result sources.
• Product catalog site collection template
• User segmentation to drive adaptive interfaces
• Faceted navigation – supports taxonomy refiners
• Anonymous access for cross site publishing not supported
• E3 and E4 plans only - Cross site publishing
• Content Search and Content Item Reuse web parts
• Category and Item page layouts
• Unable to modify Search content sources
20. Product
Catalog Uses
Enabling anonymous as content
Products……
Policy & Procedure repository
Benefits tracking
Digital Asset
Management
21. Transform Fortune 100 IT Organizations Using IT
Service Management with Microsoft System
Center 2012 R2 and Office 365
http://bit.ly/1gcYFRJ
Matt
Who has heard of the product catalog in SP 2013?
Is anyone here using the product catalog?
What version of SharePoint are people running? All 3? matt joke *cue laugh track
- First we will be discussing what IT Service Management means and how the product catalog was used as a solution
- Then we will begin breaking down what the product catalog is and how to configure one
- We will then talk about some of its limits and uses and also differences between Office 365 and on-premises
- Throughout this presentation we will be jumping into demonstrations
Pete
Product catalog intro demo
Pete
What is an IT Service Management Portal?
For example: Infrastructure services -> virtual services -> hyper –v > request a new VM
IT Services are always changing; Cloud services now has its own service map
One of the primary goals of an IT Service Management Portal is to allow access to unique services in the hierarchy such as access to a unique ticketing service based on service.
Another goal of an IT Service Management Portal is to provide specific content or related documents that correspond with that service. An example of this would be any specific type of policy or procedure that directly relates to a service or a service category
- This type of portal with a hierarchical collection of content directly maps to the new product catalog feature in SP 2013
Drew
A primary point of this session is to show that just because its called the “product catalog” it does not have anything to do with products, Any dynamic content can be displayed using this feature
The concept of the product catalog at a very high level is that it allows you to separate the content that is being authored from the consumption of that content. There are many parts that go into process but that is the concept at the core.
As it relates to ITSM is to organize all of the services and corresponding on an authoring site and present specific service content to consumers in a different site
This is not just for on-premises configurations of SP, SP Online can now host a product catalog.
There are some differences between the 2 that we will be going through later
Drew
The product catalog is made up of a lot of different aspects. This is a diagram that I put together that I believe highlights the key pieces that make up a “product catalog”
I will start in the top left
Cross-site publishing is the primary feature that makes this all possible. This feature activates the web parts and catalog features to allow functionality of authoring and publishing content.
Once the prior feature is active you can start creating search driven sites. This isn’t necessarily a technical feature but a concept. Search is the key part to make this possible
The next piece that makes up a product catalog is content, and mainly authoring content. This is the content that is intended to be used in the product catalog and be published. This can be page content, list, asset or document content.
In the authoring sites you use term sets to tag the content. When you tag content with one or more terms, the terms become part of the metadata that is associated with the content. This metadata is used in the publishing site collections and used for managed navigation
Once the content is ready to be published the catalog needs to be configured. This is where you configure sections of the catalog such as anonymous access, item identifiers, and navigation identifiers
Before a library or list is shared as a catalog, content must exist and be tagged with a term. This all must be crawled as well. This will generate the crawled and managed properties that will be used to find the content across site collections.
Then on the publishing site collection (which also has cross-site publishing enabled) will use search web parts such as the Content Search Web Part to query the content based on the properties and display it.
The Content Search Web Part uses display templates as the end user design piece that displays content in a certain way.
We will be going into more depth in nearly all of this as we continue. We will start with search and publishing content
Matt
This is a high level view of what makes up a product catalog with all of the pieces together and this is how the IT service management portal is put together .
IT Service Management Content is built on the authoring site and tagged with the appropriate information based on terms in the term store
The content is published via a catalog and once a crawl runs (which can occur quite frequently with continuous crawl) all of the items are now located in the crawl index
Content can then be viewed on the publishing site
Term Store – It is part of the Managed Metadata Service. Term Store is a collection of terms. Gives us the ability to classify, tag content to help us better managed and find content.
2 keys that make the term store important in this process are
1 – Putability and 2 – Findability of content
- Putability
- Putability is the concept or actually adding content to the site. The term store gives you the ability to govern these processes.
- Once you put the content in, the findability is the ease of access to finding the content that you actually need.
- For IT Service Management this can relate directly back to the ability to target the content to a user based on a service. That gives the user a better experience as they are only seeing the content that they want.
And all of this is put together because of new powerful features of search in SharePoint
Matt
Robust and Enterprise FAST Search
Not “set and forget it” rotisserie
If there’s 2 features worth upgrading to SP2013
1. Search
2. New product catalog / cross publishing features
3. Bonus – Many performance and web standardization enhancements.
Awesome new web part Content Search, (Content Query was limited to a site collection)
Results sources – Search scopes – Everything, People, Video,
Query Rules – Promoted result, grouping of results (result blocks), and ranking (like having HR policies first)
Display Templates – 1 to many, controlling how content is displayed.
Analytics – Beneficial for tuning SP search. What are people searching for and not finding.
Matt
One Search Platform – Previous we had multiple versions on search ( FAST Technology, FAST Search for SP, SP2010 Search Foundation)
Crawl Component – Crawls / Indexes content. Uses local disk cache for further content procession Types of Crawl – Full, Incremental and Continuous (default 15mins)
Content Processing – Processing the content and analyzes it before sending it to the index, creates better and cleaner index. Security Updates are done here. SP2010 this could take a long time 2013 much faster. Parses Docs and maps to managed properties. “Smart Title and Author Extractor” New in SP2013 will pick up titles and names and add it to the index. Prevents against poor naming of documents.
Index - Add one index partition per 10 million items. Crawled property converted to Managed Property =Searchable, Refinable, Sortable, Queryable
Query Processing – Reads the index partitions
WFE – Event stream to Analytics Processing that feed back into index. Clicking on items boost relevancy and puts it into the Index.
Analytics DB is created for Reporting
Good UX / Browser Support
Matt
Scale – Can your solution scale. Yes product catalog can!
What can scale: Managed Properties – painful in SP2010 to user mgd properties , Metadata Navigation, adding products/items,
Multiple Site Collections– one for products and one for images
With 2 pages you can…
Category and Item page
Utilize display templates that no longer needs to use XSLT
Can use jquery, javascript or css per display template
Breaking down site collection boundaries – Author in one, publish in another.
You’re not limited to 1 site collection
To go into the steps about configuring a product catalog let’s go back to Drew.
Drew
The first thing that needs to be done before configuring a product catalog (and really almost anything in SharePoint) is planning. Cross-site publishing architectures has the ability to span many site collections but also only be in one. The number of authoring and publishing site collections that you create depends on project requirements such as how many catalogs there will be. These architectures could be different for different types of scenarios such as Internet, Intranet, Extranet, or multilingual sites. Along with logical architecture security is important to know prior to configuration. Are you planning to do anonymous? Who will need this content? Who will own this content?
Once you are ready to go you can create either your single site collection or multiple site collections using the SharePoint online admin center. The most common site collection types to be use are team site for the authoring and publishing for the publishing.
Next you need to activate the SharePoint Server Publishing and Cross site publishing site collection features. Depending on the site collection that you pick you will also need to activate the site level SharePoint server publishing feature
As we have discussed term sets are necessary in this process. This is what will be used for navigation. In a product scenario this is something like the product hierarchy. For example you have electronics -> then tvs -> then Samsung. This should be configured in the SharePoint online admin center using the managed metadata service if the plan is intended to be used across site collections. If this is a single site collection configuration it can be done at the term store at the site collection level. Also make sure that is marked as available for tagging
Now that we have the term set configured we need to create the content types that will apply to the content. Best practice is to create these at the site level and not just add columns to a list or library. This ensures that any other lists/libraries or subsites that will be used can use the same content type. One of these columns (like item category) should point back to the term set created. There also needs to be a unique identifier for the item such as item number.
Drew
Now that the content type is built you can create the content sources on the authoring site and begin building content once the content type is added. In the screenshot below you will see a content type that I created based on the product catalog site collection. This includes an item number, group number, and item category as the primary columns. I also included a roll up image column that will be used on the publishing site to display images. I then created content that will be used. (this is required fully build out the product catalog)
The next 2 steps happen on the same page but I wanted to separate them to discuss the importance. The first step is an easy one but a big one. Once you have enabled the features that we have previously discussed if you go to list settings on the authoring list you will see a new link called catalog settings. Click that link and you will have multiple options. The first checkbox is to enable this library or list as a catalog. This is a primary checkbox that needs to be checked to get everything started. This is what will make it viewable to the publishing sites. Small but big!
Below that checkbox you will see the rest of the catalog settings. This includes the configuration of the way that you will be identifying the catalog items. This will be used as appended variables in the URL to identify the items. The next settings is the navigation hierarchy which will become the new managed navigation on the publishing site. On the catalog settings page is also where you can enable anonymous access.
Drew
Now that the catalog is configured a crawl first needs to be run. Once a crawl is run you can go to the publishing site collection and connect to the authoring site. This is done on the site settings page under the new link called “Manage Catalog Connections” Click “connect” on the catalog that you are configuring to set the catalog source settings. There is a lot that happens on this page and I don’t have time to go through it all but here are the highlights.
Connection integration -> select integrate the catalog into my site to bring everything across including the navigation.
Set the navigation hierarchy, navigation position, and navigation pinning based on our needs. In this scenario our hierarchy is based on the item category and we want to use the root of the terms. We also want to pin the terms to navigation for the site.
Next Define catalog item url format to either point to the source site or keep it relative to this site (which is used in this process) The catalog item url was defined in the authoring site but you could change it here as well.
As matt discussed everything is done using 2 pages. If you already have 2 pages created you can use those or else SharePoint can create 2 new pages for you.
Click OK and you will see that the publishing site is now connected to the catalog and the navigation is pointing to the term that you declared
Drew
The last step is to customize the category and item pages. This is where the majority of the time will be used once the catalog is configured. If you had separate pages you can declare them in the managed metadata term store under the navigation tab.
The customization of these pages will mainly be done using the content search web parts with custom display templates. On this slide you will see examples of the queries for both content search web parts for the category and the item page.
For the category page select the new result source of the catalog which was created and restrict by current and navigation terms
For the item page it is more complicated but you will want this to point to the item directly. To do this use the managed properties of the fields that you created and defined in the catalog item url. Use the format managedpropertyname:{URL.Token. 1 or 2 } url.token value represents the value in the URL as counted from the right to left. So URL.token.1 would be the last itme in the url after a slash. Such as /group/item number. In this example we used group number as the defining field so we want it to be url.token.2
Drew
The content that will return in the prior queries that we just talked about will be seen using display templates. Display templates are everywhere in SharePoint now. There used to not be a lot of documentation around them but it is getting better. Here are some quick points about display templates.
There are 2 primary display templates used (control and item) The control is the template that covers all items that are returned. Think of this as the container. And the item template is used at the line by line level. Together they are used and applied to a content search web part.
For a good product catalog setup there is no default display template that will work. New display templates must be built. Use the OOTB display templates as starting points. Copy and paste them to start.
Display templates are store in the master page gallery of the site collection. An easy way to work with them is to map a drive to edit the HTML file directly. Make sure they are published prior to going live or anyone who cannot see the verions will not see the most recent version.
Pete
Product catalog content demo
Matt
Timer jobs run every 15mins can fall out of sync