Mapping Properties in SP2007 for Search

Search is really one of the most needed, if not most important, components of a corporate intranet based on SharePoint. Why?  Because if you can’t find what you are looking for on the intranet, then the intranet is of little value.  Regardless of whether or not you accept this concept as true, the fact is that improving the search capabilities of your SharePoint farm will increase usage and acceptance. One of the things you can do to improve the search capabilities of your SharePoint farm is to make some (or all) of your site columns searchable in an Advanced Search page.  I know, I know, you can already find content based on the data in your site columns when searching now.  But how many documents are in your result set?  And, can your users search for specific site column content? If you have created Content Types and Site Columns that your users understand, then they will likely want to search for specific content based on them.  Here are the steps to take to enable searching directly on your custom site columns from an Advanced Search.  I created a new Advanced Search page, you could modify your Search Center Advanced Search page if so desired. To search by a column in any list or document library, you need to create a managed property and modify an Advanced Search box…and you will need to crawl your content to make it available. So let’s get to it.  My example is using a Site Column named “Product Name”.

Create a Managed Property

1. Navigate to your SSP and select Search Settings
2. Click on Metadata Properties under the Queries and Results section in the QuickLaunch
3. Click on the Crawled Properties link in the tool bar
4. Find your Site Column by typing it in the search box and clicking on the green & white arrow
5. Capture the exact property name – in my case it is “ows_Product_x0020_Name”
6. Go back to the Metadata Properties page
7. Click on the New Managed Property link in the tool bar
8. In the new form, please enter a name for the managed property, e.g. “ProductName”
9. Select the correct data type, e.g. “Text”
10. Click on the Add Mapping button to open up a “Crawled Property selection” WebPage dialog
11. Type the name of your column in the “Crawled property name” field and click the “Find” button, e.g. type “Product”
12. You will see the column name showing in the “Select a crawled property” list
13. Select the appropriate column, e.g. “ows_Product_x0020_Name”
14. Select the checkbox for Use in scopes if you plan to add this property to a Scope, otherwise leave it blank
15. Press OK to complete the form
16. Start a full crawl. This crawl will map column data to the managed property

We are halfway there, we now have a managed property that can be accessed by the Advanced Search web part.

Modify Advanced Search

To enable users to search for the column from the UI, you have to add the new property to the property drop-down in the Advanced Search web part they use.  Again, this can be any advanced search web part, however this only enables the web part you modify.  If you want users to select this property from any Advanced Search, you will have to modify each of them.

1. Go to the search page (or your Search Center  & click on “Advanced Search”)
2. Click on Site Actions and select Edit Page
3. Click on “edit” and “Modify Shared Web Part” of your Advanced Search box
4. On the right pane, find the Properties text box under Properties section (XML text box)

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     Click image for large view

5. Copy and paste the XML text into Notepad to edit the XML (I just think it is easier this way)
6. Find the <PropertyDefs> node and add a new entry for your new Managed Property:
   • e.g. <PropertyDef Name=”ProductName” DataType=”Text” DisplayName=”Product Name” />
   • The DisplayName attribute  shows in the property drop-down
   • The PropertyDefName is the Managed Property Name you created in Step 8 of Create a Managed Property, above
7. Find the  <ResultType> nodes and add a new entry:
   • e.g. <PropertyRef Name=”ProductName” />
8. Copy and paste the XML text from notepad back into the XML text box
9. Click OK
10. Test your handy-work:
    1. Check that the Properties drop-down menu has the property displayed
    2. Execute a search using the new property

Now your savvy users can search for content with laser accuracy and obtain search results that focus on what they want without having to sift through extraneous results.

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Modify the default scope for your search box

MOSS/SharePoint 2007

To modify the default scope

Go to your home page and navigate to “Site Actions” –> “Site Settings” –> “Modify All Site Settings“.

On this page, pick “Search scopes” under the Site Collection Administration.

Here you’ll see some different “Display groups“, one of them is the “Search Dropdown” (which is the search box you see on your SharePoint site).

If you click on the “Search Dropdown” link, you’ll be taken to a page with some settings for this group and the bottom one is where you set your default scope.

Modify this to whatever you want, click OK and you’re done!

Removing Internet from your Search Results

The default Search settings within MOSS 2007 may work fine for many companies, but there is one setting that we didn’t like on our SharePoint based Intranet.  That is the display of search results from the Internet.  We want our searches from within the SharePoint sites to focus on internal content, and felt that it is a distraction having what some consider advertising to be displayed with every Search result.

Removing this isn’t difficult, finding the place to do it might be.  If you haven’t messed with Search very much then you won’t likely know where to go to control this behavior.  Additionally, you probably won’t have any idea what it is called so your Google searches may not help you very much.

Want to remove or modify the Internet Results in your Search Results display?

Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to your Central Administration (or directly to your SSP)
2. Select  the SSP for your site from the QuickLaunch in Central Administration
3. Select Search Administration, found under the Search heading on the Home page of your SSP
4. Select Federated Locations from the Queries and Results section of the Search Administration QuickLaunch



5. On the “Manage Federated Locations” page you should see 2 or 3 items listed on the page, we are interested in any that have “Internet Search” in their name.  Notice that the Trigger column displays “Always”


Manage Federated Locations

6. Click on Internet Search Results
7. Scroll down the Edit Federated Location page to the Trigger section



8. Read the information about your options,  you want to choose what is best for your site.  For the sake of this post I am selecting Prefix and entering “web” in the Add Prefix field



9. Click the OK button
10. Repeat steps 7-9 for Internet Search Suggestions (which I assume you have like I did)  Your Manage Federated Locations should look like this now:


Modified Federated Locations

11. Jump out to another browser and try searching on your site.  The Search Results window shouldn’t display

     

    

    Search Results without Internet results

Tadaaa, you have done it!

In this case, if anyone searches on “bozo” (for example) they will get results without anything included from the Internet.  However,  if they search “web bozo” they will get both results and suggestions from the Internet.  That is because I choose Prefix and used ‘web’ as my prefix.  In both scenarios they will always get results from the SharePoint site.

MOSS 2007 and VSS 2005

<rant >

History: we have a boat-load of documents being stored in Visual SourceSafe 2005 by project managers, product documentation staff, and engineering staff.  They started storing various documents there simply because it was available (due to our developers using the tool) and because they didn’t have anywhere else available.  Most wanted both version and access control.

Fast forward a few years to today.  We are in the process of implementing a SharePoint based intranet.  Some of the files stored on PC’s, Laptops, file shares, and VSS will move to our Document Center or some other Document Library within SharePoint.  There are some files currently in VSS that the groups want to leave right where they are.  Management is in agreement with this situation.

One of the goals of our new intranet is to make it easy to find files.  Search is a big deliverable.  The obvious question is can we perform a search in SharePoint and find files in VSS? A follow-up question is, better yet, can we integrate to some level where users (with appropriate permissions) can see the documents stored in VSS from within a SharePoint site?

The answers are yes, I think, but that isn’t really the point of this post.  I spent hours searching MSDN and TechNet for information to answer those questions.   That is the point of this post.  My biggest complaint with Microsoft is that they seem to make it very very difficult to find any information you are looking for.

Why can’t I search on “Search Visual SourceSafe with SharePoint” and find anything related to what I am looking for?  I tried various searches, with various combinations of words, no luck really.  One old article talking about integrating VSS 5.0 with SharePoint 2003 (the info in that article doesn’t apply to the current versions, things changed).

I tried focusing on Visual SourceSafe 2005 – no mention of integration or interaction with SharePoint found.  Then I tried focusing on MOSS 2007, nothing.  It was painful, and I only found tidbits of information that were actually related to the topic I am interested in.

TechNet FAIL, MSDN FAIL.  Why can’t Microsoft improve the search capability within these sites, it has been terrible for years and years? It is still nearly impossible to find anything in TechNet and on MSDN when you search for something, especially if you don’t know the “proper” keywords.

</rant>