SharePoint Resources

SharePoint Resources: "SharePoint Resources" lists Internet sites built on Sharepoint platform. It has links to other resources also.
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Insulating an Unfinished Attic Tutorial

Insulating an Unfinished Attic Tutorial

Keeping this link for future home projects. It takes you step by step through the process of insulating your attic.

Extending Sharepoint search with custom properties

 

Situation:

Empower.Me would like to store marketing documents, pictures, PDFs etc in Connect Share. The items are stored in a Sharepoint document library with a custom content type. This custom content type has additional properties that further describe each item. These properties are business relevant and help in categorization. Examples: Validity dates, Philips business unit, CTN or product identifier, etc.

Some of these properties can be mapped to standard (out of box) Sharepoint properties, but some are new to Sharepoint.

EmpowerMe would like to find the documents that match certain property values (instead of a full text search).

Investigation results:

The Connect Sharepoint environment built on Microsoft Office Sharepoint provides 3 standard methods for searching items.

1. Search page (https://www.emea.sharepoint.philips.com/Search/Pages/results.aspx)
2. Advanced search page (https://www.emea.sharepoint.philips.com/Search/Pages/Advanced.aspx )
3. Search web service (https://www.emea.sharepoint.philips.com/sites/TS0903310710272080427802/_vti_bin/search.asmx?WSDL)

The results returned by these three alternatives are identical.

All of the above methods permit you to search by keywords / property values or by full text. To query a property, just include <propertyname>:<value> in the query. If the value has a space, enclose it within double quotation marks. An example of this is in Exhibit 1.

Exhibit 1: Search for PDF documents by author (Rinia, Jornie) in the empowerMe site

Site:https://www.emea.sharepoint.philips.com/sites/TS0903310710272080427802/ filetype:pdf Author:"Rinia, Jornie"

Now let us try this syntax on items with custom properties. We take an item from the EmpowerMe Document Library. This item has a custom property “ChapterName” = “Introduction to empower.Me”. It also has a standard property “Title”=”Introducing the empower.me…..”. (See Exhibit 2)

Exhibit 2: Item with a custom property “ChapterName”

A search on documents with content type “Empower.me Guideline” shows up 3 documents.

Exhibit 3: Search for ContentType “Empower.me Guideline”

Site:https://www.emea.sharepoint.philips.com/sites/TS0903310710272080427802/ Author:"Vaassen, Guido" ContentType:"Empower.me Guideline"

A search on the property ChapterName doesn’t seem to work. It returns no results. (see Exhibit 4).

Exhibit 4: Search for ChapterName containing Introduction

Site:https://www.emea.sharepoint.philips.com/sites/TS0903310710272080427802/ Author:"Vaassen, Guido" ChapterName:Introducing

However, if you search on Title, you get these two results. See Exhibit 5.

Exhibit 5: Search for Title containing Introducing

Site:https://www.emea.sharepoint.philips.com/sites/TS0903310710272080427802/ Author:"Vaassen, Guido" Title:Introducing

So it appears that custom properties are ignored by the Search in Connect Share.

However, looking a bit deeper, you can see that there is a standard way to extend Search to consider these custom attributes. A bit of background first.

When the search engine “crawler” indexes items in Sharepoint, it stores all custom properties in the index as “Crawled properties”. These crawled properties are ignored during search (except if it is a string, it will be included in the full text search for that item). The custom property “ChapterName” is included in the crawled properties. Microsoft Office Document properties are also available as crawled properties.

The properties that are available for searching are called “Managed properties”. You must create a new Managed Property and map it to your “crawled property”.

Fortunately, extending search for your own attributes does not require any programming or coding. Instead, creating and mapping a new managed property can be done in a few minutes by a Sharepoint site administrator. (See instructions at http://j.mp/3BnZnQ and http://j.mp/3ulrlT )

Once you have a managed property, the administrator can change the search options for this managed property.

· In the Search Options section, select Include this property in Advanced Search options to allow users to perform advanced searches using this property.

· Select Include this property in the content index to include this property in the content index, so you can search for items based on this property.

· Select Allow property to be displayed to make this property available for display in custom search applications.

· Select Display this property in item details in search results to display this property in the Item details section for each item in search results.

An additional enhancement is the concept of search scope. Search scope restricts the selection of documents that are returned. As an example, a search scope called Marketing can be setup to search all items with the content types setup for marketing, like “EmpowerMe guidelines”.

Conclusion

Connect Share can be quickly extended to add additional properties that are relevant to a parametric search. Parametric search combined with scope provides a method to make search more relevant to the users.

External web references:

Searching on property values in Microsoft Search: http://j.mp/WGAjh

Program to list all crawled and managed properties in Sharepoint (Need sharepoint administrator access to /ssp/admin):

Generate a Extending Microsoft search for image search: http://j.mp/1Gqj93

Managing “Managed properties”: http://j.mp/3BnZnQ and http://j.mp/3ulrlT

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