Exploiting or being Exploited by SharePoint Search
Author: Chris Quick
Website: WSS Development
One of the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server touted as the end-all-be-all of productivity boosts is Search. As an implementer of MOSS, I have heard countless discussions on the benefits of search. I have seen slideshows that had me drooling over the capabilities of MOSS Search over WSS Search. I became elated and had the experience of flying as demonstration after demonstration showed me how long lost documents suddenly surfaced to the top of the list.
Floating back to my desk, I sit down and begin executing searches to find those pearls of wisdom and gold nuggets produced by my team that I was previous unable to find on our network shares, only to discover that I’m catapulting towards the earth at a rapid speed. Yes, I too became a victim of MOSS Search induced hallucination.
So how do we make the search of our dreams more of a reality? Exploit it!
Managed Properties
Part of the beauty of SharePoint search is contained in the use of managed properties. Simply defined, managed properties are metadata columns used for uniquely identifying information in SharePoint. Managed properties are defined by your SharePoint administrator. Even if your administrator never changes the way these are configured, you, as a consumer of search, can use these to improve your search results.
Here is a partial list of managed properties that are available in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server:
- AssignedTo
- ContentType
- CreatedBy
- FileExtension
- Filename
- SiteTitle
Advanced Search
Some of the work for improving our searches has been done using advanced search. To access advanced search, go to the search center of your implementation and then click on advanced search. You should come to a page that looks similar to the following:
By default, the property restrictions listed at the bottom are windows into some of the managed properties discussed above. You can add these restrictions to your standard searches and get closer to the results. However, there are times you may want to get to information that isn’t part of the advanced search. That’s where you’ll need to exploit search.
The Technique
In order to execute searches using some of the managed properties listed above, you can enter them directly into the standard search box. The method is managedproperty:”term”. For example, say I want to find all items that have the assigned to column set to me. I would execute a search on my intranet using the following text: AssignedTo:”Quick, Chris”. SharePoint returns 74 items where I am in the assigned to field.
Let’s say that I have a task assigned to me that involves Exchange server. When I execute a basic search for Exchange, I get over 200 items. This is far from useful to me because I now have pages of information to review to find the task I’m interested in reviewing. I know that somewhere in the task the word Exchange will appear. So, I simply add to my search to make it appear like the following: AssignedTo:”Quick, Chris” Exchange. Now Sharepoint returns 4 items.
Next Steps
Of course, you could continue to use this technique to find things in SharePoint, but remembering all of the available managed properties can be difficult. Also, if your implementation has been customized to any degree, the list of managed properties available to you may be different. It would be nice if we could get to those managed properties through search without having to expressly type it each time. In my next post, I plan to explore how to add a search center to your team site and customize it to include more valuable results from your content.
Hello:
Thank you for writing on this topic. We are a K-12 school in Colombia, South America. Last year we acquired MOSS 2007 on a Microsoft School Agreement. We are starting our intranet and we plan to launch 2 extranets in August. We had to learn by ourselves all about SharePoint, and implement it by trial and error. We acquired several books on SharePoint (in New York), but they do not have answers to detailed questions. Training on SharePoint is almost nonexistent in Colombia. So the blogs on SharePoint are our most important source of information. Search was one of our motivations to use SharePoint, and we have not seen any benefit yet. Anything you can tell us about Search in SharePoint will be useful for us. Thanks.
We, too fell for the search hype. I can’t wait for your next column. Please let us know how to edit that Advanced Search box.
I have a feeling, trying to teach my end user that they need to type in property:”search term” won’t go over easy.
Manny
Jaime,
Thanks for the feedback! I hope this series help open up new possibilities for you.
Manny,
You’re right, property:”search term” isn’t something that most end-users will find intuitive, but it is foundational to building a functional search center. Thanks for the request for the Advanced Search Box. I’ll see what I can do to help make that more useful as well.
Chris
I am confused about three things related to searches. If you could address any of them in your next post or point to a resource, it would be appreciated.
1. How is the search as illustrated above different from a content query web part?
2. Can searches that look for the occurence of a word in a file (e.g. .doc or .ppt) be executed through VBA code via an Excel spreadsheet? I see that some metadata on file folders can be returned beautifully using the “Refresable Web Query” feature in Excel as described by Courter and Marquis in their terrific book “Beginning Sharepoint With Excel”, but I cannot see the underlying code in the macro editor to product those queries.
3. How can you restrict the scope on an advanced search to a subsite or folder? This is in the context of searching for a phrase in a document rather than a value for a metadata item. Our site always falls back the root folder and admin cant figure out how to fix it. Scope works fine on regular search.
Thanks in advance!
Content categorization is a great help to improve SharePoint search. You can tagg items and documents with centrally managed taxonomy-based tree-style categories manually (guided by rule-based suggestions) or completely automatically. Then you can use several different content discovery components like dynamic site navigations, category trees, A-Z index directory, tag clouds, related items link lists or search enhancements to browse the “knowledge network”.
More:
http://www.sharepartxxl.com/products/taxonomy/