Understanding SharePoint Search


The search facilities in SharePoint allow users to easily locate content stored in the various SharePoint sites as well as other external content sources such as file shares, Exchange public folders, and line-of-business (LOB) applications. Before you get started working on some of this chapter’s exercises, you need to familiarize yourself with some terms as well as what search features each version of SharePoint has to offer.

So how does a SharePoint search work, exactly? The search must have a content source, which are the locations where that SharePoint looks for information when you enter search terms into the SharePoint interface. By default, one content source represents all the sites in the SharePoint environment. However, you can add more content sources so users can search content stored in other locations such as a file share, website, Exchange public folder, or business application.

For SharePoint to search any content, the content must first be indexed. A content index combines details on all the information in the content sources. When users perform searches, the index is queried for content that matches the user-entered terms. For a search to be accurate and effective, the system updates the index regularly based on a schedule that you define. A crawl is the process by which the SharePoint index is rebuilt or updated to include new information. A full update is a complete recrawl of all SharePoint content to update the index. An incremental update only reviews items that have changed or been added since the last update. Although SharePoint crawls a number of file types to include content in the documents, the system does not automatically crawl some file types and requires you to install a special tool, called an iFilter, to allow the SharePoint search service to index the documents. For example, you must install an iFilter to support PDF document indexing.

Open table as spreadsheet

SharePoint Services 3.0

SharePoint Server 2007 for Search

SharePoint Server 2007

This is the same as SharePoint Server, with some differences:

  • You can only index and search SharePoint content.

  • It does not support keywords and best bets.

  • It does not support reusing Search Web Parts and creating custom search pages.

  • There is no Search Center.

  • It does not support searching user profile information.

  • It does not support searching of business data.

When an organization requires an enhanced search engine but cannot justify transitioning to SharePoint 2007, they can license SharePoint Server 2007 for Search, which offers the following improvements over WSS 3.0:

  • Support for custom keywords and best bets.

  • Support for the Search Center without tabs.

  • Support for People Search.

  • Support for multiple content sources (file shares, Exchange folders, external websites, and Lotus Notes).

SharePoint 2007 has the following improvements:

  • Improved relevance in returned results.

  • Advanced search for team collaborative sites.

  • Search results hit highlighting.

  • Suggested words for mis-spelled queries.

  • Features to search more content types.

  • Customized search query and results pages.

  • Enhanced support for user profile and people searching.

  • Features to define content scopes on a global and site level.

To get the most out of your search, you may need to define a content scope or set managed properties. Searching the entire content index or a content source may be too broad of a search. By way of example, if you lose your keys visiting the front lobby of a building and go back to search for them, you limit your search to that lobby, not the entire building. In essence, scopes tell SharePoint what sections of an index to search. You may have scopes that represent smaller subsets of data such as user profiles or the human resources site, that allow users to limit their searches. For managed properties, remember that in Chapter 6 you created site columns as global properties to define documents and list items. You can configure these columns as managed properties so that users can search for documents based on specific content in the Advanced Search interface. For example, if you have a customer site column, you can turn it into a managed property, and when users conduct a search from the Advanced Search interface, they can select Customer from a drop-down list. This refines the search and limits it to items relating to a specific customer.

This book focused specifically on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which offers the maximum amount of search functionality over all other versions, including being able to search for business data from LOB systems. The previous table outlines some of the differences between the other versions of SharePoint 2007 that support search and indexing.




Beginning SharePoint 2007. Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007
Beginning SharePoint 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007 (Programmer to Programmer)
ISBN: 0470124490
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 131

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