I thought I’d repost over here on my blog with a short intro.  Just to clarify, yes I work for Rackspace.  Yes we have a ton of cloud products but this isn’t a marketing post! One thing I’ve found in my discussions throughout the SharePoint community is that cloud means different things to different people. In many cases, people think cloud refers to only one type of thing. But in reality there’s different flavors of cloud.  There’s tons of benefit to the cloud and all flavors — but each flavor of cloud has different pros and cons.  You can even mix and match types of cloud into hybrid scenarios to do even more great things.

Take a look, I hope this serves as a good conversation starter. Feel free to reach out on twitter (@johnrossjr) or leave comments below if there’s other SharePoint and cloud topics you’d be interested to hear more about.

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One of the more common discussions that I keep hearing over and over is around SharePoint in the cloud. This is a great topic but there seems to still be a lot of confusion and misconceptions about what it means for SharePoint to be in the cloud. In this blog post I’m going to try to clarify some of these more common issues.

Let’s take a step back, a number of very large companies (including Microsoft) have used the term “Cloud” and “Cloud Computing” frequently these days. But what does it mean? Here’s a basic definition I found on Wikipedia that sums it up succinctly:

Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet).

To simplify that even more, by this definition cloud computing would include anything where your hardware and software is not hosted in your own data center and instead made available by a service provider. This definition is a bit more broad than most of the ones that I’ve heard from organizations that are considering moving SharePoint to the cloud.

There are actually a few different types of clouds. As companies are looking to move to the cloud it is important to be aware of the various options to make sure that they are choosing the option that is right for them:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): A provider manages the hardware. Very similar options and flexibility to hosting SharePoint on-premises but the provider takes over the day-to-day operations and maintenance of the hardware. Remote access and ability to develop and create custom solutions against this type of farm are typically the same as on-premises. Examples of IaaS would include Rackspace, Peer1, and other managed hosting providers.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): In this case, all an organization needs to do is sign up and they are provided access to the application. All hardware and software is managed by the provider. From a SharePoint perspective SaaS would include Microsoft’s O365 and any other vendors who’d provide SharePoint in a Multi-Tenant configuration. This option tends to be less expensive, but also has less flexibility for customizations.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): Platform refers to the cloud platform itself. There are several options for this including Rackspace’s OpenStack, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure. With this option an organization would pay for the amount of the cloud platform they’d consume. For example instead of installing Windows, SQL, and SharePoint on physical servers, it’d be installed on virtualized infrastructure running in the cloud. Typically, companies would still manage their own environment and the provider would just provide and manage the cloud platform itself.

Which option is the right fit for your organization? The answer is the dreaded “It depends.” There’s significant value in leveraging the cloud, but it important to remember that cloud comes in a number of different flavors and in some cases combinations of cloud options make the most sense. These are referred to as Hybrid Cloud.

If someone were to ask me “Should we be looking to move our SharePoint to the cloud?” my answer would be a very enthusiastic “Yes!” While I think all organizations should be exploring how moving their SharePoint to the cloud, I also recognize that the cloud isn’t going to be a great fit for everyone. Certain organizations have security or regulatory constraints that make going to the cloud impossible.

Bottom Line

All organizations should be evaluating the cloud as a way to get more value from SharePoint. But SharePoint in the cloud comes in several different flavors, each with its own pros and cons as well as costs.  It is important to weigh all of the various cloud options and consider the security, flexibility, total cost, and functionality you get from each option. My advice is to take your time and do your homework. Happy SharePointing!!

I’m going to try to keep this out of the weeds with respect to the architecture that’s behind the scenes driving all of the functionality.  The follow describe the major pieces that are working together to make the new WCM functionality tick:

• Product Catalog — You can think of this as almost a published list or library.  Unlike content from SP2010 which was usually entered into pages via page layouts, we are just talking about fields that get filled out — just data pretty much.  Creating this first piece is going to be the subject of this post.
• Managed Metadata — This feature was introduced in SP2010 and then improved and expanded for SharePoint Server 2013. It still is where you’ll setup your enterprise taxonomy for your data but there’s additional functionality now that can be used to drive navigation as well as some other WCM goodness which I’ll cover in another post.
• Search — There’s tons to discuss here, but for right now the important takeaway is that as you work more with the new WCM features you’ll spend a lot of time dealing with search.  If you aren’t too familiar with search, there can be some gotchas you’ll run into.  I’ll point a few out in this post.
• Page Templates — Not to be confused with Page Layouts, page templates are a single page that dynamically renders content.  In this way we can have a single page for all of the items coming from our catalog — the single page will show the different items from our catalog depending on what information is passed back.  In other words, we need one page to render lots of content. Page Layouts still exist, but managing content with the new WCM functionality will mean you’ll be working with the page templates.  Yet another topic for another post…
• Display Templates –  This is the primary way to style the results from the Content By Search (CBS). In SP2010 designers working with a WCM site needed to customize the ItemStyle.xsl to control the way results came back for the CQWP.  Display templates are the way you’d style the results from the CBS — I don’t expect to get too deep into this.  I’ll leave that to my good friend Randy Drisgill — be sure to keep an eye on his blog.

I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting about, but the there’s going to be plenty of time to fill in the gaps.  The goal here is to just get you started with the basics.  On that note — let’s start at the beginning and walk through the steps for creating a simple catalog.

1– The first step in the process is to Create a site collection using the Project Catalog template.  To do this open up Central Admin and from Application Managed click the link to Create Site Collection.  From here you’ll want to click on the Publishing tab and choose the option for Product Catalog.  Give it a name, URL, and set up a site collection administrator and press OK.

2– Once you’ve created the product catalog, you’ll see when you open it the first time there’s some helpful links right on the homepage that describe the steps you’ll need to follow.  The next step is going to be to create some site columns.  You can really add whatever you feel like makes sense.  The next step is going to be to create a content type but just keep in mind out of the box there’s already one for Products that includes the following fields: Group Number, Item Category (managed metadata), Item Number, and Language Tag. Additionally, there’s also a content type called Product with Image with includes an additional field where you can add images.  In my case I chose to add some of my own fields.  The important note here is that you need to make sure that you are using a managed metadata field which can be used for navigation.  If you don’t have this, you won’t be able to connect your catalog.  Also, when creating the term store make sure you create something that can be used a root node below the Product Heirarchy.  For some reason that level can’t be selected as a root node. Here’s a look at what my term set looks like:

3– With your site columns created, the next step is to create a new content type.  From the Site Settings page click on Site Content Types under the Web Designer Galleries section.  From this page click on the Create button. On the screen that opens enter in the name for the content type, choose the parent content type to select from (Product Catalog Content Types), the parent content type (Product with image), choose what group you want to place it in, and then press OK.

4– On the next screen is where you’ll add any custom fields you created to the Content Type.  Choose the link that says Add from existing site columns, choose the ones to add and press OK at the bottom.

5– Next browse to the default Products list (or another one if you want to go that route), from the ribbon at the top choose the List tab and click the List Settings button.  Scroll down to the Content Types section and click the link to Add from existing content types to associate our new content type to this list.  Once we’ve done that go to the All Items view and make sure any custom fields we’ve created are also showing.

6– While you are in the List Settings page, click on the link for Catalog Settings.  From here you’ll want to make sure that the list is setup for Catalog Sharing, specify the field(s) to be used as the primary key, and then specify the field to be used as to determine the navigation (This is the one that needs to be the managed metadata field).  Then press OK.

7– This is the easy part.  All you’ve got to do now is fill the list with content.  But there’s a couple gotchas here that are important to point out.  The first is that we’ve created new site columns so if we want the new site columns to get added to the search schema and index the items have to be filled out and the new fields have to have data in them.  The second thing to remember is that once you’ve added all of your content to the list, remember that the list has approval turned on.  So you’ll need to make sure all of your items are published or you’ve disabled content approval or search won’t pick up the items (this one in particular initially tripped me up).

8– There’s one other tricky little step that we need to ensure we do.  That is to give permission to the site collection which will be consuming our product list so that it can access the term set.  To do this go to Site Settings and from under the Site Administration section click on Term store management.  At the left click to select the term store associated with your site collection and the general tab will be displayed at the right.  You should see a field labled Site Collection Access. In this field type the URL of the site collection where you’ll be consuming the product catalog — if you haven’t created this, you should do that now and use the Publishing Portal template.  Then type the URL into here and press Save.

9– The next step is to kick off a crawl to make sure everything we’ve done so far gets added into the index.  To do that go to Central Admin and click on Manage Service Applications from under Application Management.  Click on the Search Service Application link to bring up the search administration page.  At the left click on the Content Sources link under the Crawling section.  Hover over the name of your content source called Local SharePoint sites, click the drop down, and choose Start Full Crawl.  Now is about the time you should go get a tasty beverage or something.  When you get back you can click the link that says Refresh to check on the status of things, but it’ll probably take anywhere from 3-10 mins depending on how robust your server is.  When the status says Idle you’ll know you are ready to move on to the next step.

10– Now’s the time you’ll want to go to that Publishing Portal that’s going to be used consuming the catalog.  From Site Settings click on Manage catalog connections under the Site Administration section. Click on the link that says Connect to a catalog. The next page that opens should show the URL to your catalog.  Click on the Connect link at the right.  The Catalog Source Settings page will open.  There’s a lot of great options here, but for this post we’ll just go with all of the defaults.  But we will need to select a Root term of heirarchy from under the Navigation Heirarchy section.  This is what I was referring to in step 2.  If you compare the image below to the one from step 2 it should help to clear things up.  This was another area that originally was a little tricky when I was trying to choose the root node at the wrong level.  Once complete press OK.

11– When the page reloads you should notice that the navigation at the top of the page is being driven by the metadata.  Also, if you go into the Pages library of the site you’ll notice two pages have been created — these are those page templates I was referring to earlier.  If you try clicking on a link from the navigation take a look at the URLs — you’ll notice they are dramatically different from the URLs we’ve been used to in SharePoint in the past.  This is something that will definitely be the subject of future posts but the the basics are that when you setup the catalog connection there was a section with options that described the Catalog Item URL Behavior and the default is to make all URLs relative to the site.  Despite the fact the content lives in another site collection, it doesn’t appear that way.

This post was intended to be a guide to getting started with the first step in working with the new WCM features in SharePoint Server 2013.  As I’ve mentioned throughout this post, there are a number of areas that will be important to explore in more detail at a later time.  If anyone has any requests I’d love to hear them — can’t promise that it’d be something I’ve looked into yet but will definitely do my best!

Search Driven Content Management

In the past the way we’d always thought about planning a WCM project hinged on where we put our content in SharePoint then we tagged it with metadata and surfaced it with things like the Content Query Web Part (CQWP). Moving forward with SP2013 the FAST search engine has now been fully integrated into SharePoint and it will be the primary engine driving WCM.  This is a game changer for a number of reasons:

• Search has always been a great way to get content from across the farm.  Since the CQWP isn’t able to reach across site collections, we’ve now got a way to get content from anywhere in your farm out of the box.  The primary tool for doing this will be the Content By Search (CBS) web part. I hope to dive deeper into this one in future posts.
• The CQWP could be tuned, but it was common for it to be the source of performance issues in larger implementations.  Search will be a far more effient way to surface content in almost all circumstances.
• The way we’ll plan and think about WCM in SharePoint will fundamentally change.  For example in the past, content needed to be in SharePoint for us to roll it up.  With the new model, as long as content is in the search index we can surface it where ever we need.  So the biggest limiting factor we’d have would be whether we’d be able to get SharePoint to crawl a datasource.  This has massively huge implications!

Thinking Beyond Keyword Searching

A couple years ago I had the pleasure of working very closely with several former FAST folks.  They taught me a very important lesson that I’m hoping the rest of the SharePoint world will come to embrace over time — if you look at how most folks search, they typically just type in a search term and get results.  This is referred to as keyword searching.  The way the FAST folks thought about search went well beyond simple keyword searching — because of the high performance and scale that’s possible through using FAST they were able to use the product to drive content management on several very prominent Internet sites — most notably BestBuy.com.  Although BestBuy.com wasn’t a SharePoint site it showed what was possible from a content management perspective with a powerful search engine driving content to the page without anyone actually going in and typing a query.

This opens up an extremely complex set of discussions but the main point is this — as SharePoint implementers and users, search provides an immense amount of power once we start thinking about search driving content on pages to users.

What Does This Mean For The Future?

In the past, most WCM scenarios in SharePoint were fairly simplistic.  There’s plenty of examples of projects where very complex things were done but they usually required a high level of development and customization.  But now it will be possible to create many of these highly complex scenarios with much less effort.  One of the more common phrases you’ll hear applied to SharePoint is “with great power comes great responsibility” and the new WCM capabilities in SP2013 are no different. To deliver a project with this new WCM functionality will likely require that we approach projects in a slightly different way.  In future posts I hope to explain this in more detail but I’ll try to give a high level view of what I’m referring to.

1. Planning is key!  The first step in any SharePoint should involve planning.  But this is more important than ever! I’ve been doing a presentation for the last few years called Getting the Most Out of SharePoint Search (http://johnrossjr.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/getting-the-most-out-of-sharepoint-search-sptechcon-boston-2012/) and the goal has been to help people understand how search works — specifically how to make content stand out and be more relevant.  As we move ahead into SP2013 we’ll be able to rollup content from all across our organization in new ways.  No longer will we just say “we’ll rollup content from this library and make it show up over here” — we can rollup content in much more complex ways.  But if we don’t put enough thought and planning into our metadata for the organization taking advantage of these complex scenarios will be more difficult.
2. Search and WCM skillsets now go hand in hand. This might sound pretty obvious at this point in this post, but it is worth reiterating.  When you think about your new SharePoint site in SP2013 and you know you need to get content onto the page there’s going to be more moving parts.  For example, if we have custom fields we need to make sure they are available as metadata in the index.  Because if the fields aren’t available in the index, we won’t be able to roll the field up the way it needs to be.
3. Branding the content returned via CBS will be a new skillset.  The CBS is going to be one of the most important tools in the SP2013 WCM toolbox.  Getting the data into the index is the first part of the equation, but being able to get the content out to the page rendered in the way it needs to be in the next piece.  The CBS will render content via what is called “Display Templates” which use a combination of HTML and Javascript.  Since this web part is going to be so pervasive, it will be something that UI/UX/Designers will become more familiar with — similar to how they got used to working with the CQWP and using XSLT to style the output.  This specifically is going to be one of the areas that I expect as the community works with the Display Templates we’ll see tons of great examples of how different folks are using them fairly soon.  I’m excited to see how this evolves!
4. How users manage content will change. Today the basic way content is being managed is that users go into a Pages library and create/update content in a WYSIWYG editor.  Moving forward, while content can still be managed in the “classic” way like it always has been in SP2010 but it’ll now be possible to potentially abstract content from display.  In other WCM products, users can manage content by basically updating data in fields in a database or list.  From there the data is then transformed and displayed based on whatever was designed and created by the UX/UI/Designers.  And this concept is now a very real option in SP2013. It adds a new layer of goverance because there’s the potential to more tightly control the presentation in organizations where that are more highly controlled.  But the “classic” way of doing things is still going to be there — how we control the mix is still going to be a work in process.  Stay tuned on this front.
5. But wait there’s more!  The things I’ve mentioned above really just scratch the surface of what’s going to be possible with WCM in SP2013.

I just want to be clear about one thing — if you’ve been doing WCM in SP2010 and been happy with it don’t worry, all of those options will still be available to you.  The purpose of this post isn’t to scare anyone, just to highlight the new additional options that will be available.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time!

Hopefully this post has helped to give you an idea about what WCM in SharePoint 2013 will be all about.  On a personal note, my two areas of focus have always seemed strange: WCM/Branding and Search.  I used to get strange looks when I told people what I did – I tended to think it was an odd pairing.  With the new features and new possibilities they promise I really do think that WCM and Search go together perfectly!  I’m excited about the possibilities on the horizon! Be sure to stop by from time to time or follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/johnrossjr) as I’ve got a lot of new content in the works that will dive deeper into many of the topics I’ve mentioned throughout this post.  If you’ve got any requests be sure to mention them in the comments!

http://sdrv.ms/PLPbcU

http://sdrv.ms/LWMJzL

Here’s some of the other references that I mentioned in my slides:

Creating a Page Layout in SharePoint 2010 using Visual Studio 2010 by Becky Bertram [SharePoint MVP] —  http://blog.beckybertram.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=71

Packaging master pages and page layouts —  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bobgerman/archive/2011/01/31/packaging-master-pages-and-page-layouts-with-visual-studio-2010.aspx

CKS:Dev Extensions —  http://cksdev.codeplex.com/

The week after Christmas our fearless leader, Shane Young, called a very mysterious meeting on Friday at noon.  We have meetings all the time, but the phrasing and wording of this meeting request made us all a bit nervous and I probably got IMs from everyone on the team with various theories.  But the news came down then that Rackspace wanted to buy us.  Everyone had a million questions and I can’t actually remember most of that meeting — all I remember is that we needed to all book flights immediately to head out to San Antonio to head to Rackspace the following week.

I’ll spare you all the nitty gritty details, but the next week or so was one of the most stressful of my life.  Initially I was very excited about the news but there were so many open questions.  The whole SharePoint911 crew came down The Castle (Rackspace’s home office which is a renovated old mall) on January 4th and 5th.  I was completely blown away from the sheer coolness factor of their offices — they have a slide! But slides alone aren’t enough to give warm and fuzzies.  During our time there we had a chance to meet upper management and the rest of the SharePoint team as well as a cast of characters from across the organization.  One of the best parts about working for a small company is that “start up” feeling and at SharePoint911 we always worked hard and tried to have a lot of fun doing that.  Walking around the Rackspace offices, they’ve figured out a way to keep that same “start up” feel in a company with more than 4,000 people.

Last Friday as we were doing final preparations for today’s annoucement, I mentioned that we might want to move our website out of our current “datacenter” over to some servers at Rackspace.  I think the whole process of creating the servers started at about 4pm EST.  Somewhere in the middle I went to dinner with my wife, then came back and had everything moved over to Rackspace by about 11pm EST.  It was the first time the teams from SharePoint911 and Rackspace had worked together on something like this and it was pretty awesome to see what we were able to do in such a short amount of time.  For me, that was a little glimpse into what the future holds and I’m excited.

I left my last job more than 4 years ago to go to work with Shane and Nicola Young at this company called SharePoint911 that they ran out of their house.  I’ll never forget when I told my wife this guy wanted to hire me that had never even met me.  We were pretty sure it was some type of scam.  But Shane and Nicola both came down to Orlando and went out to lunch with my wife and me.  I decided to make the jump to go work for SharePoint911 and I’m sure some folks thought I was a bit crazy.  At the time, the idea that one day we’d be acquired by a company like Rackspace wasn’t even close to something I thought was ever possible.

I’m so proud to work with such great people at SharePoint911 and excited to join the team at Rackspace.

It was great get to talk with so many of the attendees and see others in the community that I don’t often get to see!  Not to mention the location in the DC area was awesome.

For those of you that were able to come out to my sessions, thank you for coming out!  A special shout out to everyone at my search session for helping me get the room set up.  I apologize for being a little late making the slide decks available, but here they are.

Hope to see everyone again at SharePoint Conference in Anaheim!

When I give search presentations, one of the demos I always do is about showing users how to do some quick and easy customizations to the Enterprise Search Center to improve the search experience a little better. 

Just a quick note before we get into things too deeply. This blog post is specifically for users with SharePoint Server 2010 or Search Server Express 2010.  If you happen to have FAST Search for SharePoint (FS4SP) the process for creating scopes will be different, but the same concepts would apply.  In fact, you’ll be able to create scopes if you FS4SP the way I describe but you might get incorrect results. 

For more information on creating scopes with FS4SP check out these great blog posts:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jorgeni/archive/2010/02/26/search-scopes-in-fast-search-for-sharepoint-part-1.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jorgeni/archive/2010/03/11/search-scopes-in-fast-search-for-sharepoint-part-2.aspx

Scenario:

Just about every organization has a need for scopes.  If you aren’t familiar with what a search scope is, you can think of it this way: All of the content that has been crawled by SharePoint is tossed into an index – like the index of a book.  But the issue is, that sometimes you might just one to look at a small piece of that content.  Maybe just content from a specific department, or all content tagged with a specific piece of metadata (maybe you wanted to only search within documents that were tagged as “proposals”).  A scope is what makes this possible.

One thing I suggest in my session, is that you could move old content to an archive location.  This could be a specific site, separate site collection or web application, or even a metadata flag on the content itself.  Either way, the goal is the same – get the older information out of your active search results.  But sometimes, users want to search the archives.

In this example, I’ll walk you through the steps about how to create a scope and set up the Enterprise Search Center with a separate tab your users can use to specifically search the archive.

1. For this demo I’m using an Enterprise Wiki as my starting point.  If you are using a different template, your steps might be slightly different.  But for the first step, you’ll want to create an Enterprise Search Center if you don’t already have one.  To do this, you’d simply need to click Site Actions > New Site then click on the Enterprise Search Center.  Give the site a title and URL and hit the Create button.

2. The next step is to create a scope.  You’ll need to make sure you have Site Collection Administrator permissions.  Click on Site Actions > Site Settings and then from under the Site Collection Administration section click on Search Scopes.

3. From the Toolbar click the New Scope button.

The create scope page will open, for the purposes of this demo you can simply fill in a Title for the scope and then hit OK.

4. This will take you back to the View Scopes page.  You should see your newly created scope listed here, but you’ll notice that under the Update Status column it will say “Empty – Add rules.”  To add rules, click on the Add Rules link.

5. On the Add Scope Rule page, at the top you’ll see you’ve got 3 options for scopes: Web Address, Property Query, and All Content.  In this example we’ll use the Web Address option.  However, the Property Query option is useful if you wanted to create a scope based on specific metadata values.

For the folder value, I’m just going to use one of my existing document libraries. So I’m going to cut and paste the URL into this field and remove the /Forms/AllItems.aspx part of the URL since it isn’t needed.

Then for the behavior section at the bottom, I’m going to leave Include selected and hit the OK button.

6. You’ll notice that when the View Scopes page loads that your new scope will likely need some time before it gets populated.  In my case, it’ll be another 6 minutes.  I With many other search related activities there’s a bit of waiting involved.  I usually take this time to catch up on my web surfing

7. Once your scope has been created, it is time to head over to the Enterprise Search Center you created in the first step.  Specifically, the results page.  In my case the URL is: http://demo.contoso.com/search/Pages/results.aspx

It is okay if the page throws an error if there are no results.  But if it would make you feel better, you can always execute a query.

8. Put the page into edit mode by clicking Site Actions > Edit Page.

At the top of the page click the Add New Tab link:

9. On the tab page, be sure to give it a Tab Name and enter a value for the Page.  In this case, it is important to remember that when you enter the page name you need to include the full name of the page.  In my case, it was archive.aspx.  Then hit the Save button.

10. You’ll notice that the new tab has been created, but if you click on it you’ll get an error.  Don’t worry.  All we need to do is just create the page.  And to do that click on Site Actions > New Page.  Then press the Create button.  In this case, we’ll call the page ‘Archive’ – no need for the .aspx.  I know it isn’t consistent.  Don’t blame me – I just write blog posts.

11. Once the new page has been created, there’s a couple quick modifications we’ll need to make to a couple of the web parts.  First, modify the Search Box web part by clicking the Edit Web Part.  When the web part properties menu opens, expand the Miscellaneous section and edit the Target search results page URL to point to itself.  The goal here is that when someone does a search from this tab, we want to make sure it doesn’t redirect them to another page.  Once complete scroll down to the button and press OK.

12. Next, edit the Search Core Results web part.  Expand the Location Properties section and enter the name of the scope you created earlier. This will make sure that the results displayed in this web part are restricted to the scope we created.  Press OK when you are done.

Then all you’ve got to do is Check in your page and give it a test. Just remember to publish the page if you want to enabled all users to see this.  You can run a query against the All Sites scope and you should get back a big number, and then you click over to the new tab you’ll be only getting results back from your new scope – which should yield far fewer results.

Happy Searching!

But one area that many organizations seem to forget about is the powerful enterprise search capabilities that are available out of the box with SharePoint 2010. Search tends to be one of those areas with SharePoint that “just works,” so what usually happens in an organization is that the farm gets setup and search gets configured — results come back and it is assumed that everything must be working. Right? This approach is very common which is why when I go to work with different companies I often hear the same story about how “Search is broken” or “search sucks.” But the fact of the matter is that in order to work to its full potential, search can’t be entirely an afterthought. However, getting better results from search doesn’t require a lot of effort.

Before we can get into any search discussion we’ve got to start with the key measuring stick for determining whether any search engine works — relevancy. Relevancy is just another way of saying “did you find what you were looking for?” Users who have negative things to say usually aren’t finding what they are looking for and therefore have an issue with relevancy. The following are a few quick and easy ways to improve relevancy across your organization with very little effort.

Put more important documents near the root of the site, less important documents farther down the hierarchy – They say the cream always rises to the top, and with search the same is true. There are many factors that work together to determine the relevancy of a document but one rule of thumb is that the deeper the document is buried in your hierarchy the less relevant SharePoint is going to assume the document is in comparison to a similar document closer to the root. As a rule of thumb, the less “/” in a URL to a piece of content the more relevant it is. For example a document at http://sales/sharepoint-presentation.docx would be considered more relevant that http://sales/products/sharepoint-presentation.docx.

Just remember that you can use this to your advantage. Less important documents and sites can be nested deeper in your hierarchy and more important ones can be closer to the top.

Use natural language for site and file names – Among the easiest and most effective things people can do to improve search relevancy is to name their sites and files effectively. Look at these two URLs:

The first document has a URL which has actual words used for the sites and document where the second one has some shorthand for the sites and document names. The first one is far more effective because the URL and file names for a document in SharePoint are a heavily weighted component of the relevancy algorithm. If you were to type a search query of “sales presentations widgets” SharePoint would be able to determine clearly that the first document was relevant to the query. Although the second document might have some of those words typed somewhere in the content, and would likely still show up somewhere in the results — the first one will be considered more relevant simply because of the way it is named.

It should also be noted that in order for this to work as effectively as possible it is important to NOT run your words together. This is because SharePoint doesn’t know where words break unless you’ve got something between them that it identifies as a “wordbreaker.” Although spaces are recognized as a word breaker in SharePoint, my recommendation is to use “-“ between words instead. The main reason for this is because if you use spaces in things like site or page names when SharePoint will automatically remove them and you’ll lose out on the relevancy benefit you’d get otherwise. Other common word breakers that get used are things like underscores (_), periods, semi-colons. If you happen to be using these, they are also all valid word breakers.

Supply metadata for your files — If you aren’t familiar with the term metadata it basically means “data about data.” If you were talking about a car some common pieces of metadata would be make, model, color, mileage — think about the types of things you’d use to find a car on a web site. All of those pieces of data describe the car; they are its metadata.

For your files in SharePoint, by tagging them with descriptive metadata you can make it easier for your users to find what they are looking for. Remember, that metadata is always going to carry a heavier relevancy weight than content in the body of a document.

How much metadata do you need? Generally I recommend 5 to 10 fields that would be useful for categorizing a file. Common examples would be: department, product name, type of document, client, etc. The key to metadata is that it needs to be clear and consistent. Here are a few metadata recommendations:

Summary

This article covered just a few basic tips, but even though they may seem small, they can have a huge impact on search relevancy for your users. And the best part is that it doesn’t take any custom code or even a lot of effort. The end result should be that users will spend less time looking for things in SharePoint which can add up to tons of ROI. Managers like things that bring ROI and it usually puts them in a better mood when it is time to do performance reviews!

What is being shown in the screenshot is the default refiners that are displayed for SharePoint search.  The refiners allow me to perform a very general search and then click on the refiners to basically filter my results.  I can start with a very broad search and then keep refining until I get to what I’m looking for.

But in many organizations, they might want to display their own values here instead of the out of the box ones.  The refinement panel uses XML to display the results, so if you wanted to change what you see – it only takes a few steps.

1) Go to your search results page in your Search Center and put it in edit mode.  Then edit the Refinement Panel web part.

2) Expand the ‘Refinement’ section.  After the field that says ‘Filter Category Definition’ click the ellipsis button which will bring up an editor that allows you to more easily see the code.

I know, there’s no formatting for the XML. It is pretty terrible to look at.  You can try to parse it out on your own if you enjoy that kind of thing.  I don’t – I’ve found the easiest way to clean up the code is to paste it into Visual Studio 2010.  I’ve experimented with a few other editors, and Visual Studio 2010 is the best one. 

3) Assuming you are us VS2010, you can open up any project (or create a new one) and Add a New Item.  Choose to add an XML file (under the data section).  You can name it whatever, because you don’t really need to save it. Then paste your code in and it will all be automagically formatted for you!

QUICK TIP!  Visual Studio will add the following code to any new XML file: <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>  You’ll want to remove this before you paste your code in. If you don’t, it will cause the Refinement Panel to error because that line is already included in the XML you are pasting in from the web part.  SharePoint doesn’t like it if it sees two of those lines at the top of your XML.

4) This is going to be a very basic example and we are going to configure the refinement panel to only show the Author refinement.  To do this we want to everything inside the <FilterCategories> tag except line 85.  In other words, when you are done your XML should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<FilterCategories>
  <Category     Title="Author"     Description="Use this filter to restrict results authored by a specific author"     Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator"     MetadataThreshold="5"     NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="4"     MaxNumberOfFilters="20"     SortBy="Frequency"     SortByForMoreFilters="Name"     SortDirection="Descending"     SortDirectionForMoreFilters="Ascending"     ShowMoreLink="True"     MappedProperty="Author"     MoreLinkText="show more"     LessLinkText="show fewer"     />
</FilterCategories>

It should be pretty obvious what most of the tags do here – but the most important one is MappedProperty.  In this case, the refiner is looking at the Author managed property.  But really you could set this to be whatever you wanted. So if you had a custom field that you wanted to refine on, no problem!  All you’d need to do is add a managed property, and copy/paste the line in the XML which defines the Author refiner, and rename it to match the name of your managed property.  Obviously update the other values too – like title and description. 

Don’t know how to create a managed property?  Check out my blog post on the topic:

http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/john/archive/2011/03/18/creating-custom-managed-properties.aspx

5) Copy and paste your new XML from VS2010 back into the text editor in SharePoint. Then his the OK button on the text editor.

6) Now here’s the tricky part that trips people up.  Before this will work you need to remove the check from the box at the bottom of the ‘Refinement’ section in the web part properties that says ‘Use Default Configuration’ – if you don’t do this, your changes will not be applied!

7) On the web part properties panel, hit the Ok button.  Then you’ll need to press the Check In button on the ribbon.

8) Run a new search and you’ll see that your refinement panel has been customized!  If you don’t see results, there could be a couple reasons why. First, make sure that there’s enough items being returned in the search which contain the refiner you are looking for. I’m not sure of the exact number needed, but generally at least 5 will do the trick.  Second, if that isn’t the issue you might want to double-check your XML.  It is very unforgiving by nature.

This is one of the more common search customizations I’m doing these days for clients.  As a final thought, my recommendation is that if you plan on a field being used as a refiner it is best if it isn’t free-text.  That means something like a Choice or Managed Metadata field works best. 

The other tip I’d suggest is when customizing the refinement panel, don’t try to do 50 refiners all at once.  It never seems to end well.  I suggest starting with a couple, confirm they work, and then add a few more.  Repeat that until you are done.  Slow and steady win the race!

Final thought – remember you can always just add the out of the box refinement panel to the page if you want to get back to the original.  Or, just go back into your custom web part and check the box again to use the default configuration. Just remember if you check that box again it will overwrite the changes you made to the XML so you’ll have to start over again to reapply your changes.  That’s why once I get my refinement panel web part customized the way I like it – I export it out just in case!