Customize Search Features in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Search capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 include a host of powerful features suitable for a large enterprise intranet or extranet. Although Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 also includes many of these features, only MOSS provides the easy customization of the search scope and UI. SharePoint administrators can customize MOSS to meet many specific business needs.

With MOSS, you can search a wide array of sources in the network, such as Web sites, file shares, and Microsoft Exchange Server public folders—not to mention site contents within the SharePoint server itself. The MOSS standard site collection feature pack offers two search enhancements, an Advanced Search Web part and the Search Center site template, that Share- Point administrators can use to fully customize the site’s UI and search behavior. SharePoint offers two display options for search results: through a search Web service or through the built-in search results page. The search Web service, which lets you access results from client applications outside of the context of SharePoint, is development-intensive and beyond the scope of this article. Managing search scopes and accessing search results from within the SharePoint UI, however, doesn’t require a developer’s skill set—although it isn’t necessarily intuitive or straightforward.

Customize Search Scope
Because SharePoint can crawl contents from a wide array of sources, you use search scopes to let users search a specific subset of the workspace’s entire contents. Targeted scopes help you get better search results while boosting overall search performance.

You customize search scopes in MOSS in the Shared Services Administration section of SharePoint Central Administration. Shared Services are applications that run behind the scenes on their own Microsoft IIS Web applications. These services can be configured from a single place and shared for use by SharePoint sites on multiple MOSS and WSS servers— hence the name. The MOSS search engine is an example of Shared Services. Keep in mind that someone with administrative privileges in the regular SharePoint content sites won’t necessarily have access to Shared Services Administration.

By default, MOSS has two out-of-the-box search scopes:

These scopes both cover a rather broad range of sites. You’ll have to create your own scopes to target more specific areas of your content. Take, for example, a document library list named Catalog, with various custom columns that track document metadata. In the default setup scenario, if you want to search for content only within this document library, you would have to navigate to that document library, then select This List: Catalog in the search scope drop-down menu.

The first item in the drop-down menu is specific to each page. If you’re somewhere else on the site, you’ll see different options on the list—but you won’t see the This List: Catalog scope. The solution is to add a new search scope that appears in the search scope list on every page. Here are the steps to follow to create the new scope:

Now that you’ve created a new search scope, you need to specify the content this scope should query when searching by adding a rule for the search scope, as follows:

You’ve now specified a content source for the custom search scope. The next step is to have SharePoint display this custom search scope in the search drop-down menu. This configuration is done through the SharePoint site’s Site Settings page:

Schedule the Search Crawl
The SharePoint search engine crawls the content in the search scope every so often. The frequency of this crawl is controlled by a search schedule. By default, SharePoint is set to crawl only once in a 24-hour period for the default search scope content. After you’ve defined your custom search scope, you need to set up a crawl schedule for it. You can set up separate schedules for full crawls, which build an index of all site content, and incremental crawls, which index only changes to content since the last crawl.

A full crawl takes longer and is more resource intensive on the server than a partial crawl. Therefore, it’s best to schedule fewer full crawls than incremental crawls and to schedule them during non-peak hours. A partial crawl, however, doesn’t detect all types of changes.

For example, when a row item on a Share- Point list is changed or deleted, a partial crawl won’t find the change because it can’t recognize changes to .aspx pages. A full crawl is required to re-index the list data after such changes.

You set up custom crawl schedules through the site’s Shared Services Administration. Follows these steps:

Customize the Search UI
Adding a custom search scope to the search drop-down menu is an example of search UI customization. MOSS provides numerous out-of-the-box features, such as Web parts and site templates, that let you customize the UI of both search and results pages. Search Center is a new site template dedicated to search functionality; it’s embedded with many standard search-related Web parts.

The Search Center site template comes in two flavors: Search Center Lite and Search Center with Tabs. Search Center Lite is available in site collections by default where the Office SharePoint Server Publishing feature isn’t activated. Search Center with Tabs is available in site collections with the publishing feature activated; this version lets you create a custom UI that includes tabs with different searches. You can see a list of both activated and available features of a site by going to the site collection’s administration page and clicking Site collection features. The Search Center is usually a sub-site under the site collection with the URL http:///search center/. In a publishing site, you can also create your own Search Center sub-site by using the Search Center with Tabs template on the Enterprise tab in the New SharePoint Site page, as Figure 2 shows.

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Customize Search Tabs
You use tabs to group search queries and results by scope. By keeping each scope in its own tab, you can also create a different search form for each scope. Users access a custom search form to query by fields or values that apply only to a particular scope, and the results displayed pertain only to that scope.

By default, the Search Center contains two tabs, All Sites and People. These tabs appear on the Search Center home page. The All Sites tab searches all SharePoint content sites; the scope for People is limited to My Sites. If you want to add a new custom tab, follow these steps:

You’ve added a new search tab named Catalog to your Search Center, and it includes the Advanced Search Web part.

Customize Advanced Search
Earlier, we created a custom scope that you could access from anywhere in the site to search for contents only within the Catalog document library. Now, imagine this library has a custom column named Color Category. We want users to be able to search for documents in this library that are tagged with a particular color. With the standard search box, if the user searches for a color (e.g., green), the results include all documents that have the word green anywhere in the document body or metadata. But what if the user wanted to search only those documents that are tagged as green in the Color Category field? The Advanced Search Web part, with some customizations, can help answer that question. Here’s how:

Manage Metadata Property Mappings
Note that in step 5 above, we referred to a property definition with the name ColorCategory. SharePoint doesn’t yet know how to search for this property. You need to define this property such that it maps to the field named Color Category in the Catalog document library. This definition is done through metadata property mapping. SharePoint list and document library fields are also referred to as properties. As the SharePoint search engine crawls through lists, it indexes the properties, which are then referred to as crawled properties. You define relationships between list properties and crawled properties through Search Setting’s Metadata Property Mappings. For the example above, you can define a new managed property named ColorCategory and map it to the crawled property that points to the document library’s field named Color Category by following these steps:

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Customize Search Results
By default, the Search Center displays results in the results.aspx page. You can customize this page or create your own results page. For example, consider the document library with the custom Color Category field. When a user searches against the Catalog scope, you want the search results page to display a field named Color Category. You can achieve this by modifying the XSL markup of the Search Core Results Web part in the search results page.

Start by performing a search with the Catalog scope so that you get a results page where only items that fall within the Catalog scope are displayed. After you have such a page, follow these steps to create a new search results page:

Now when you perform a search using the search box, you’ll see the Color Category property exposed in the search results area. By following these steps, you can expose anyproperty that’s already stored in the metadata

Control SharePoint Searches
You should now have a good idea of how you can customize the search experience in MOSS 2007. The procedures shown in this article, though simple, can easily be leveraged to create more meaningful business solutions that can crawl and index a large amount of disparate data, yet offer end users targeted search capabilities to zero in on a specific subset of data. Custom search scope definitions also let administrators schedule indexing and crawling of each scope separately: Only scopes with frequently changing contents need to be crawled frequently. This ability not only saves server resources, but it also makes the search results more accurate and fresh.