26

Setting Up SharePoint Search to Catalog Analytics and Reports

This lesson covers the basics of search in SharePoint 2010. Search is important in the context of Business Intelligence because once you create all those great reports and store them in SharePoint, you need a great way to quickly find what you're looking for without manually clicking your way through different team sites, document libraries, and attached file servers.

This lesson goes through the basics of search, the different types of search offered in SharePoint, and how to configure basic search in SharePoint to begin seeing value in quickly accessing your Business Intelligence reports.

WHY DO YOU NEED SEARCH?

With the advent of improved search functionality in every aspect of our lives, we've come to expect this functionality from every piece of technology. Our computers have Windows search, our phones have search for both the phone's files and the Internet, and the rise in tablet computers is only driving this further.

Internet search is optimized for following a large number of links throughout the Web, and cataloging the “map” of websites, the sites they link to, and the content in those sites. Internet search has a fatal flaw, though, because it can't reach into the confines of your corporate network and index your files. It certainly can't handle complex situations like Lotus Notes, Domino, or UNIX filesystems.

Many firms have tried the new “all in one” Internet search appliances that are “plug and play” in your environment, but many leave this strategy disappointed. SharePoint search comes to the rescue. With the new architecture improvements and scale out technology allowing over a million items in SharePoint Search and up to a billion items to be indexed with the new FAST Server technology, organizations are now investing significant time and resources into testing and deploying this new technology. New improvements also include wildcard searches, refinement management, and a new AJAX-driven search screen with more real estate.

SharePoint Search Options

The different versions of search include:

• SharePoint Foundation Search
• SharePoint Server and Search Server
• FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint and FAST Search Server 2010 for Internet Sites

SharePoint Foundation Search

SharePoint Foundation Search is what this lesson focuses on demonstrating. It is the most basic search functionality, but provides a lot of bang-for-the-buck where BI search is concerned. More functionality for this area is covered later in this lesson. Your search needs may extend beyond this, however, so before we jump into the Search configuration and setup, let's explore the other search options in SharePoint 2010.

Search Server

Some of you may have used Search Server 2008 and will be really impressed by the new improvements in Search Server 2010. This new version is basically an upgrade and includes some exciting new features. These include:

• Boolean query support
• Wildcard prefixes in your search (*.txt)
• Query suggestions
• Suggestions for query variations
• Refinement panels for users to refine search results
• Improvements in relevance of results
• Ranking and relevance based on inferred metadata
• PowerShell support
• Query federation

SharePoint Search 2010

The new SharePoint Search is part of a core shift in enterprise Search technology. This diverges from previous versions of search in SharePoint and other Microsoft Search products. This version is more heavily explored in other texts and online at Microsoft.com. It has even stronger features, including:

• Social Search
  • Search by location, skills, projects, and expertise
  • Ranking by names, position, or social tags
  • Personal search and improved restrictions on search
• User Experience Improvements
  • Best Bets
  • Query federation
  • Improved query language with wildcard support, “did you mean,” and improved complex Boolean operations
  • Phonetic Search (in some languages)
  • Taxonomy Integration
• Administration
  • PowerShell scriptable deployments and operation
  • GUI administration
  • Systems Center Operations Management Pack
  • Health Monitoring
  • PowerShell Configuration Cmdlets
  • Usage Reporting

Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint and FAST Search Server 2010 for Internet Sites

Fast Search is a new technology that was acquired and integrated by Microsoft into a new top-tier enterprise search offering. FAST is beyond the scope of this book, but it's important to know some of the features and improvements that you will get by exploring this technology:

• Updated, one-stop search center to find items quickly
• Deep refiners, allowing quick visual exploration or results
• Additional web parts for improved out-of-the-box user experience and flexibility
• Visual cues through presentation of visual Best Bets, document previews, and document thumbnails
• Contextual search to meet the needs of different groups
• Customizable ranking models
• Easy to configure end user experiences
• Advanced query capabilities

SharePoint Foundation Search

Now that you've explored all the options, let's discuss the one you're going to focus on in this lesson. The benefit of Foundation Search is that there is very little to configure or maintain, but it provides some great functionality that users will expect as a minimum in a new solution that is based on the new SharePoint 2010 platform. Let's walk through that setup now.

Configuring Foundation Search in SharePoint 2010

First go to Central Administration and review the services running on the server by going to Manage Services on Server in the upper left. See this list in Figure 26-1.

FIGURE 26-1

Next locate SharePoint Foundation Search in the list of services and click Start. You are presented with an options screen as shown in Figure 26-2.

From here you will configure a few key settings:

• Search Service Account — Make sure this account is dedicated to this service. You've seen this recommended practice in other services in this book, and it's a good one.
• Content Access Account — Because this is Foundation Search, you need one account that allows access to all the content you'd like to index on this site. You will use administrator but you should have an account for content access to help control security and account proliferation.
• Search Database — You can change the location and name of the database for storing search results and configuration. The default should be fine unless you need it on a different server for scalability.
• Specify a failover server — If you're running this farm and SQL backend in a clustered scenario.
• Configure your index schedule — Configure indexing to match your needs. Remember to match your need for frequent updates with the performance of your system. Starting with a default of hourly updates is a good place to baseline and then increase frequency based on user feedback or needs.

FIGURE 26-2

A fully populated configuration is shown in Figures 26-3 and 26-4.

Once you click Start, you will be brought back to the Manage Services Screen, and you need to assign this server as an indexer to each content database.

Under Application Management Manage Content Databases, select the name of your content database and select the correct index server. See details in Figure 26-5.

Once that is selected, the next time the indexer runs, a crawl will collect information about your content and process it for searching. If you are impatient you can run an STSadm.exe command to force a full process immediately. The command can be executed from a command prompt as shown in Figure 26-6.

It's important to remember that you either need to be in the SharePoint root directory and then in to run this command, or you could open the SharePoint Management Shell because it handles the stsadm.exe portion for you. The message Operation Completed Successfully will return quickly. This does not mean the index is finished, only that the start command was given and accepted by the service. If you want to know when it's finished you can monitor Event Viewer on the computer and look for Event 85: “A master merge has completed for catalog Search.” See an example of this in Figure 26-7.

FIGURE 26-3

FIGURE 26-4

FIGURE 26-5

FIGURE 26-6

FIGURE 26-7

Basic Search Administration

Administering search in SharePoint 2010 is a big topic, but this section focuses on the basics to get you up-and-running. Search can be a daunting technology but the next few sections cover some important concepts to give you the confidence to explore more complicated areas if your organization requires.

Security Trimming

Security trimming is an important concept to think about when implementing and then running searches in your enterprise. SharePoint will only return results for content that you have access to and for which SharePoint understands the security. For example, when you include a Windows file share in the index, SharePoint can match your AD permissions to the access control list governing that file share and return the appropriate files.

If SharePoint is set up to index an external source with a cookie or anonymous login, SharePoint cannot understand those permissions and will show you all the results from that source. This is an important security concept and why we mention it right at the beginning of this section. If you need security trimming or external sources, you will need to develop your own. That topic is out of scope in this text.

Site Search Administration

There is great news in this section. When dealing with Foundation Search, there is virtually no administration to speak of. When you go to the Search Settings page under Site Settings, the only options are Search and Offline Availability. This allows you to control whether or not the current web application is included in the search results and how to handle any ASPX page use. That's it! Very straightforward.

Extending Your Search Configuration

Extending your search configuration can provide some much needed functionality. This section discusses some common ways to extend your search capabilities and put that new functionality to good use.

What Do You Need from Search?

If you have higher volume needs from search beyond departmental or prototyping efforts, you will want to explore the expanded offerings and tests that cover those offerings in depth. There is significant potential for corporate benefit from employing these new search tools.

TRY IT

In this Try It you configure the Search Service and then force a crawl to populate the index.

Lesson Requirements

This lesson's Try It section will require you to set up search functionality on a site where you have reports and other Business Intelligence items stored. You are going to use the Central Administration and site settings to configure SharePoint Search, force a crawl of the site, and then view your search results.

Hints

• Don't forget to set the indexer on your content database.
• Make sure you run the stsadm command to force a crawl or you'll be waiting a while for your results to show up.

Step-by-Step

1. Open Central Administration from the Start menu.
2. Select Manage Services on this Server.
3. Find SharePoint Foundation Search Service and click Start to start the service.
4. Fill in the information for a service account, content access account, and index scheduler based on explanations in this lesson (see Figure 26-3) and your needs for your application.
5. Click Submit at the bottom of the page.
6. Next, go back to Central Administration and select Manage Content Databases under the Application Management heading.
7. Select the content database you're using and you will be presented with the options screen for that database. See Figure 26-5 for suggestions on filling this out.
8. Select your new server name in the drop-down for the indexer and click Submit.
9. Now you're configured, so you need to force a crawl.
10. Open the SharePoint Management Shell on the server from the Start menu.
11. Type in Stsadm.exe -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart.