SharePoint Search 101: What can I find on the search dashboard?

The SharePoint 2010 comes with a wide range of administration, operations and reporting features that aid in deployment, scaling and monitoring the performance of the search application.

The administration interface allows you to quickly see the topology of the search application with all components involved, such as query components, index partitions, administration, crawling and property databases. You can It provides you with a at a glance system status with information on the number of items in the index, crawl and propagation status, query and crawling rate and crawl history with success and failure of the crawl statuses.

Quick menu items provide access to Content Sources, Crawl Rules, File Types and Crawler Impact Rules where you can set the frequency with which each crawler component will be requesting items from specific site. The Queries and Results section of the quick lunch menu provides access points to specify Authoritative Pages, Federated Locations and search scopes as well as Metadata Properties configuration.

The Reports section allows to quickly access a wide variety of Administration and Web Analytics Reports. Administration Reports help to understand the query latency and crawl rate and show the overall performance of the application thus helping administrators to anticipate the necessity of adding new search components or modifications to existing topology based on the performance needs.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint Search 2010,Search Administration

SharePoint Search 101: Why do I need to extract content?

A while ago, I’ve started writing search vignettes for the MSFT Enterprise Search Product team, but the project got stalled and I’ve decided (with MSFT permission) to start the “SharePoint Search 101” series of mini articles on my blog. All content is related either to SharePoint Search 2010 and/or Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP). These mini articles are intended to be small, easily digestible snippets of content that answer the What, How and Why of a given enterprise search feature of SharePoint Server 2010 and/or FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. The HOW portion is usually covered by the short demo or list of steps.

Why do I need to extract content?

(Entity Extraction, Managed Properties, Refiners)

Entity extraction is a way of pulling out meaningful information that might not be otherwise explicitly defined by end users as metadata. Managed Properties that are created through entity extraction and surfaced in the search interface as refiners are defining alternative structure or visual presentation of structure that can be used to narrow down the search results set.

When you present refiners based on managed properties created from entities extracted from content or metadata, users can easily filter out the result set based on the values of those extracted entities. Refiners can be shallow or deep, where shallow refiners are based on top 50 results brought back by query, and deep refiners is when all results are brought back with exact count of the number of results.

While managed properties are available in SharePoint Search 2010 OOTB, you can only map crawled properties that are exposed in lists and libraries metadata.

In the FAST Search for SharePoint there are built in entity extractors such as People, Companies and Locations. You can define your own list of terms to be extract from the content by building a dictionary or you can create a content processing stage that will extract entities based on a specific business rule or a need as well as extract entities through matching them to regular expressions. For example you can extract client names from document where this information is not available as metadata and expose it as managed property.

Note: Deep refiners are available only in FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint Search 2010,managed properties,crawled properties,entity extraction

ESUG June Meeting - An In-depth Look into FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS)

JUNE MEETING REMINDER - Wednesday, June 9th, 5:30 PM REGISTER NOW SUBJECT An In-depth Look into FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS) SPEAKER Didier Oliver - is a Technical Sales Specialist in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group.  His focus includes pre-sales briefings, evaluation support, requirement analysis, architectural design and working with implementation services teams.  Didier has been involved in the Search market for over 15 years.  Prior to Microsoft Didier has worked at other firms specializing in Search technologies such as Verity and Autonomy.  The session will focus on the new FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS). FSIS provides a new platform for building powerful and compelling online experiences.  We drill into the exciting new capabilities including: Interaction Management Services (IMS) Content Transformation Services (CTS) The Search Designer for Visual Studio The Business Manager Console MEETING AGENDA 5:30 PM - Networking (Food and Drinks) 6:00 PM - News and Highlights 6:10 PM - A word from our sponsor 6:30 PM - Speaker Presentation 7:25 PM - Wrap-Up and Give-Aways 7:30 PM - After Meeting Social ADDRESS 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104 To attend this meeting, REGISTER TODAY!

About the User Group The Enterprise Search User Group is a SharePoint based community with a focus on Enterprise Search aimed to provide valuable and timely information to its members. Its primary goal is to provide a forum that encourages disparate practices and business groups to come together and share thoughts, ideas, successes and failures, to cultivate a borderless body of knowledge.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Search User Group,FAST search for internet sites,FSIS

How the FBI is using Enterprise Search to improve its law enforcement capabilities: A Case Study on the FBI Sentinel Program

April 14, 2010

Enterprise Search User Group Meeting in NYC.

Join us for this exciting event and great topic on a case study for FAST Search and how FAST provides:

• Automated indexing and comprehensive search capabilities that support both FBI agents and analysts
• Manages multiple backend content sources (Documentum and Oracle databases)
• Provides flexible pre-index content processing to normalize and enrich content using advanced linguistics

For those who have not heard of Sentinel:

1. Sentinel is the case management system employed by the Bureau to replace older case management systems.
2. Sentinel provides Web-enabled information management, workflow management, item & evidence management, records search & reporting across all data.

SPEAKERS:

Erik Franklin

Erik Franklin has been with FAST/Microsoft since 2003, and was the second employee hired to support FAST’s expansion into the US Federal Market. Erik has directly supported the closing of all major accounts in the government space, including accounts in the Civilian, Defense & Intelligence communities. This support includes the pre-sales briefings, evaluation support, requirements analysis, architectural design and working with implementation services teams. Erik has held a large number of roles at FAST, including pre-sales, solution implementation, training and search business consulting.

Jon Padgett

Jon Padgett has almost 20 years of sales experience in the US Federal Enterprise Search market. Jon been with FAST/Microsoft since 2008 and joined FAST with the acquisition of the Convera RetrievalWare search platform where he spent 11 years building a successful practice made up of Federal customers in the Civilian, Defense & Intelligence communities. Before that, Jon spent several years with Adobe Systems and then at a Verity Search reseller helping build their government sales practices. Last year Jon won the prestigious Microsoft Platinum Sales Club Top Attainment award.

Register now!

• MEETING AGENDA:

  5:30 PM - Networking (Food and Drinks)

  6:00 PM - News and Highlights

  6:10 pm - A word from our sponsor

  6:30 PM - Speaker Presentation

  7:25 PM - Wrap-Up and Give-Aways

  7:30 PM - After Meeting Social

  ADDRESS:

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor New York, NY 10104

Special thanks to Metalogix for fully sponsoring this event.

I hope to see you there

Technorati Tags: FBI Enterprise Search,FAST ESP,Sentinell,Enterprise Search User Group

Custom workflow step to add user to a security group

I’m not a developer per say…

It might not be the best way to start a post that is introducing a custom workflow step created by me, step that adds users to a SharePoint security group. But I have to be very honest and confess that the last time I opened up a visual studio and compiled anything was in 2006 for SP 2003.

OK, so here are the requirements I had. This is for a site that is built to facilitate a clinical trials and to be managed by study coordinators. The need for a custom activity step was caused by the need to have multiple study sites that would require the same functionality. A medical study coordinators that are not part of admin group, only contributors for a list in the study site, coordinators need to fill out new user information when a person agrees to participate in a study. Coordinators would fill our the person desired user id and their existing email, submit it and have a workflow to notify the external user to register on the site with the user name that was provided by the study coordinator.

As the next step the study participant would register on the site and once coordinators confirm that the new user registered on the site (FBA) they would go to the New User information list, check “User Registered” field and save this information. Update of this user record triggers a workflow that automatically adds this new user to the correct security group that would allow new users submit different online questioners and forms in a secured fashion once they log into the study site

OK, so that’s it with the overview of the process requirements. Lets look at the workflow step developed here to facilitate the process of adding new users to the right security group. Keep in mind this is running with elevated privileges, but the source code is available for you to modify it as desired. It’s available on the codeplex at http://natalyavoskresenskay.codeplex.com/ for download.

Steps to deploy the custom action:

1. download the DLL and register the DLL in the GAC.

2. Add to your web.config the following line in AuthorizeTypes section

<authorizedType Assembly="AddUserToGroup, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=e82442daf6f5df8e" Namespace="CustomAction" TypeName="*" Authorized="True" />

3. Create AddUserToGroup.ACTIONS file with text bellow and save it to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\Workflow folder. this file is also available for download.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<WorkflowInfo Language="en-us">
<Actions Sequential="then" Parallel="and">
  <Action Name="Add User to the group" ClassName="CustomAction.AddUserToGroup" Assembly="AddUserToGroup, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=e82442daf6f5df8e" AppliesTo="all" Category="ARC Action">
   <RuleDesigner Sentence="Add %1 to the %2 at site %3">
    <FieldBind Field="UserName" Text="Please put the User Name" Id="1" DesignerType="TextArea"/>
    <FieldBind Field="GroupName" Text="Please put the Group Name" Id="2" DesignerType="TextArea"/>
    <FieldBind Field="SiteName" Text="Please put the Site Name" Id="3" DesignerType="TextArea"/>
   </RuleDesigner>
   <Parameters>
    <Parameter Name="__Context" Type="Microsoft.Sharepoint.WorkflowActions.WorkflowContext, Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions" Direction="In"/>
    <Parameter Name="UserName" Type="System.String, mscorlib" Direction="In" />
    <Parameter Name="GroupName" Type="System.String, mscorlib" Direction="In" />
<Parameter Name="SiteName" Type="System.String, mscorlib" Direction="In" />
   </Parameters>
  </Action>
</Actions>
</WorkflowInfo>

Now open up a site and create a workflow in SharePoint Designer, “Add User to a group” step should be available in the list of action.

Add this step and fill in the info, User name, Group Name and the site URL, all fields are mandatory for the workflow action to run.

See example:

Enjoy :-)

SSP Search error (Search application for SSP… is not provisioned)

On one of our farm we noticed that search had not been working, and the search administration page would give this message: “Crawl status The search application for 'SharedServices' on server [SERVERNAME] is not provisioned. Confirm that the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service and Windows SharePoint Services Administration service are running on the server. “

Even though search had been previously configured there, and required services were running, there was not obvious things that would usually jump out .

To troubleshoot it, I first tried stopping Office search from the UI. The status of “stopping” had been not switched to “Stopped” and kinda hang there for a while.

Trying to stop through stsadm –o osearch –action stop, yielded no result as well.

Running: “Net stop osearch” just gave me the “the service could not be controlled in its present state”, same message was observer when I hit stop the services console.

Kill utility was not available on that server and restarting the server was not an option as it was a production server.

Here is the list of steps that resolved the issue:

• End the process it’s self through tasks manager
• In central admin the “stopping” message for this Office search disappeared and instead I saw “stopped”
• Stopping WSS search was not an issue after these steps
• Then go and delete index from the index location.
• Start wss search services
• Start Office search services
• Edit properties of existing SSP –
  •  this is when I realized that db the SSP was referencing does not exist. And That was the problem all along
• I created new ssp, associated mysites with this new ssp.
• Changed association of other web apps with the new SSP, made the new ssp default
• Started full crawl, a bingo.

Hope it helps :-)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Search,SSP

SharePoint Enterprise Search 2010 & FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

I’ll be speaking next month on March 3rd at the NYSPUG meeting, come and say HI.

NY SharePoint User Group Meeting, March 3 2010

Abstract:
With the acquisition of FAST Enterprise Search Platform, Microsoft has made enterprise search a centerpiece of SharePoint 2010. Get a first hand comprehensive overview of the major improvements in SharePoint Search 2010 compared to SharePoint Search 2007. Natalya will also provide an understanding of the major differences between SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. This session, full of demos, will cover the following:

• New & improved architecture
• Sources of content available for out-of-the-box indexing
• Crawled properties vs managed properties
• What is the entity extraction
• Social search & people search
• Relevancy tuning & content processing

Agenda: 

5:30 PM	Eat & Greet: Networking, Food & Drink
6:00 PM	The News: Breaking SharePoint & NYC SPUG News
6:10 PM	The SharePoint Minute: Quick 3-minute tutorial
6:20 PM	Presentation
7:20 PM	Wrap Up: Announcements/Door Prizes
7:30 PM	After Meeting Social: Continue discussions with Speakers, Sponsors & Peers

To attend this meeting, REGISTER NOW!

PS: Carlos, you already know this stuff :-)

 

Technorati Tags: FAST Search for SharePoint 2010,SharePoint Search 2010