Presented at SharePoint Saturday Toronto July 9, 2016. I cannot tell you how many recent customers have simply indexed a universe of content with SharePoint Search OOTB (both SP and non-SP) and commented that “Search sucks” and “I can’t find anything relevant”. You will learn everything you need to know at this session to make use of very powerful OOTB configurable search functionality to “light up” your search experience and become the next Search Hero. No previous knowledge of SharePoint Search is assumed.

1. Ed Musters, SharePoint MVP, Infusion
emusters@infusion.com
@TechEdToronto
Slides available now at:
http://slideshare.net/emusters

2. GOLDBRONZE/
PRIZES
SILVE
R

3. Session Overview: Business Level 100
I cannot tell you how many recent customers have simply indexed a
universe of content with SharePoint Search OOTB (both SP and non-SP)
and commented that “Search sucks” and “I can’t find anything relevant”. You
will learn everything you need to know at this session to make use of very
powerful OOTB configurable search functionality to “light up” your search
experience and become the next Search Hero. No previous knowledge of
SharePoint Search is assumed.

4. Ed Musters, SharePoint MVP
Infusion, Toronto Canada
Email : emustes@infusion.com
Twitter : @TechEdToronto
Slideshare:
http://www.slideshare.net/emusters
Ed is a SharePoint MVP and a SharePoint
Architect for Infusion. He has instructed the
exclusive Critical Path SharePoint courses for
many years. Ed is an author for two books
on SharePoint development. He has been a
featured speaker at many international
conferences, SharePoint Saturdays, and user
groups. Ed would very much enjoy sharing
his real world expertise with you!

5. Agenda
• How can you be a search hero?
• Search Terminology
• Authoritative Pages and Search Thesaurus
• Search analytics reports
• Your Very Own Search Center
• Federated Search
• Results Sources, Promoted Results and Results Blocks
• Search “vertical” / tabs
• Information Architecture and Search Refiners
• Hybrid Search

6. Side Note: The Demo Environment
I will be using the Office 365 Trial environment, pre-populated with
“Contoso” content, as provisioned via the following link (if you are a
Microsoft Partner): https://demos.microsoft.com/

7. How can you be a search hero?

8. How can you be a search
hero?
Arm yourself with search knowledge super powers! Learn the art of the possible!
Apply your transformative powers and make your users search experience shine!
Learn:
• What you can ask your SharePoint Administrators to do
• What you can do yourself with your very own Search Center
• All the basics before tackling more advanced concepts such as the Content
Search Web Part (which merits its own session!)

9. Isn’t SharePoint Online / 2016 / 2013 Search
supposed to be awesome and getting better
with every version? Isn’t it the “killer app”?
Discussion!
• Are you dissatisfied with your organizations “Enterprise Search”?
• If SharePoint is simply “indexing the universe of content”, disappointing
search results should not be surprising – why might that be?

10. Search Terminology

12. Search Terminology
Result Sources – A new or refined set of search results, previously known as
scopes. You could limit results to a file extension (e.g. ppt*), a path (e.g. a
sub-site / document library), a matching term in a term set, a content type
(e.g. Proposals), etc. You could also bring in external / federated results
sources (e.g. Bing or from Google Search Appliance) via OpenSearch.
Query Rules – I term these “search business rules” where you anticipate
what people are looking for, but defining a set of conditions and actions. A
simple example is to look for a keyword (“News”) and direct someone to
the News home page.

13. Search Administration in SharePoint Online

14. Authoritative Pages and
Search Thesaurus

15. Authoritative Pages
Given a listing of all of your site collections, you have the opportunity to
rank them in “levels” of “first, second, or third” in terms of search relevance.
You don’t have to do them all, but you should do the ones you can.
You can also promote relevant content that may be “buried” deep down in
some site hierarchy – corporate, division, region, company, department,
team...
There is a special category called “sites to demote”. The classic example is
an archive site you certainly would not want featured prominently in search
results simply based on keywords typed in.
These settings are global to the Office 365 tenant / SharePoint Farm.

16. Authoritative Pages

17. Search Thesaurus
Available in SharePoint On Premise only! But exceptionally useful!
A Thesaurus defines synonyms so that searching for one term or the other
yields identical search results.
All that is required is a simple CSV file in UTF-8 format, and is uploaded in
Central Administration. Example file:
A good starting point are your corporate or industry specific acronyms (e.g.
For the banking sector).
Key,Synonym,Language
COO,Chief Operating Officer,en
Chief Operating Officer,COO,en

18. Search Thesaurus
Note the hit highlighting
includes search result both
with “coo” and “chief operating
officer”.

19. Search Analytics Reports

20. Search Analytics Reports
Search Analytics reports will show you what people are looking for now,
and is a primary input for creating new “search business rules”.
At some frequency (e.g. Quarterly), request the “Top Queries By Month”,
“Abandoned Queries By Month”, and “No Results Queries by Month”.
An actual client example was employees searching for official company
holidays – terms included “holiday”, “holidays”, “2016 calendar”, “statutory
holidays”, “working calendar”. Together, they comprised a top search on
the company intranet. But each term yielded very different search results –
and frustration (and wasted time) on the part of the employee! We can
resolve this, but the first step is knowing about it.

22. Your Very Own Search Center

23. Your Very Own Search Center
You may have a global / “Enterprise” search in your organization (e.g. from
your corporate Intranet).
It is definitely worth considering if you should have your very own Search
Center for your site collection (a “/sites/Search” sub-site)
We will learn in this part of the presentation the
Site Settings you can make to have a unique and
specialized Search Center experience.
Site Settings

24. Federated Search

25. Federated Search
This technique allows you query an “outside” search index that is compliant
with OpenSearch protocol and include the search results within your search
center.
This is the SharePoint 2013 Hybrid Search approach to include SharePoint
On Premise results in SharePoint Online and vice versa.
We’ll be introducing Results Sources and Query Rules in this section.
Microsoft’s Bing Search is OpenSearch compliant, so let’s use that as an
example...

26. Bing Federated Search
First we need a Results Source that “points” to Bing:

27. Bing Federated Search
Results Source details
Bing Search
URL

28. Federated Search
Now we use a Query Rule to specify we’d like to show our Bing search in a
Results Block:

29. Google Search Appliance Federated Search
More practically, clients wish to feature federated searches from their public
“.com” site when searching on the Intranet. For example, the product
information and brochures your customer is accessing are probably there.
Many of our clients are using the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to index
their “.com”, so this has to be the search index we query to get results from.
One of our banking clients is BMO.com. If you perform a search for “RSP”
(“Retirement Savings Plan”), it will reveal the GSA query endpoint:
http://findit.bmo.com/search?proxystylesheet=bmo_json&site=bmo_en&cli
ent=bmo_en&output=xml_no_dtd&q=rsp&num=10&start=NaN&oe=utf8

30. The XSLT File you Need!
Here is the magical file (embedded into presentation) that you will need to
provide to your GSA team!
Note the parameter “proxystylesheet=bmo_json” on previous page. If you
try the URL (in Chrome) you will see special “json” search results because of
a specialized XSLT file the client provided
You will want them to implement this as “proxystylesheet=OpenSearch” or
whatever, which will apply this XSLT to the results before returning them to
SharePoint.

31. GSA Federated!
Following exact same approach as for
Bing, you add the Results Source and
Query Rule to get the GSA search results
federated to SharePoint

32. Results Sources, Promoted
Results and Results Blocks
Or: Results Sources and Query Rules, aka “Search Business Rules”

33. Results Sources
Let’s look at another example of a custom Results Source:

34. Promoted Results / Results Blocks
Let’s look at some samples for Query Rules:

35. News “Business Rules” Triggered

36. Pop Quiz!
How would you recommend to do for our previous example found via the
search reports?
“An actual client example was employees searching for official company holidays –
terms included “holiday”, “holidays”, “2016 calendar”, “statutory holidays”, “working
calendar”. Together, they comprised a top search on the company intranet. But
each term yielded very different search results – and frustration (and wasted time) on
the part of the employee! ”

37. Search Verticals / Tabs

38. Search Verticals / Tabs
You can have additional tabs in your search center.
One simple scenario is a “search scope”, limiting search results to a certain
path / site / document library, or a specific type of content.
Let’s set up a “News” tab that focuses only on Press Releases (the Results
Source from the previous section).

39. Create and Configure New Search Page
In your Search Center, Add a New Page (e.g. “NewsResults”). Then on the
search results web part, choose to “Edit Web Part”:

40. Configure the Search Results Web Part
Click the Change Query button. Change the “Select a
Query” drop down to the appropriate Results Source (in
our case Press Releases):

41. Configure A New Search Tab
From Site Settings search navigation, add a new link to point to your search
results page. That’s it! Your search will now have a new tab!

42. New Search Tab – No Results Source
Another example of Sales/Marketing
tab. But this time we use Local SP
Results and modify the Query Text
with a Path parameter:

43. Information Architecture and
Search Refiners

44. Information Architecture and Search Refiners
A proper Information Architecture involving logical, physical, and navigation
can be a daunting exercise.
You can add your own custom search refiners to improve your search
center experience.
Start simple with one or two types of content.
Create a Site Column that is mapped to a managed metadata term set.
Add the Site Column to a document library and tag/classify your
documents.
Map “refinable fields” to your managed metadata and add Search Refiners
to your search center.

45. Sample Logical Information Architecture
Physical content is
connected together
by tagging with
values from
hierarchical term
sets.

46. You can create your own term sets
Scoped to only your site collection, example “Product Group”

47. Create Site Column to Map Term Set

48. Add The Site Column To A Document Library
In my example, I used the Documents
library under Departments -> Sales &
Marketing -> Marketing Campaigns sub-
site.
Go to the library settings and add the
Contoso Product site columns using “Add
from existing site columns”.

49. Tag Your Content!
Note I did this quickly using the “Quick Edit” view:

50. Crawled Property ->Managed Property
When SharePoint crawls content that has been tagged with your term set, a
“Crawled Property” is automatically generated.
Notice the “Mapped to Property” is currently blank

51. Map to Managed Property
You need to have a Managed Property – this is the part that is Searchable,
Sortable, and (most importantly) refinable.
It is recommended to use the SharePoint provided generic Managed
Properties “RefinableString00”, “01”, “02”, etc. OOTB that you can use to
map to your Crawled Properties.

52. Map to Managed Property
On the Managed Property tab, search for “refinablestring”. Edit the next
number that has not been assigned – in this case 02.

53. Map to Managed Property
You can leave everything “as is”, just scroll down to the “Mappings” section.
Click Add a Mapping and find and add your crawled property:

54. Map to Managed Property
You should now see this filled on back on the Managed Property tab:

55. Adding a Search Refiner
Ok! Now we are ready to add a new search refiner! Go to the search
results page (e.g. go to Search Center and type in any search criteria, such
as “test”).
On the search results
page, put the page in
edit mode:

56. Adding a Search Refiner
In that Navigation Zone, choose to edit the web part. In the web part
properties, click on the Choose Refiners button:

57. Adding a Search Refiner
From available
refiners, choose
Refinable String
02 and Add.
Change the
Display Name
to Product

58. Adding a Search Refiner
Save and publish your page. Test an appropriate search – in my case “Q4”.
Notice your new refiner!

59. Hybrid Search

60. Hybrid Search
Hybrid Search is when SharePoint Online directly indexes your SharePoint
On Premise.
SharePoint Online becomes your one master search index.
You can move search configuration from On Premise to Online.
In one customer scenario, SharePoint On Premise search is also running for
sensitive data (i.e. You can have both).
You need SharePoint 2016 or a patch for SharePoint 2013.

61. Thanks for attending
You officially now can be the next Search Hero for your organization!

62. Thank you!
Toronto Enterprise Collaboration User Group
Change Management, Governance, SharePoint, Office 365,
Yammer, PowerBI, etc
http://www.meetup.com/TSPBUG/
Toronto SharePoint Users Group
http://tspug.com/
THANK YOU & See you next year!
Join us for SharePint after the event @ 5:30pm
6982 Financial Dr. and don’t forget to submit feedback
after each session for your chance to win great prizes
at the end of the day!
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/spstoronto2016