When working with Search, I often get the question how to set up the Search Center, and how to configure and customize its Search Pages. In this blog post, I am summarizing the basic configuration steps to follow.
Please note, these steps can be applied in SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016 on-premises as well as in Office 365 / SharePoint Online.
See the first part of this series here: Is SharePoint Search Dead?
Despite all these signals, there has continued to be a quite healthy investment from Microsoft in search, and SharePoint search is a remarkably capable and very affordable product. The search market was commoditized for quite some time, due largely to Microsoft and Google.
The market is changing, though. And there are a lot of positive signs for Microsoft in Enterprise Search. Read more…
I’m asked regularly whether Microsoft has abandoned the Enterprise Search market. This was a frequent question in 2015, and less frequent in 2016, but there’s been a recent uptick, and I got this question 10 times last month. As a long-standing search nerd that lives close to Microsoft, I know the answer is NO. But I was baffled about why this question keeps coming up.
So I decided to investigate. This blog takes you through what I’ve found and how you can answer the question when it comes up. Search Explained is the perfect place to publish it. Read more…
In my many years of working with enterprise search, the one thing which companies want solved first is finding people. They might have an employee directory or they might already be using SharePoint user profiles, but there are always tweaks to be made to make it better.
It’s not rocket science from a technical perspective, as the hard part is figuring out which pieces of data about a person should be stored in the SharePoint user profile, where does it come from – the age-old question about master data, and how do you want to use this information in a findability scenario around your employees. Read more…
It’s been a challenging few weeks here, with family emergencies as well as project challenges, and getting ready for my upcoming workshop in NYC.
The good news is, the emergency is over, and although I am still in late with some writing tasks, I am also happy to let you know that the next webinar of Search Explained is scheduled. My next guest will be my search guru friend, Mikael Svenson, CTO of Puzzlepart. He has worked in the search field for over 15 years implementing solutions for major international corporations and for several Nordic governmental institutions.
Mikael is an international speaker as well as an Office Server and Services MVP for the past six years. He is a Microsoft P-TSP, and he is also involved in a lot of SharePoint community work in Norway. Mikael has worked with media monitoring software, developed an Enterprise Search Engine, and developed for Office 365 and SharePoint in general. He has authored “SharePoint Search Queries Explained” and “Working with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint”.
Webinar title: How to make sure your content is searchable the way you want
Date/time: May 24, 2017 5pm CET / 11am EST / 8am PST
You have heard that SharePoint can find anything, but you are not seeing those results. You have important content that you want to find in the SharePoint Search center either in Office 365 or SharePoint on-premises. In this presentation Matthew will demonstrate how to run a search project for a specific kind of content, like Invoices, Templates, Sites, Contracts, Resumes, or whatever it is that you need to find. This session will outline the steps required for a successful search project and then demonstrate how to configure the content, the site, and the search center to deliver actionable results for your end users.
Come spend an hour and discover what you have been missing in SharePoint Search.
Last year I was introduced to the amazing work of Brian Pendergrass, Russ Maxwell, Brent Groom and Eric Dixon in the form of the SRx Core the SharePoint Search Health Reports. This suite of reports was created to help evaluate, monitor and maintain on-premises SharePoint farms by providing DEEP feedback and analysis of the SharePoint Search Service Application. The core is a set of “tests” that you can run collectively or independently and in detail to determine the overall health of your SharePoint Search Service Application (SSA).
Running the tests starts with initializing the reports. Run:
. .\InitSRx.ps1
This will build a local cache and do some initialization of the object needed to run the reports.
The most common question I get about my upcoming workshop, SharePoint 2016 and Office 365 Search in Practice, is why I’ve decided to choose a two-day format.
I know it could be one day. Also, it could be three days, or even up to five.
“Advanced Search” is a great feature, although not utilized in many cases. Out-of-the-box, it provides a default set of available options, which are too general for most businesses. However, it can be enhanced with some easy customizations.
In this post, I’m going to demonstrate one of the most powerful configurations of “Advanced Search” in SharePoint 2013/2016 and Office 365: how to add our custom property filters.
I am happy and super excited to announce Search Explained Roadshow 2017! The first stop is Amsterdam, Netherlands with a 2-day workshop SharePoint 2016 and Office 365 Search in Practice.
Search and findability have evolved over the past several years into a new form. Search is no longer simply about “Search”. While Information Overload is the new reality of our lives, findability of relevant content gets more and more critical. The “old school” Search Center experience is outdated – we need something different, something better, something that is more efficient, more user friendly and more helpful.
In this two-day workshop, I will introduce proven steps and best practices, as well as common mistakes to avoid, demonstrated by live demos and exercises. The training provides you the guidance and action plan to take if you want to succeed with Search in your organization.
You will learn about: Read more…
When it comes to the search experience, the look-and-feel of the search results are always a big question. In most cases, the out-of-the-box “ten blue lines” experience is not enough, creating custom Display Templates is almost always required.
Read more…
Search Explained’s Yammer network is a community of Search Enthusiasts, with more than 300 members as of today. The network is growing fast, with business decision makers, IT Pros, developers as well as end users joining from all around the world.
As the new year arrived to us, let me share the list of our most popular posts from 2015:
It’s a common requirement to create a “My Tasks” dashboard on the Intranet, where every user can see his/her own open tasks with status, due date and other information.
This year’s SharePoint Conference (held in Las Vegas, NV) was again a major success! I had the privilege of speaking on two sessions.
The first one was “Designing and Applying Information Architecture for SharePoint and Office 365”, together with Israel Vega. In this session, we have broken down the various components of SharePoint and Office 365 and demonstrated how to maximize the advantages of these components for content organization and discovery.
The second one was “Best practices for Information Architecture and Enterprise Search”. Here, I discussed the importance of a good IA design for search. I also discussed how search provides the foundation of a successful knowledge/information management, and discovery scenarios for content and people. I demonstrated best practices in planning, maintaining, and governance of information architecture (IA).
It was very rewarding to hear about the positive feedback from the audience. I am very glad to learn that many participants found the sessions very helpful. I am also extremely pleased that some of them considered the materials to be practical and useful references that they can go back to again and again.
Thank you everyone who attended my sessions! I truly hope to see you soon again.
Recordings of my sessions are available at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/agnes-molnar.
Recordings of all SPC14 sessions can be found at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/SharePoint-Conference/2014.
