SharePoint 2010 has changed a few things regarding search. One of which is the use of a different master page to control the navigation, providing a minimal global navigation (aka top link bar) and removing the left sidebar (aka current navigation or the quick launch bar). The left sidebar needs to be removed to make way for the new search refiners but the global navigation loses an important feature – the breadcrumb to navigate back where you started (i.e. somewhere else in the site collection).

Comparing default master pages

The top image above shows the header for a normal internal SharePoint site with it’s little breadcrumb icon expanded (the folder icon next to Site Actions). I’m on the Facilities site which is a sub-site under Resources which is a sub-site under Intranet. Intranet is the root site in the site collection.

The second image above shows the header for a SharePoint search site (Basic or Enterprise template). There is no icon.  It is a sub-site under Intranet but you can only tell if you look in the address bar of the browser. There is no link to click to get you back to the Intranet root. This can be annoying for users if they are not interested in any of the search results provided.

I do the following little hack to add the Intranet root URL before the site title.

1. Create a new master page

• In SharePoint designer,open the root site in the site collection. Click on Master Pages in the navigation
• Open the minimal.master page and copy its contents (do not check it out, do not save any changes)
• Create a new blank master page, give it a name (e.g. search.master) and replace its content with the content from the minimal.master page

2. Set up a style for the link to be added

• At the end of the HEAD section of the master page, add the following style settings

<style type="text/css">
   .MyLinkStyle a, a.hover{  
       color: #FFFFFF;  
       text-decoration: none; }
</style>

• Note: you can call .MyLinkStyle what ever you want, e.g. .YourLink. Just make sure it starts with a full stop (.)
• These style settings are based on the default site theme. If you are using a different theme, change the formatting to suit. If you are doing everything properly through style sheets, make the changes in the appropriate files.

The HEAD section of the file should now include your style settings as shown below (additions highlighted):

Adding <style> code to master page

3. Add the link before the site title

• Whilst still editing your new master page…
• Locate the line that contains the Heading 1 tag. It should look something like this:

<h1 class="s4-mini-header">

• Enter the following code directly beneath this tag:

    <span class="MyLinkStyle">
    <a href="http://intranet">Intranet</a> -
    </span>

• Note: Replace “http://intranet” with your own URL.
• The edited section should look something like the image below (additions highlighted, my URL is http://demo/sites/intranet/):

Adding the link to the master page

I’ve included the split screen mode so that you can see how the link appears visually. Don’t be confused by ‘Intranet – Intranet’. We are creating this master page at the root site in the site collection – called Intranet on this demo. The master page is only going to be applied to the Search sub-site.

4. Finish your new master page

• Save, check-in and publish your new master page.
• Don’t forget to approve it – you’ll be prompted if you’re working with a default settings.

5. Apply the new master page to your search site

• Navigate to your Search site. Go to Site Actions – Site Settings
• Under Look and Feel, click on Master Page
• For the Site Master Page, change the selected master page from minimal.master to search.master (or whatever you called your new master page)

Selecting the new master page

Click OK. And your search site should now look something like the following:

Link added to the Site Title

And there you have it, a basic little hack to add navigation to your site title in search sites.

Related blog posts

• SharePoint 2010 Search Set-up
• Adding Staff Directory Search
• SharePoint vs FAST for search
• Configuring Adobe PDF indexing

This post is filed in the SharePoint 2010 handbook under Enterprise Search

[Update] Please note that this solution does not quite get to a full address book search. When Microsoft says ‘Sort by name’, they actually only sort by first name. Daft I know but go complain to them.  The best approach is to add a note for people – add at least the first letter of each name if possible, e.g. search for First name: Cla, Last name: P. That usually ensures all possible matches are listed on the first page.  I did have a workaround for SharePoint 2007 that also sorted by last name, but it only worked per page, i.e. per 50 results which also is not ideal.

—-

This post applies to: SharePoint Server 2010, Standard or Enterprise edition. (Requires User Profile Service). It does not apply to SharePoint Foundation Service or FAST.

SharePoint Server includes people in search results. This is great if you’re looking for expertise in a given subject. Results are based on the content of user profiles, which can be a mix of formal information – organisation hierarchy, name, contact details etc. and informal stuff – skills, hobbies, interests etc.

However, what SharePoint does not do straight out of the box is provide address book style staff directory searches. If you are searching specifically for a person, you have to spell their name precisely or phonetically. This post will walk through setting up staff search where you can enter all or part of a name (e.g. show me names beginning ‘Sm’) with results displayed alphabetically.

Preparation

To set-up staff directory search, you first need to have configured a search site using one of the built-in Search site templates available with SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise edition. I recommend the Enterprise Search Center site template, it’s available in SharePoint Server Standard and Enterprise edtions (yes, Microsoft has habit of mixing up what the word Enterprise applies to).

For help with setting up the search site, see the following blog post: SharePoint 2010 Search Set-up

Create the Staff Directory search tabs and results page

Instead of using the standard People results page that comes with the Enterprise Search site, we’re going to add an additional tab and results page called Staff Directory. Note: you could just modify the People page, I prefer to use a separate one and leave People for finding expertise.

First we need to create the page we are going to display staff directory search results:

1. Navigate to the search site
2. Go to Site Actions – View All Site Content
3. In All Site Content, under Document Libraries, click on Pages
4. In the Pages library, click on the Documents tab at the top of the page, click on New Document and select Welcome Page
   
5. To create the page:
   - Enter a title: Staff Directory
   - URL: staffresults
   - Select the page layout: (Welcome Page) People Search results, and click Create
   
6. The page will be checked out, check it in and publish as a major version (1.0). There’s still some work to do but we’ll be editing it later…

Second, we need to create tabs to make it easy to navigate to the page:

1. Go back to Site Actions – View All Site Content
2. In All Site Content, under Lists, click on Tabs in Search Pages
3. Click Add New Item and enter the Tab Name: Staff Directory and Page: staffresults.aspx
   You must use the same page name that you just created. You don’t need to enter the full URL, just the page name, the list points directly at the Pages library.
4. Repeate steps 1 – 3, but this time select the list Tabs in Search Results

The end result: Your search site now has a dedicated tab and search results page for your staff directory:

Create the Staff Directory Search Box

The following can be done on any page on any site but let’s assume you want it on the Intranet home page.

1. Add a Content Editor web part to the page
2. Edit the web part to change it’s title to Staff Search
3. Click inside the web part, then in the menu ribbon, click on the HTML icon and choose Edit HTML Source
   Note: You must do this inside a web part and using the HTML Source box for it to work. Otherwise SharePoint will remove the JavaScript when you save the page
4. Insert the following code* inside the HTML Source box:  Replace the URLs to point to your search site and page name. You may want to include the full path, e.g. http://server/… Change the table settings if you want a different size or style of layout.

   <script language="javascript">

   //function for enter on keyboard and apostrophes in search strings

   function txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(e)

   {
   if (e.keyCode == 13 || e.keyCode==10)
   {
   e.returnValue=false;
   DoWildPeopleSearch();
   return false;
   }
   else
   return true;

   }

   function escapestr(str)

   {
   return str.replace("'","%22");
   }

   //staff search

   function DoWildPeopleSearch()

   {
   var firstname = escapestr(document.all["firstname"].value);
   var lastname = escapestr(document.all["lastname"].value);
   var url;

   //search on last name onnly (first name is empty)

   if(firstname == "")

   {
   url = "/search/Pages/staffresults.aspx?k=LastName%3A" + lastname;
   window.location=url;
   return;
   }

   //search on first name only (last name is empty)

   if(lastname == "")

   {
   url = "/search/Pages/staffresults.aspx?k=FirstName%3A" + firstname;
   window.location=url;
   return;
   }

   //search on first and last
   url = "/search/Pages/staffresults.aspx?k=lastname%3A" + lastname +
   "%20FirstName%3A" + firstname;
   window.location=url;
   return;
   }
   </script>
   
   <table width="100%" id="StaffSearchTable" border="0" cellspacing="0"
   cellpadding="4"><tbody>
   <tr><td width="80" nowrap="nowrap">First Name:</td>
   <td width="100%"><input name="firstname" id="firstname"
   onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)" type="text" size="25"
   maxlength="55"/></td></tr>
   <tr><td width="80" nowrap="nowrap">Last Name:</td>
   <td><input name="lastname" id="lastname"
   onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)"
   type="text" size="25" maxlength="55"/> </td></tr>
   <tr><td></td>
   <td><input onclick="DoWildPeopleSearch()" type="button" value="Search"/></td></tr>
   </tbody></table>
   <p>Enter all or part of a name<br/>e.g. A will find all names beginning with A</p>

5. Click OK. If you are confident you’ve got the code right, now woud be a good time to export this web part. SharePoint is very fussy about using JavaScript and if you try to edit it at a later date, it may break. Export and then import to the web part gallery to make it easy to just add it back in at a later date. If you’ve made an error, delete the web part and start again from scratch.
6. Once done, save the page and you should now have a web part that looks something like this:
   
7. Test the web part to make sure you entered the correct URLs for the search page. Assuming you did, stay on the Staff Directory results page, ready for the next step.

Note. The code creates a layout using a table. If this offends your design sensabilities, by all means insert DIVs and appropriate HTML code to create a properly formatted AAA-compliant box. (p.s. it still won’t be compliant if you’re using a web part zone because the zones use tables in the page layout…)

* I’d love to take full credit for this code but somebody else wrote the original. I’ve had it for years and can’t remember if I got one of the Devs to help or found it via Google. There’s quite possibly a better way of writing it.

Modifying the Staff Directory results page

The final step is to edit the Staff Directory results page. If you’re not already looking at the page, navigate to it now.

The image above shows the default People search results page. You can see the search parameters in the search box – I searched for everyone with a last name beginnning G. But look at the results. They are not in alpahebetical order. We’re going to replace the default search box with our staff directory search and change the way the results are displayed.

1. Edit the staffresults.aspx page
2. Delete the web part called People Search Box
3. If you exported/imported your Staff Search web part earlier, now add it to the Top Zone of the page
4. Edit the web part settings and under Appearance, change the Chrome to None (to hide the title and borders)
5. Click inside the web part content and click the HTML icon to Edit HTML Source. The code is identical to the before but we are going to use a different table layout. Replace your TABLE section with the following:

   <table id="StaffSearch" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
   <tbody><tr><td width="80" nowrap="nowrap">First Name:</td>
   <td width="180"><input name="firstname" id="firstname"
   onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)" type="text" size="20"
   maxlength="100"/> </td>
   <td width="80" nowrap="nowrap">Last Name:</td>
   <td width="180"><input name="lastname" id="lastname"
   onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)" type="text" size="20"
   maxlength="100"/> </td>
   <td><input onclick="DoWildPeopleSearch()" type="button" value="Search"/>
   </td></tr></tbody></table>

6. Click OK and save the page. Then click Edit to edit it again.
7. Find the People Search Core Results web part and edit the web part settings
   - Expand the Display Properties section
   - Under Default Results Sorting, change it from ‘Default’ to ‘Name
   - You can also modify other settings, such as number of results per page, size of summary and URL
   - Click Apply/OK to save the changes to the web part settings. Save and publish the page

And there you have it, staff directory search in an address book format with results listed alphabetically by surname.

There are some other tweaks that I often do, such as adding department to the search box as a dropdown list (requires very accurate data in your AD – i.e. consistent department names) and adding additional properties to the search results such as mobile phone, alternate contact (again, is dependent on the data being available in the profile). But this should get you started.

Final note: It is possible to use the code here and create a staff directory search in SharePoint Server 2007. The complication comes from not having a built-in capability to display results by name. You can set-it up but with a huge limitation – it sorts alphabetically by results page and you can’t have more than 50 items per page. Also, the people results in SharePoint 2007 look terrible. You can make them look more like a business-card style results layout but it takes quite a bit of tweaking using XML. If there’s demand in the comments for it, I’ll dig out my old notes…

This post is part of the SharePoint 2010 Handbook: Enterprise Search

[Update] Following comments to this post, please note that this refers to using the Enterprise Wiki template when creating a site collection. The Enterprise Wiki template is the only one that will create a root site with all features available. All other templates limit the features for the site collection and the Publishing Portal template is the worst of all.  Within a site collection, you can use any site templates you want for sub-sites.

[Update 2] You must be a Site Collection Administrator to perform these steps. Being added to the Site Owners group (Full Control permission) is not enough.  The search settings are under Site Collection Administration. If you can’t see them, you’re not a Site Collection Administrator.

—- Original Post —-

In SharePoint 2007, if you created a new site collection using the ‘Collaboration Portal’ template, it would come with a number of sites, including the Search Center. In SharePoint 2010, this is no longer the case. There isn’t a Collaboration Portal template for starters, the nearest you’ll find is the Enterprise Wiki template which is my recommended starting point for Intranets, KM and Collaborative Sites. (Side note: Another example of poor usability on Microsoft’s part. The Enterprise Wiki template is available in both the Standard and Enterprise editions of SharePoint 2010. When you read about features with ‘Enterprise’ in the title, don’t assume they are limited to the Enterprise Edition, in most cases they are also available in Standard.)

In SharePoint 2010, the clue is in the search box:

When you create a new site collection, the default search settings limit search to within the current site only and uses built-in search pages. If you want to search across multiple sites (a fairly normal requirement for most internal SharePoint deployments), use search scopes and configure different types of results pages, you will be wanting a dedicated search site. Here’s what to do:

Create a Search site

1. At the root of the site collection where you want the Search site to live, click Site Actions and select ‘New Site’
2. Select the search site template you want to use
3. Enter a title and URL (Search works for me…) and create the site

There are up to three search site templates to choose from (and you should use a search template if you don’t want to create a lot of extra work for yourself setting up search query and results pages):

• Basic Search – available with all versions of SharePoint
• Enterprise Search – requires SharePoint 2010 Server: Standard or Enterprise edition (yes, another of those ‘Enterprise’ features also available in Standard)
• FAST Search – requires SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise Edition (or FAST add-on/dedicated)

The search query box is automatically integrated every SharePoint site within the global navigation bar (as shown in the first image above). Unless you particularly want to also have the Search site listed in navigation, go into the Navigation settings and hide it.

Configure Search Settings

Once you’ve got your search site, you can now configure the search settings to use it. This step needs to be repeated for each site collection that you want to point to the Search site.

1. At the root of the site collection, go to Site Actions – Site Settings.
2. Under Site Collection Administration, click on Search Settings
3. Within Search Settings:
   • For the Site Collection Search Center, enter the URL to your search site in the format /search/Pages (replace the word ‘search’ with the site URL for your search site, if different))
   • In Site Collection Search Scopes dropdown mode, select ‘Show search scopes’
     The image below shows the settings for my demo machine:
     
     
4. Click OK and you’re done.

Once the search settings are configured, the search box will show scopes with the default set to search across all sites instead of just the current site:

Don’t forget, you’ll need to configure search settings for each site collection that you want to point to the Search site. Whilst the URL will be relative for the site collection where the search site is located, for all other site collections you will need to enter the full path (for example, on my demo the URL is http://sp2010/search/ for all other site collections)

Enter a search query in the new search box and you will be routed to the Search site to display results:

In the image above, I’ve configured the default results page in the Search site to also include federated search results. When I enter the query ‘SharePoint’ I can see documents and items on the Intranet (along with refiners on the left to filter results), people who have SharePoint in their profile and federated results YouTube.

I’ve also modified my Search site to include 2 additional tabs – Staff Directory and Internet. The Staff Directory is discussed in a follow-up post (see links at the end of this page). The Internet tab shows more federated search results from sites such as Twitter, MSDN, TechNet and Google News. I’ve even got a page for querying Facebook but haven’t managed to federate that one yet. Federated results are great for finding relevant information inside and outside your organisation using a single query.

This post is filed in the SharePoint 2010 Handbook under Install & Configuration and Enterprise Search.

Related blog posts

• Configure Adobe PDF indexing
• SharePoint 2010 vs FAST for Search
• Staff Directory Search in SharePoint 2010

One of the new features with SharePoint 2010 is the option to add-on FAST for advanced indexing and search capabilities. The short presentation below gives an idea of the extras you get with FAST versus just using SharePoint. The focus is on internal indexing/search solutions. FAST offers a lot more over SharePoint for use with public facing web sites but that’s a whole other scenario.

Microsoft has announced a new indexing connector for business intelligence (BI), specifically BI reports created using Excel and/or SQL Reporting Services, including the new tool for analysing massive amounts of data – PowerPivot. The connector creates a dedicated Report tab to query just reports, includes specific refiners filtering search reports, and thumbnails and previews to view reports within the search results page.

The pre-requisite for using the indexing connector (according to the download page for the backend components)  is that you must be running FAST for SharePoint 2010.

If you are only planning on using SharePoint 2010, i.e. its built-in indexing and search capabilities, you can still index and search for Excel-based reports. You could also create a dedicated tab for them in the Search Center, but would require a manual process to tag reports in order to make them discoverable as a separate scope of results versus embedded along with all other documents that match a given search query. You won’t get the thumbnails or built-in preview, but for Excel you can still ‘view in browser’ thanks to Office Web Applications. The feature you cannot create outside of FAST are the custom refiners. FAST also does some more advanced funky indexing stuff around querying the data sources within the reports.

If you want to give the BI connector a go and are running FAST with SharePoint 2010, here’s the links to download:

• Microsoft BI Indexing Connector for FAST – Backend components
• Microsoft BI Indexing Connector for FAST – Frontend components

[Update: 17th May 2011] See end of post for link to a Powershell method for doing this.

The following post is an update from the original ‘SharePoint 2007 and Adobe PDF‘ post written in 2007. These notes are based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 (made publicly available in November 2009). Once the product has officially launched on 12 May 2010, an update will be posted if any changes are made to the process. The process is very similar to SharePoint 2007, with minor changes to folder location (14 instead of 12) and a slightly different administration user interface in the browser.

SharePoint Server 2010, like its predecessors, includes indexing and search capabilities. But what doesn’t come out of the box is the ability to index and search for PDF documents. PDF is a format owned by Adobe, not Microsoft. If you want to be able to find Adobe PDF documents, or have the PDF icon appear when viewing PDF files in a SharePoint document library (see image above), you will need to set it up for yourself. This post describes how to.

1. Download and install Adobe’s 64-bit PDF iFilter*¹ – http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025
   
2. Download the Adobe PDF icon (select Small 17 x 17) – http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html
   1. Give the icon a name or accept the default: ‘pdficon_small.gif’
   2. Save the icon (or copy to) C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
3. Edit the DOCICON.XML file to include the PDF icon
   1. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML
   2. Edit the DOCICON.XML file (I open it in NotePad, you can also use the built-in XML Editor)
   3. Ignore the section <ByProgID> and scroll down to the <ByExtension> section of the file
   4. Within the <ByExtension> section, insert <Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”pdficon_small.gif” /> attribute. The easiest way is to copy an existing one – I usually just copy the line that starts <Mapping Key=”png”… and replace the parameters for Key and Value (see image below)
   5. Save and close the file
      
4. Add PDF to the list of supported file types within SharePoint
   1. In the web browser, open SharePoint Central Administration
   2. Under Application Management, click on Manage service applications
   3. Scroll down the list of service apps and click on Search Service Application
   4. Within the Search Administration dashboard, in the sidebar on the left, click File Types
   5. Click ‘New File Type’ and enter PDF in the File extension box. Click OK
   6. Scroll down the list of file types and check that PDF is now listed and displaying the pdf icon.
   7. Close the web browser
5. Stop and restart Internet Information Server (IIS)*² Note: this will temporarily take SharePoint offline. Open a command line (Start – Run – enter ‘cmd’) and type ‘iisreset’
6. Perform a full crawl of your index. Note: An incremental crawl is not sufficient when you have added a new file type. SharePoint only indexes file names with the extensions listed under File Types and ignores everything else. When you add a new file type, you then have to perform a full crawl to forcibly identify all files with the now relevant file extension.

That’s it. If you now perform a search, PDF files should be displayed in results where they match the search query, along with the PDF icon on display in results. The icon should also be visible in any document libraries that contain PDF files.

* Additional Notes:

1. At time of writing (March 2010), Adobe has published PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit applications, tested on SharePoint 2007 but not yet listed as tested on SharePoint 2010. So far, it is working fine on my builds of SharePoint 2010 (Beta versions)
2. When setting this up, I initially just restarted the search service rather than IIS but found myself locked out of SharePoint. Resetting IIS fixed it. I don’t know for certain if you also need to restart the search service. Will test on the next build and update here.
3. As with SharePoint 2007, there are alternative PDF ifilters. The most well known is Foxit Pro – http://www.foxitsoftware.com/. Rumoured to perform indexing faster than using Adobe’s iFilter. I can’t comment, I haven’t tested it. Given PDFs don’t change (they are usually PDFs specifically to not be edited) they are only indexed when first uploaded or when you perform a full crawl. Most organisations should primarily be performing incremental crawls – updating the index with content that has been added or changed rather than re-indexing everything
4. An absolute cheat for getting round the need to do registry edits is to install Adobe Reader on your server…
5. There’s a Powershell script for doing all of this, see Johan Skoglund’s blog – Use Powershell to configure PDF search in SharePoint 2010. Haven’t tried it yet, will give it a go on the next demo build and it’s been confirmed int he comments
6. Another suggestion from the comments – you don’t have to use the default icons (but do make sure whatever ones you do use are licensed or free to use).  Thanks to Jon for suggesting http://www.iconmaker.com where you can search for icons free to use commercially.  Nothing stopping you from using your own icons for all the different file types…