[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

The Microsoft team blog made an announcement on 12th December regarding the Knowledge Network (KN) – a social networking tool that was due to ship as an add-on to SharePoint Server 2007. I wanted to call this out because I know people are still talking about KN as though it is a product that is going to ship this year, and figured perhaps they weren’t aware of the change in direction

The add-on is no longer going to be part of this version of SharePoint. Instead, a ‘technology preview’ will be available, intended for evaluation purposes only. The technology preview will not be a supported product

What does that mean? The likely reason is the technology simply isn’t going to be ready to ship any time soon, at least not in a stable format. Instead it will remain in development for release as part of the Office 14 release cycle (i.e. the next version)

Is it worth playing with the KN in its current form? The easy answer is ‘it depends’. (The short answer would be no). I’d recommend experimenting with the technology preview if you have the time and resource. It introduces an age-old concept in a new format – six degrees of separation. By exploring email trails between people, the KN can create a web of contacts, both internal and external to the organisation. When you do a search for information, you receive results based on the degrees of separation between you and the person with the knowledge. If the person is one degree away (i.e. you know each other), them you can contact them direct. If the person is 2+ degrees away, you can request an introduction via someone you know directly

I would be amazed/disappointed if Microsoft didn’t continue to develop this technology and further enhance it. How close the end result will compare with the current technology preview is anybody’s guess. I remember the early beta version of Windows Vista that was distributed at the Microsoft Profesional Developer’s (PDC) conference in 2003…

Related links:

• Announcement on the KN team blog regarding the KN release plan (12th December 2006)
• About the Knowledge Network (my previous blog post, June 2006)

Technorati tags: Knowledge Network; SharePoint 2007; MOSS 2007

Last week, at the SharePoint conference (and also the CEO Summit), Microsoft announced a new technology – Knowledge Network (KM) for Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS). What follows is an overview based on the session I attended (the presenter clearly stated we could blog at will ) with some personal comments added in. I have not installed the product and do not have access to it. Knowledge Network is currently a closed beta, so you won’t find it on the list when MOSS beta 2 is released. I played with a very early prototype of the client-side technology 2 or 3 years ago, when it was still in MS Research and I was still at Microsoft, but the product has changed significantly since then.

KN is focused on enterprise social networking, automatic discovery and sharing of undocumented knowledge and relationships. (I copied that off the opening slide…) So what does that really mean?

The solution involves client and server elements. The KN client is installed locally and analyses email content to create an individual profile of keywords and contacts (colleagues and external contacts). The user can review the profile – for example, set privacy levels on information (e.g. choosing only to share external contacts with your direct team) and remove information you don’t want published. The user then chooses to publish the profile and it is uploaded to the KN server, i.e. this is an opt-in model (until some evil being in I.T. enforces publishing through group policy…). As multiple user profiles are published to the KN server, they are aggregated to create expertise information and form a social network (i.e. the more profiles published, the richer the network). The MOSS search service indexes the information created by the aggregated profiles and it is returned within search results.

When a person (seeker) queries for people – who knows what/whom – the results are ranked by social distance to the seeker, expertise and relationship relevance (e.g.results grouped as ‘my colleagues’, ‘know my colleagues’… <– this is similar to the LinkedIn method of being able to link to people who are linked to people you know.) The KN server also includes a feature called ‘anonymous brokering’ – it is based on the privacy field in the KN profile manager and allows people to share information with the system, but only on demand.

If you are seeking expertise, you can submit a query and will be returned a set of people results without the contact information. If you want to contact one of the experts, you click on the link to send a message via the KN broker. The KN broker forwards the email to the expert (under its own email account) and the expert can choose to accept or decline the request. If the request is accepted, the seeker and expert are hooked up.

This feature demo’d well, but I suspect the technical implementation will be far easier than the cultural implementation. In smaller organisations, it will not be difficult to guess who the expert is even without the contact information. The culture of the organisation must make it acceptable to say no to requests without fear of penalty, otherwise everyone will just say yes (or not publish their expertise) and the service becomes irrelevant. There are some configuration options, such as how many times an individual can contacted with requests during a time period – useful, but again needs to be within a culture that allows experts to say no.

The individual profile is created client-side with no server involvement. In effect, the profile is an index of the content within Outlook (keywords and contact information are extracted from emails within Outlook folders and also contact lists in IM (I’m assuming that means Live Communication Server)). After the initial profile is published, incremental updates are sent at an interval defined in the configuration. The default is 14 days. <- this is a concern. Whilst people will likely be thorough in reviewing their profile prior to the initial publish, I suspect the novelty will soon wear off and they will start to accept the defaults for incremental updates. This could lead to sensitive information being published onto SharePoint without the source user realising.

KN is designed for Microsoft environments – it requires MOSS to install (Windows Server 2003, .NET framework 2.0, SQL 2000 or 2005) and requires Active Directory and Exchange for name resolution (contact information and DLs). The client will need to be running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or later and Office 2003 or later. The product group are already recommending that Outlook be configured with cached Exchange mode to minimise processing impact against the Exchange Server whilst inboxes are analysed to create/update the profile.

From a deployment perspective, KN is another shared service being added to MOSS (joining Excel services, Forms server, and Indexing/Search). As soon as a user elects to publish their profile to the server, the KN profile management web service takes over to calculate the expertise information and social network.

The session closed with a healthy Q&A that raised some interesting issues. A couple of specifics: Only the body of emails are indexed, not the attachments. The question was asked as to whether or not the ‘Deleted items’ folder was indexed, and I didn’t hear a clear answer. It poses an interesting challenge – how do you determine which emails contain relevant information. I delete irrelevant stuff immediately, but I delete everything eventually unless it has particular sentimental value. And that leads on to the age old challenge of auto-generating social networks based on emails we send/receive and searches we perform – how to determine when expertise is being shared versus discovery and learning versus spam (corporate as well as external) versus answering on behalf of etc. The product group are more than aware of this challenge. When asked why not mine stuff other than email (documents, IM conversations etc.) they responded that email is the richest in terms of tacit information as well as being the most pervasive source. They acknowledged that the challenge in calculating strength (relevance) was hard enough and adding data sources adds complexity, and decided the return was not worth the investment in this version (i.e. look out for extensions in the future…)

Closing notes:

Historically, organisations have been reluctant to deploy social software tools – IM being the most recent example of irrational fears over-riding business benefits (see related post: when will IM come of age). Knowledge Network will face similar challenges, as concerns over productivity drains, privacy and culture-fit bubble to the surface. That all said, I’m glad Microsoft has finally entered this space. The power of social networks have become well documented over the past 5 years, and failure to understand them is one of the primary reasons why most KM systems fail. This will be a v1 technology and will have all sorts of flaws and challenges. But it’s a great start and this sort of capability is long overdue.

For more information:

• Microsoft product team blog for Knowledge Networks
• Craig Randall has posted his thoughts (he attended both sessions at the SharePoint conference, I just went to the session covering the details)

If you’re interested in learning more about the potential value of social networks, there are plenty of books on the subject but here are three I would recommend for starters:

• The hidden power of social networks by Rob Cross and Andrew Parker (2004)
• Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (2003)
• Six Degrees by Duncan Watts (2003)

Update: An overview has been posted up on Microsoft’s web site: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver/kn.mspx complete with screenshots.