Tag Archives: Microsoft Office

The search experience in SharePoint 2013: customised or targeted?

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This post is the fourth in a series of four articles providing several best practices on how to implement and customise the search experience in SharePoint 2013. The previous posts listed the differences between the cloud and on-premise SharePoint, provided considerations when upgrading to SharePoint 2013, and dealt with the practicalities of configuring search in SharePoint Online. This fourth post handles the more advanced topic of ranking results and the future of search in SharePoint.

Managing ranking

We’ve previously mentioned the query rules as a way to change the ranking of the search results based on your requirements. These allow the promotion of certain search results or search result blocks on top of the ranked searched results, and more advanced query rules allow even changing the ranking of the search results based on what the query terms are.

By using query rules, customising the search results web part, and a few content by search web parts, you can change the behaviour of the search depending on what user is accessing it. That is, you would also need good metadata to make this work, but having a complete user profile (including the job title, department, and interests) is a good start. Based on such user information, you can define how the search experience for that user will be.

Changing ranking using query rules, however, requires a query rule condition, which describes the prerequisites that the query must fulfil in order for the query rule to fire. For changing the results for all queries, you can use the next approach.

If the default ranking does not satisfy your search requirements and you want to change the order of the ranked search results, SharePoint provides the possibility of changing the ranking models. It is a feature available in SharePoint Online as well, as described in the TechNet documentation: “SharePoint Online customers need to download and install the free Rank Model Tuning App in order to create and customize ranking models.”

A ranking model contains the features and corresponding weights that are used in calculating a score for each search result. Changing the ranking models might require a deeper and theoretical knowledge of how search works, and those that take the challenge of changing the ranking model are often dedicated search administrators or external specialised consultants.

The Ranking Model Tuning app is free on the App Store - http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/store/ranking-model-tuning-WA104192565.aspx

The Ranking Model Tuning app is free on the App Store

The Rank Model Tuning App provides a user interface for creating custom ranking models, and can be used for both SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server, though in SharePoint 2013 Server there is also the possibility to use PowerShell to customise ranking models. New models are based on existing ranking models for which you can add or remove new rank features and tune the weight of a rank feature. It also allows for evaluating the new ranking model using a test set of queries. The set of test queries can be constructed from real queries made by users that can be gathered from previous search logs, for example. How to use the tuning app is explained step-by-step in the documentation on the Office site.

Changing the weight of certain file types (say for example for PowerPoint documents compared to Excel documents) might be enough for many search implementations, but depending on the content, the features that influence the ranking of the search results can become more elaborate. For example, a property defining whether documents are either official or work-in-progress might become an important factor in determining the ranking of search results. SharePoint provides the liberty to create new properties, so it makes sense that these can be used in search to improve the relevance.

It should be pointed out, however, that changing the ranking model influences all searches that are run using that ranking model. Though the main idea of changing the ranking model is to improve the ranking, it can become much too easy to make changes that can have an undesirable effect on the ranking. This is why a proper evaluation of ranking changes needs to be part of your plan for improving search relevance.

The office graph and the future of social

The social features introduced in SharePoint 2013 provide a rich social experience, which is interconnected with the search experience. Many social features are driven by search (such as the recommendations for which people or documents to follow), and social factors also affect the search (such as finding the right expertise from conversations in your network).

In the month of June 2012 Microsoft acquired the social enterprise platform Yammer. The SharePoint Server 2013 Preview has been made available for download since July 2012, and it reached Release to Manufacturing (RTM) in October the same year. The new SharePoint 2013 implements new social features (see for example the newsfeed, the new mysites and the tagging system), many of which are overlapping with those available in Yammer! This brings us to the question on everyone’s mind since the acquisition of Yammer: what is the future of social in SharePoint? Should you use SharePoint’s social features or use Yammer?

In March 2014, Microsoft announced that they will not include new features in the SharePoint Social but rather invest in the integration between Yammer and Office 365. The guidance is thus to go for Yammer.

“Go Yammer! While we’re committed to another on-premises release of SharePoint Server—and we’ll maintain its social capabilities—we don’t plan on adding new social features. Our investments in social will be focused on Yammer and Office 365” – Jared Spataro, Microsoft Office blog

Also at the SharePoint conference this March 2014, Microsoft introduced the Office Graph, and with it Oslo as the first app demo using it. During the keynote, Microsoft mentions that the Office Graph is “perhaps the biggest idea we’ve had since the beginning of SharePoint”. The office graph maps relationships between people, the documents they authored, the likes and posts they made, and the emails they received; it’s actually an extension of Yammer’s enterprise graph. The Oslo application is leveraging the graph, in a way that looks familiar from Facebook’s graph search.

The Office Graph, connecting people and information - Microsoft Office Blog http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/03/work-like-a-network-enterprise-social-and-the-future-of-work/

The Office Graph, connecting people and information – Microsoft Office Blog

The new Office Graph provides exciting opportunities, and has consequences for how the search will be used. Findwise started exploring the area of enterprise graph search before Microsoft announced the Office Graph – see our post about the Enterprise Graph Search from January 2013.

Reluctant to go for the cloud?

Microsoft has hinted during the SharePoint conference keynote in March that they will be adding new functionalities to the cloud version first. Although they are still committed to another version of SharePoint server, new updates might come at a slower pace for the on-premise version. However, Microsoft also announced that with the SharePoint SP1 there is a new functionality in the administrative interface: a hybrid setting which allows you to specify whether you want the social component in the cloud/Yammer, or your documents on OneDrive, so that you don’t need to move everything to the cloud overnight.

Let us know how far you’ve come with your SharePoint implementation! Contact us if you need help in deciding which version of SharePoint to choose, need help with tuning search relevance, have questions about improving search, or would like to work with us to reach the next level of findability.

Five things to consider when migrating to SharePoint 2013

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Search in SharePoint 2013 – Part 2: Five things to consider when migrating to SharePoint

Planning to migrate to SharePoint 2013? In this post, we provide a few ideas on what to take into consideration when you are planning a migration to SharePoint 2013. Note that this is by no means a comprehensive list of what to consider when migrating, but can surely help you get started! If you want more information than is found in this blogpost, please visit our website or contact us.

This post is the second in a series of four articles providing several best practices on how to implement and customise search in SharePoint. In the first post, we provided a brief overview of the differences in terms of search between the on-premise and cloud versions. You’ll find the first article here.

#1 Understand the benefits of migrating to SharePoint 2013

Here are some of the benefits of migrating content to SharePoint:

Metadata: The variety of metadata options in SharePoint are much bigger than the system fields that are applied to files in the File Share, and you can adapt the variety of metadata to fit your organisation.

Control: The workflows that are available in SharePoint can ensure that content follows a specific life-cycle. You can also make sure that metadata is applied in a controlled manner (having mandatory metadata fields for example). It is also easier to ensure correct spelling of titles and keywords if you use a controlled vocabulary in SharePoint’s Term Store.

Collaboration: When the content is migrated to SharePoint every user can benefit from the collaborative functions that are built-in to SharePoint — such as commenting, hashtags, wiki libraries, or discussion boards. On a File Share the content is only stored in files, which can make it difficult for a new employee in the area to guess the logical connection between the files in a folder.

Search: The search functionalities in Explorer are very limited and cannot deliver the same user experience as search in SharePoint can. Just make sure that the users actually use and see these benefits from search in SharePoint, and they will never go back to the primitive search of Explorer!

#2 Start with your content

You probably agree and understand the importance of the quality of content when it comes to findability. If you don’t take care of your content you cannot expect to have good search results. Having a lot of old content and duplicates will make it difficult for users to find the relevant results. Taking care of the content quality however creates a solid foundation for the search (see also this previous post or this one).

While you agree with this now, as you approach the deadline of migrating your content to the new solution and are pressed by time, it is likely that you will become increasingly willing to make compromises. Having an information architecture and migration strategy is very important in these situations in order to make sure that you don’t make too many exceptions on the way and end up with a solution that is far from your initial expectations. Planning in good time what content should be migrated and what should be archived is crucial. Think of this migration task as an opportunity for cleaning up.

A migration project can also be a good opportunity to look at the organisation’s complete information management strategy and a chance to look into where the content is stored in the organisation. As many of you might have experienced, the users can sometimes be very keen on keeping their stuff on File Shares instead of sharing and publishing it on SharePoint. One decision could be to only keep personal content on File Shares and get rid of the department or project folders. Either way, it is important to consider this in the plan if you decide to include content from other sources than the existing SharePoint platform. Moreover, always make sure that the decision is implemented with all employees.

You should always include the following questions in your content analysis and take the necessary measures to achieve better content quality:

  • Is the content still relevant, should it be archived, or removed?
  • Do you have a workflow for archiving old documents and periodically updating information?
  • Do you need to assign an owner to the content. Please note that editor and owner are two different roles that should not be mixed up when it comes to ensuring the quality of content.
  • Is the content well organized? Have you been using (customized) content types or are you planning to?
  • Is the content tagged with relevant keywords?
  • Are you using templates for documents? And if yes, are those well organized (headings, metadata etc)
  • Do you have control over which permissions are applied on documents?
  • Is the content targeted appropriately? Should it reside in a document library or as a blog post?
  • Are the taxonomies up to date?

#3 Understand the technology

The technical solution is often the starting point of a migration project. Understanding the technology, which often means understanding the possibilities within the new version, is crucial to the success of the project, but it should of course not be the only focus point.

Here are some aspects to include when performing an analysis of the technology that you are planning to use:

  • Determine the hardware and software requirements for your installation
  • Identify the customisations made on your existing search solution and create a plan on whether and how to move them to the new solution. Branding for example might not look so good after upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to 2013, since there was a big change in how the web parts are displayed and customised (more specifically, the XSLT has been replaced by HTML and JavaScript), so the design and branding should be thoroughly tested.
  • Also, the way the search scopes are defined has also changed between versions, so if you are using these be aware to either replicate them correctly or make the transition as easy for the users as possible.
  • Check the Microsoft Office list of discontinued or modified features
  • Map your requirements to the technical capabilities
  • Create a strategy for moving existing content. Will you be using a migration tool or will representatives from the users be responsible for moving the content? How many steps will you plan for and what content will you start and end with?
  • When it comes to mapping your requirements to the technical features, it becomes a bit tricky with SharePoint 2013 on finding the features that apply specifically to your SharePoint licensing. There are more than 10 SharePoint licensing plans to choose from. In the previous post we summarised the search features that differ amongst the main licenses, and discussed in particular those that might be missing from SharePoint Online.

Don’t forget to document any customisations that you plan to do. If you don’t plan to do the customisations yourself, ask the provider for appropriate documentation. Such documentation will make it easier for you and providers such as Findwise in future implementations.

#4 Where is home?

One decision that has to be made at some point is how will the users access the new solution, what will they see? While this can be described not only as a technical requirement, it is strongly correlated to the expected user behaviour and depends on the usage scenarios that the new solution is supposed to answer. Remember that SharePoint is also a collaboration tool; through the choice of the start page, you are also communicating to the users the way to work together.

Some alternatives for the starting page in an intranet solution based on SharePoint 2013 would be the following:

  • The Newsfeed. This is where the latest news relevant to the current user will be shown. It is the place where the users can view posts and updates from followed people, sites and documents, from the entire solution. SharePoint 2013 comes with many new social features and the newsfeed is a good start page choice if you plan to use these features. A link to the user’s Newsfeed is by default available in the global navigation bar, which makes the start page easy accessible.

  • The search page. Use the search center as the start page to keep users only one click away to the information they are looking for. A good start page choice if you’ve done your job in making the content findable. In addition to the search box, you can think of adding search-driven web parts delivering content that is relevant to the logged-in user. Show latest sales presentations if the logged-in user is working in the Sales department, and show financial spreadsheets if the user is working in the Finance department.

  • A specific site. Set as the starting point the root site of your intranet for example. Plan to always keep the information on that site’s homepage updated. You can give the users the latest news through a newsfeed web part, but also include a few useful links to other resources (such as external systems). Search-driven web parts can contribute to having the page updated with the latest content and potentially target the content depending on the logged-in user.

#5 Create a communication plan and get your users aboard!

After all the hard work on understanding the content, the technology and requirements, there is one more step that should not be neglected when planning the migration: user adoption. A big impact factor to user adoption is the way that the information will be transmitted to the team and the users.

Here are a few things to take into consideration when creating a communication plan for the migration:

  • Define who is part of the migration team, what roles they will play, and when they will become active in the migration rollout (for example, site owners need to create the structure of their site and should be notified when the sites are ready to use)
  • Provide training for site owners
  • Plan for a test group (gather feedback early in the process and prioritize ideas)
  • Potentially find a new name for the solution, with a powerful message
  • Communicate clearly the new release, and make it fun (release cake, introductory videos)
  • Communicate how users should make use of the new social features (including tagging and Newsfeed)
  • Communicate how users and site owners can ask for support
  • Share the governance plan with all users (everyone is expected to be a contributor)

After all your careful planning of the migration, it’s time for implementation! In the next post, we will give you a few tips on how to customise search in SharePoint Online.

Do you want more information, have further questions or need help? Stop by our website or contact us!

Search in SharePoint 2010

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This week there has been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Since SharePoint 2007 has been the quickest growing server product in the history of Microsoft, the expectations on SharePoint 2010 are tremendous. And also great expectations for search in Sharepoint 2010

Apart from a great deal of possibilities when it comes to content creation, collaboration and networking, easy business intelligence etc. the launch also holds another promise: that of even better capabilities for search in Sharepoint 2010 (with the integration of FAST).

Since Microsoft acquired FAST in 2008, there have been a lot of speculations about what the future SharePoint versions may include in terms of search. And since Microsoft announced that they will drop their Linux and UNIX versions in order to focus on higher innovation speed, Microsoft customer are expecting something more than the regular. In an early phase it was also clear that Microsoft is eager to take market shares from the growing market in internet business.

So, simply put, the solutions that Microsoft now provide in terms of search is solutions for Business productivity (where the truly sophisticated search capabilities are available if you have Enterprise CAL-licenses, i.e. you pay for the number of users you have) and Internet Sites (where the pricing is based on the number of servers). These can then be used in a number of scenarios, all dependent on the business and end-user needs.
Microsoft has chosen to describe it like this:

  • “Foundation” is, briefly put, basic SharePoint search (Site Search).
  • “Standard” adds collaboration features to the “Foundation” edition and allows it to tie into repositories outside of SharePoint.
  • “Enterprise ” adds a number of capabilities, previously only available through FAST licenses, such as contextual search (recognition of departments, names, geographies etc), ability to tag meta data to unstructured content, more scalability etc.

I’m not going to go into detail, rather just conclude that the more Microsoft technology the company or organization already use, the more benefits it will gain from investing in SharePoint search capabilities.

And just to be clear:  non-SharePoint versions (stand-alone) of FAST are still available, even though they are not promoted as intense as the SharePoint ones.

Apart from Microsoft’s overview above, Microsoft Technet provides a more deepdrawing description of the features and functionality from both an end-user and administrator point of view.

We look forward describing the features and functions in more detail in our upcoming customer cases. If you have any questions to our SharePoint or FAST search specialist, don’t hesitate to post them here on the blog. We’ll make sure you get all the answers.

SPC09 Day 3 – Say Bye Bye to Python and Say Hello to .NET

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Today the focus of my sessions have been content indexing and content processing in both SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint. But first I started of with a session covering the new metadata focus in SharePoint 2010.

Metadata is information about the content and is of key importance for making a good search experience. In SharePoint 2010 the focus and this has increased drastically. New features is Term store which a service that can contain taxonomies, folksonomies, social tagging and keywords. Through this feature they make meta data to accessible through out the whole system on all levels of item creation. Having a structured way of working with meta data will drastically increase the quality of the search result.

Now back to the fun technical geek side of these sessions. In SharePoint 2010 Microsoft have introduced a lot of improvements to the indexing side search. First of they have aliened the two versions of search into using the same connectors. Both FAST Search and SharePoint use a common set of connectors and a common way of building new ones. With this you can use systems as BDC to create connectors even from the application SharePoint Designer which is an extremely simple to use application. BDC, which was found in 2007 as well, has though been enveloped  with new features like full security support and support for creating connectors in .NET. This making it easy and streamlined to create new connectors for indexing all kinds of systems.

One of the strengths in FAST Search for SharePoint has always been the document processing. This is a feature that SharePoint search is lacking and is probably an important thing why Microsoft bought FAST. In FAST Search for SharePoint they have taken this in to SharePoint to be easily managed and streamlined. Processing as for example entity extraction, lemmatisation and advanced language detection is now done automatically and can be configured through adding for example inclusion/exclusion words for entity extraction straight in UI (can be manged through PowerShell as well).

But what about all those custom pipeline stages that was used to be a large part of en ESP configuration before? This is a function that is not done as before. No python coded pipeline stage can be added however what you now can do is that you add a “extensibility pipeline stage”. This stage can then be configured to call an .NET application with a set of input properties and then a list of returning properties. In this way you can basically do what ever you want with the text content and then do it with the full power of .NET. Some nice side effects of this for us developers is that creating pipeline stages in the past has always been a hussel. Both since it has bin done in python and that testing it had either demanded an hard to setup instance of Eclipse and ESP or to try it out live in ESP. In the new system since it actually are small console applications that is running this can easily be tested stand alone with good debugging through Visual Studio.

Tomorrow is actually the last day of this conference. That they will for me focused on partner events that covers more the sales perspective on all the new things in SharePoint and FAST.

But now its time for some relaxing and then its time for Enterprise Search evening by the pool event.

SPC09 Day 2 – FAST Search for SharePoint Made “SharePoint Easy”

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After a great evening with Microsoft Sweden touring around Las Vegas, having dinner at the Stratosphere and a good night sleep today’s session started of. Today’s focus has been deep dives in to the different areas. For me it has been deep dives in Sharepoint Search and FAST Search for Sharepoint.

First of was sessions about Sharepoint Search functions and depolyment. This was more or less going through the different functionality that I wrote about yesterday. A thew new things did thou come up, things like crawler policy’s, avoiding that your index is empties just because the web site that you crawl is on service during crawl time, connector framework that now supports developing connectors in .NET and configuration of the whole search service through PowerShell.

But now to the more exiting thing, FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. This something that it has been really quite about. It has gone 18 months since the acquisition of FAST and during that time not much information about the upcoming version has leaked out. But from yesterday everything is made public. There is even gona come a public beta of FAST Search for SharePoint in November for everyone to test it out.

The most exiting thing about this new version of FAST is that it’s almost completely integrated within SharePoint. With almost is that the installation of FAST is still done on separated servers and has it’s own installation program, though simplified. But after completion of installation and node setup (done in a deployment.xml config file) everything is done in the SharePoint central administration interface or through PowerShell. There is not even the possibility any longer to make configurations through config files in the installation of FAST. Some more advanced configurations and extensions can be made through .NET libraries and PowerShell, for example document processing steps. I will know more about this after tomorrows sessions.

Connectors in new FAST are no longer used as before. They are integrated into SharePoint instead. It’s even the same connector for SharePoint search and FAST Search for SharePoint. Setup is done in the same way to ease the transition from SharePoint Search to FAST.

People search in SharePoint 2010 will, even though you use FAST Search For SharePoint, be handled by SharePoint search. And as Jeff Fried sad “why try to set this up in FAST Search for SharePoint when the people search in SharePoint already is amazing”.

Now it’s time for one of the biggest beach parties that Las Vegas ever has hosted here at Mandal Bay Hotel. Over 7000 crazy SharePoint geeks are going to rock there pants of to the sound of the 80’s.

SPC09 Day 1 (Las Vegas) – A New Choice in Enterprise Search

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Today the initial key notes and session on the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 has begun here in Las Vegas. The conference is fully booked with over 7400 registered attendees and is hosted at the Mandala Bay Hotel. There are over 240 different sessions covering everything within the new version of SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 is schedules to be released during the first half of next year however a public beta will be available now in November. I will try to cover the Enterprise Search perspective of this conference and summarize new features and functions in this blog.

The conference was started up through two key notes held by among others Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) and Jeff Teper (VP). They introduces new features in SharePoint 2010 on all levels from both really deep technical to end user perspective. Showing a lot of new cool features, where one feature was especially sticking out and that was Search. They all pointed out over and over again the importance of search as the core functionality of everything.

Enterprise Search

My first sessions during this conference was on Enterprise Search and the overview of this. A lot of new concepts and functions are introduced. I will try here to summarize some of the new functions in a list.

Sharepoint 2010 and Search Server 2010 (Not all is supported in Search Server)

  • Wildcard search support
  • Phonetic Spelling on person name searches
  • Partitioned index/query (for scaling purposes)
  • Support for up to 100 Million documents
  • Zero query search – Used for using search as navigation
  • Query Suggestion
  • Refinement from meta data (Shallow navigators)
  • Related Searches
  • Federate Searches with Desktop
  • Rating/Language used for relevance tuning
  • View related content in people search
  • Multiple crawler

FAST Search for SharePoint

  • All above from SharePoint searches (some times they are even supposed to work together like people search is still done through SharePoint search)
  • Visual preview and thumbnails
  • Same APIs as SharePoint
  • All administration is done through SharePoint administration
  • Similar results
  • Deep refinement navigators
  • Entity extraction
  • Visual Best bet
  • Contextual Search
  • No index profile any more. Everything is set through SharePoint administration even Navigators and meta data mappings.
  • Can use BCS for connecting to other systems
  • User context searching. Promote/denote documents and changing relevance after users context
  • New search interface

That was a summary of the new features that is to come. I will come back every day to post updates and more detailed information about these features. To finish of I want to quote Microsoft: This is a quantum leap in Enterprise Search.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas

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I will attend to the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas USA between the 19-22 October. This will be the perfect opportunity to learn more about upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 and from Findwise perspective, the new FAST Search For SharePoint.

Since Findwise have several years of experience of integrating FAST ESP and SharePoint this will be a great opportunity to meet us face-to-face and talk about how FAST ESP could help you in your future implementations.

Looking forward to meet you!

Roadmap FAST Search for Sharepoint and Internet Business

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In view of the fact that it has been a year since Microsoft acquired FAST search, there has been a lot of hush-hush about the Enterprise search roadmap. However, at the yearly FAST forward conference, Microsoft’s press release Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map reached the public.

There are no big surprises, but a lot of interesting details to come. Briefly speaking Microsoft is focusing on two areas: search to enhance business productivity and search to earn money online.

Sharepoint and FAST ESP

Here at Findwise we have been working with customers integrating SharePoint and FAST ESP for some time, and ESP certainly adds a lot of value by extending SharePoint’s main strengths: content management and collaboration. Office 14, which will probably see the light early next year, will hopefully add more flexibility to their infrastructure solutions out of the box.

More information about the licensing models are yet to come and even though FAST search will continue to develop ESP as a standalone (to run on both Unix and Linux), the roadmap ties existing and potential Microsoft customers closer by presenting search as an integrated part of their business productivity offering.

As for FAST Search Internet Business Microsoft’s target group are companies looking for earning money online. During FAST forward 2007 there was a lot of talk about the future search driven portals and during the 2008 event about the ability to understanding user intent.

Today online consumers have higher expectations when it comes to search and the ability to show related information (such as Amazon’s “people that bought this product also bought”..) as well as showing contextual advertising (related to search terms, geographical location etc) and recommendations will create loyal customers. FAST search has quite a few customers using search for strategic online business so one should keep an eye on the release of the new beta version during 2009.

If you read Swedish, Helge Legernes, one of the founders of Findwise is giving his comment in Computer Sweden.