Getting the best out of a SharePoint deployment requires meticulous planning, as well as a series of milestones and guidelines against which the success of the SharePoint project can be measured. Sadalit Van Buren’s SharePoint Maturity Model version 2.0 is a good place to look for some answers.
In this model Van Buren defines Search Competancy as follows:
“(Search is the)… ability to query indexed content and return results that are ranked in order of relevance to the search query. Areas of focus include scopes, display of results, optimization, integration and connectors, and performance.”
The model then splits this into five levels of increasing maturity. For the purposes of this article, let us focus on the requirements for achieving what the model defines as the second highest level of SharePoint Maturity:
“Content types and custom properties are leveraged in Advanced Search. Results customized to specific needs, may be actionable.”
In the following section, we will break this competency level down into three key areas and examine how to achieve them using the functionality available in standard SharePoint 2010.
At this level, custom (and standard) content types and properties are leveraged in a way that allows SharePoint users to navigate to and refine their searches. This translated into massive improvements to how rapidly they can move through a large set of results, and find what they are looking for. These can be deployed through the standard search page, by customising the refiner panel in Standard SharePoint. For a walkthrough of how to do this in standard SharePoint, a video guide can be found here .Third-party solutions such as Ontolica are capable of the same but the core value proposition remains the same: placing this valuable information in front of the user without forcing them to move into the realm of “advanced search”.
Customising results to the needs of specific groups is another important aspect. There are two major approaches to achieve this. Firstly by adapting the look and feel of the page to better match the needs of the users who will be spending large chunks of their time on those pages. The second is to build pages that are sensitive to the needs to different audiences and change and adapt based on who is currently viewing the page.
Changing look and feel in standard SharePoint 2010 is best down by modifying the XSL to provide users with a search interface that matches their needs. A good example of how to modify the standard People Search result page in SP 2010 can be found here.
The other more complex (and arguably more useful approach) is to leverage SharePoint audiences to ensure that the various different user-groups who access the page see refiners and filters that match their needs. The FAST Search Center for SharePoint 2010 allows you to do this in webpart configuration, but you can achieve something similar by extending the standard SharePoint 2010 webparts. An example of how to do so can be found here.
Audience scoping in this way allows for a much more streamlined search experience where the specific knowledge-discovery needs of a specific audience are catered to, without having overly complex search pages, or having to deploy a great many search centers with wildly differing configurations.
Connecting actions to results is an important addition to an effective search solution, as it allows users to move immediately from finding something to taking a logical action with it. The kinds of actions that could be included in this context vary as widely as organisations do, but several candidates are the ability to set up alerts on results, so that users can “follow” specific documents as they change, as well as the ability to open the location where that document is contained. Achieving this in standard SharePoint 2010 requires that the result XSLT is edited to integrate the needed functionality (here is an an explanation on the MSDN for how to do exactly that).
As we have seen, there are three key areas where specific improvements will improve the maturity of a SharePoint implementation. These can be achieved within the limitations of the standard SharePoint functionality through a combination of configuring webparts, editing XML and XSLTs and extending web-parts.
So while the technical roadmap to achieving these goals is clear enough, the real challenge is to discover which actual key areas you will actually need to focus on in order to get the most benefit for the effort and resources you put in to the project.
In our next article in the series we will be covering the specific operational areas that organisations should focus on to put these techniques into practice. Which metadata should you focus on? How should you deploy Audiences and other context-awareness? What result-page modifications should you target?
