Comperio gjør det enkelt å finne riktig dokument selv om du ikke er godt kjent med Public 360. Ved å gjøre innholdet i Public 360 tilgjengelig i en søkeindeks kan man få søketreff på tvers av kilder. SharePoint 2013 tilbyr en slik søkeindeks. Denne vil kunne gi presise treff fordi spørringen henter treff basert på data både fra dokumentet og metadata til dokumentet. På den måten kan man utforske hva som finnes av innhold og historikk knyttet til et tema eller en sak.
For å få tilgang på dokumentene i Public 360 må man koble kildesystemet sammen med søkemotoren med en konnektor.

Comperio laget i første omgang en konnektor for å kunne indeksere innhold fra Public 360 basert på Fast Search Server for SharePoint 2010. Siden har vi laget en ny versjon for Microsoft SharePoint 2013.
Når vi laget konnektoren så bruke vi Microsofts rammeverk for å lage tilpassede BCS (Business Connectivity Services) konnektorer til SharePoint 2013.

Så, hvordan fungerer konnektoren for indeksering av innhold?

FileFinder web servicen er endepunktet i Public 360, og det brukes til å hente Public 360 dokumenter. Fra denne web servicen får vi all informasjon om hvert dokument, som egenskaper, metadata og rettighetsinformasjon. Videre blir hvert dokument og dets egenskaper plukket opp av SharePoint 2013, hvor dokumentet crawles, prosesseres og lagres i søkeindeksen.

Og hvordan fungerer konnektoren ved søk utført av en bruker?

Når en bruker gjør et søk i søkeboksen, så legges det til hva slags tilganger brukeren har på spørringen. Disse tilgangene hentes fra Public 360 ved hjelp av en SharePoint security trimmer som settes opp for Public 360. Dette fører til at kun dokumenter som brukeren har rettigheter til blir returnert som en del av søkeresultatet.

Ta kontakt for å høre mer om Public 360 og SharePoint.

They say that everyone dies twice. First when you actually die, and then finally when your name is mentioned for the last time.

Back before online search revolutionized ranking algorithms, people sorted their search results by date, alphabetically or by any other static metadata. The concept of a relevance-based result set, where items are evaluated against your search terms at query-time, was rare. Now, we’ve gotten used to sorting things by relevance. A concept as easy to understand as it is hard to implement.

Rank models, i.e. the math behind calculating a metric for relevance, sparked an interest in me the moment I first heard of them. And ever since, every time someone wanted to sort a result set by the “old-fashioned way”, e.g. by date, I always cringed. But I swallowed my search geek-pride and moved on.

How search engines calculate relevance and rank is way out of the scope of this post, but because of my long-running loathing of non-relevance based sorting, I want to highlight a small but glorious thing in the new SharePoint 2013 search GUI, that may have bypassed even early adopters in the findability scene. My heart almost skipped a beat when I first noticed it at one of last week’s sessions at the Microsoft SharePoint conference in Las Vegas.

Alternate sorting in SharePoint 2010

In the search center in SharePoint 2010, both the one for Enterprise Search and FAST, the default was to sort by relevance. Great, but there was a drop down that allowed you to change over to sorting by date or, in the case of FAST, any other managed property which had been enabled for sorting. Even so, I’ve experienced time after time that the drop down was not used very often. Why? Probably because dates and many other metadata is several times better navigated using drill down facets, and this is something that comes natural to many end-users over time.

Of course there are exceptions and occasions when an alternate static sorting over a single metadata property makes sense, but for a good portion of search centers, I’m very convinced that the drop down adds little more than just some clutter to the GUI.

In the SharePoint 2013 search center, you can still sort by any property, of course. But the drop down in the default GUI is not there anymore. You’re encouraged to sort by relevance, and that’s it. There are two things to this:

• Firstly, the functionality to sort on a single static metadata property is still there behind the scenes, and very easy to expose to the user if it’s necessary in your solution.
• Secondly, the engine driving the relevance calculation is much improved and it’s now easier than ever (in the SharePoint world) to tune your relevance model; allowing it to span over several metadata and dynamically evaluate search words against the index corpus.

But not having that “sort by” drop down in the default GUI is a huge step.

The search box in SharePoint 2013, no static sorting to be seen

This is not only about getting a cleaner GUI, but more importantly also about getting to a point where users have started to assume that sorting by relevance just works. Silently, but surely, search engines are maturing, and we’ve – equally silently – started to assume they work better and better.

My inner search geek has started to wonder that perhaps static sorting first died when the rules of online search changed with PageRank, and people got accustomed to sorting by relevance. And with having that alternate sorting drop down removed from the default SharePoint 2013 GUI, perhaps this is the time when static sorting fades into obscurity – and dies the second time.

Dear static sorting, R.I.P.