Collaboration with site owners (Enterprise search at Microsoft, white paper)

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Applies to: Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

This is the ninth of 12 articles that compose How Microsoft IT deployed FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (white paper).

Upon request, MSIT collaborates with owners of sites that consume the search service to help them customize the search experience and make sure that the content on their sites is discoverable. For example, in response to requests from site owners, MSIT creates managed properties and helps site owners configure relevance.

Creating managed properties

The Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint deployment includes more than 600 managed properties. For the deployment, MSIT started with the default managed properties and the managed properties that MSIT migrated from the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 search solution by using the internal SharePoint Search Property Creator tool, as described in Migration to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, earlier in this series of articles.

Addition of new managed properties is one of the most common change requests that MSIT receives. Therefore, MSIT has a governance policy to keep the process orderly. In accordance with the policy, MSIT tracks requests for new managed properties, requires requests to be in a certain format, automates the creation of managed properties to help guarantee that the properties have certain attributes, and creates the managed properties on a regular schedule.

To request a new managed property, a site owner fills out a template that MSIT provides. When site owners use the template, it encourages them to plan thoroughly before submitting a request. This helps MSIT avoid having managed properties that use different names that serve the same purpose, for example. The request template is a comma-separated value (CSV) file that includes the following attributes of the proposed new managed property: Name, Description, Type (text, decimal, or date/time), StemmingEnabled, SummaryType, MergeCrawledProperties, SortableType, Queryable (whether the property can be used in queries), Refinement (whether the property can be used as a refiner), Crawled Properties, and IsExisting. If MSIT approves the request, it uses a Windows PowerShell script that it created that takes the CSV file as input, creates the managed property with the appropriate attribute values, and maps the managed property to one or more crawled properties.

In general, MSIT adds new managed properties only one time per month, because adding a new managed property requires a full crawl of all content sources to which the managed property might apply.

Configuring relevance

For most intranet sites that it hosts, such as the enterprise Search Center, MSIT uses the default rank profile and the default content index. The following are examples of the way MSIT works with site owners to adjust search relevance by providing custom rank profiles and custom full-text indexes.

Rank profiles

In response to a request from the Infopedia site owner to rank results differently than the default rank profile, MSIT provided a custom rank profile for the site. The new profile caused topic pages to be displayed first, and then blogs, documents, and document sets. The topic pages (usually .aspx pages) are articles with named owners to which other users can contribute notes or attach other documents.

To implement a new rank profile, MSIT created a script that copied the default rank profile into a new rank profile, added new ranking attributes and settings, and updated weights of various criteria. MSIT then ran the script in a pre-production environment that was crawling production content. The site owner created test cases to determine how the new rank profile affected the search results. MSIT and the site owner compared the search results visually, because there were no tools to automate the comparison. The site owner provided feedback to MSIT regarding the results, and MSIT updated the script based on the feedback. MSIT then ran the script again. MSIT and the site owner repeated this procedure until they achieved the desired search results. At that point, MSIT ran the script in the production deployment. Although the process was iterative and time-consuming, in the end it yielded better search results for users.

Rank profiles are global to a search service application. Therefore, any site in the web application can use any custom rank profile. After MSIT created the custom rank profile, the Infopedia site owner added it to the sort drop-down list for the site's search results page. The name of the custom rank profile then appeared among the managed properties, and the site owner was able to set it as the default sort option for that search results page.

For more information, see the following articles:

Custom full-text indexes

Another requirement from certain site owners was to provide keyword-based search, that is, to provide a search experience based on metadata associated with items in the content index. MSIT satisfied this requirement by using a Windows PowerShell script that it created to provide custom full-text indexes.

Each custom full-text index takes advantage of content classification through the Managed Metadata service to provide more relevant search results by targeting keyword searches to a limited set of properties. For example, for a full-text search (the default) on the term "FAST," a search returned several thousand results. However, for the same term, a tag-based search (which uses a custom full-text index) returned only slightly more than 100 results—only items that were tagged with the term "FAST." In either case, the user was able to narrow the results by using custom refiners (such as Industries, Partners, and Products) that MSIT created.

To view the white paper as a single article on TechNet, or to download it, see Improving enterprise search at Microsoft: How FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Powers Worldwide Intranet Search at Microsoft (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735129.aspx).