SharePoint Config

Search scopes improve the SharePoint search experience by letting users search over a subset of information within an organisation. For example you can create a search scope for a specific project or a group such as Legal or Marketing. Search scopes can either be created at the search service application level and ‘shared’ by all site collections, or defined within a specific site collection.

Shared search scopes in SharePoint 2010 can easily be created using PowerShell commands such as New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryScope. Corey Roth covers this in his article on Creating Enterprise Search Scopes with PowerShell. While the PowerShell method can also be used to create site collection related search scopes you might also want to do this programmatically in a feature receiver when the site collection is created. Another thing you might want to do programmatically is to associate a search scope with a display group such as the ‘Search Dropdown’ so it appears in options next to the search box. I’ll cover both these scenarios in this article.

The SharePoint 2010 object model has several classes that can be used to create search scopes and display groups. These can be useful if you want to create search scopes in a feature receiver when a site collection is created. There are several things to watch out for, however, as you can run into problems if you use the SearchContext, SearchServiceApplication and SearchServiceApplicationProxy classes. This article describes these problems so you can avoid them in your code.

SharePoint licensing is a complex subject. As well as there being multiple product configuration options, license prices often depend on a number of factors such as the type of organisation, the relationship with Microsoft and/or licensing retailer etc. It is useful, however, to have a rough indication of how much a product will cost when planning a project. For example if you are interested in giving all internal users access to FAST search you are looking at roughly twice the licensing costs of an installation using the standard features.

Findability is one of the most important factors in the success of a SharePoint site. If users cannot find what they are looking they will quickly use alternate methods to get results. Employees that cannot find information are less productive and less likely to use the system in general. Likewise users that cannot find information on an internet site will look elsewhere for products and services losing the company revenue.

SharePoint 2007 introduced some powerful tools for improving findability but fell short when it compared to larger Enterprise Content Management systems. SharePoint 2010 takes this a huge step forward with cutting edge enterprise ready findability features. Here are 10 new features SharePoint 2010 brings to the table in addition to the features available in SharePoint 2007.