SharePoint and Office 365 Metadata Survey White Paper

Concept Searching, a company specializing in advanced semantic metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy management, has posted a whitepaper dealing with SharePoint and Office 365 Metadata survey that they conducted between November 2013 and February 2014.  They received 396 completed surveys from companies that use SharePoint as a collaboration platform in one form or another.  As I read through the survey, I found a few interesting results:

• Office 365 has been deployed by 34% of organizations, and another 21% have plans to deploy O365 in the future.  30% of respondents have no plans to deploy O365.  These numbers seem to suggest that Office 365 is gaining traction among customers – in the near future, over half of SharePoint customers could be using O365.
• On the list of upcoming challenges and priorities, text analytics was rated as the highest priority item (86%).  Content management was rated lowest (42%).  This was surprising to me as I expected that most clients would see content management as a high priority item.
• Information Governance: 45% of respondents indicated that there was no information governance plan in their organization.  For a consultant, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  There is clearly a need for information governance services in the marketplace; however, the service offering must be clear and compelling enough to motivate the customers to move forward on it.

You can read the entire whitepaper (with many other interesting results) here:

Click to access CS_SharePoint_Office365_Survey.pdf

 

Creating a SharePoint 2010 Search Service application using PowerShell

Here’s a great script by Jeremy Jameson on how to create a SharePoint 2010 Search service application with Powershell.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jjameson/archive/2011/02/28/powershell-script-to-configure-search-in-sharepoint-server-2010.aspx

I was even able to use it to configure search on a SharePoint 2010 server which was not joined to the domain (as sometimes is required for DMZ deployments).  It worked beautifully using local computer accounts.   There is a change that needs to be made to the script if you’re using local accounts:

Add ShareName and Index arguments as shown below.

$queryComponent = New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryComponent -QueryTopology $queryTopology -IndexPartition $indexPartition -SearchServiceInstance $queryInstance -Debug:$false -ShareName  <SHARENAME>  -IndexLocation <INDEXLOCATION>

 

How to fix contextual search in a SharePoint 2010 claims-based web application

Problem:

You have a claims-based web application (let’s call it https://mywebapp.com) running on SharePoint Server 2010. You’ve set up the Search Service application and it’s crawling your content without issues. Your shared search scopes are working great (search All Sites, search All People), but the contextual search scopes (search This Site or search This List) are returning no results. How do we fix this?

Solution:

Step 1. Extend web app to an NTLM auth site. (If you’ve already extended your web app to NTLM, skip to Step 2.)

As you probably already know, SharePoint 2010 cannot crawl claims-based web applications directly. So the first thing to do is to extend https://mywebapp.com application to another IIS site which uses only NTLM authentication.

Navigate to Central Administration > Application Management > Manage web applications

Select your web application > click on Extend button in the ribbon. Fill out the “Extend web application” form and make sure that for Claims Authentication Types you only select “Enable Windows Authentication” and check “Integrated Windows Authentication” NTLM checkbox.

All other fields can be left with their default values. Make sure to take note of the Public URL, it will look something like this:

http://myservername:43374

Step 2. Modify Search Service app content sources to crawl the NTLM site.

In Central Admin, open Application Management > Manage service applications > click on your Search Service application. Click on Content Sources and edit your content source to crawl the NTLM site you just created (http://myservername:43374).

Step 3. Add Server mapping (This is important!)

Within your Search Service Application, click on “Server Name Mappings” and creating a mapping between your NTLM site and the public URL.

Address in index: http://myservername:43374

Address in search results: https://mywebapp.com

Note: Some blog posts online will skip the server name mapping step and instead tell you to change your Default Alternate Access Mapping to point to http://myservername:43374. While it may work in some cases, there are times when you cannot (or should not) change your Default AAM. The server name mapping in SSA helps you avoid changing the AAM.

Step 4. Indexing.

Finally, in your Search Service Application, reset the index and perform a full crawl. Review the crawl log and make sure that there are no top level errors.

Bing

Today I was reading about Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine product. I have to admit, their TV commercials caught my attention, and so did this article:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10264417-75.html

I checked it out, and for a couple basic queries Bing did seem to return more relevant results than Google. I’m definitely going to try it out over the next few weeks… I really hope that Microsoft has finally come out with a decent search product that can compete with Google head-on. I believe that competition is good for any business and for its customers; up to this point in the search industry, we’ve had lop-sided domination by Google and it’s time to shake things up a bit.